PHCN And Nigerian Businesses

May 1, 2006, while this writer was monitoring the protest organized by the members of the Nigerian Renaissance Movement (NRM) against constant power outages in Nigeria, it was shocking when the President of PMAN and the founder of Guaranga Foundation, an NGO, Bolaji Rosuji revealed that his business establishment, EVIS COMMUNICATIONS which is into studio production and other kinds of businesses, was brought to untimely bankruptcy by the then National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) and now Power Holding Company of Nigeria Plc (PHCN). Rosuji who was part of the protest to the PHCN Ikeja Distribution Zone, Alausa, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria, in solidarity to the organizers, said that a power surge of about 300 volts blew up all his equipment and as a result the business collapsed and have not come alive ever since.

The question now is: how many small scale businesses have gone bankrupt either because they could not provide an independent power for the cost or because they had the same experience? Yet the government of Nigeria wants economic growth and a boyant private sector in an environment where the public sector has gone under as a result of privatization (which in itself is not bad).

It is bad that a nation like Nigeria, the much talked about giant of Africa, with enormous manpower and extremely gifted human resources has continued to be classified among the poorest nations of the world. This keeps me weeping for my land of birth. Can't some one do something about this situation in which private businesses and in fact most small and medium scale businesses are going into oblivion of bankruptcy? It is more painful when you have a government that does not listen to the cry of its citizens. Like a bad father who feeds fat while the children continue to go hungry, the present regime has not listened to the call of Nigerians to give its reforms a human face!

Our earnest expectation is that a deliverer will emerge in 2007 general elections.