FYI

Ilorin, the capital city of Kwara State, is a city that is usually counted
among Nigeria’s sleepiest because of its low level of economic and social
activity. But it is now stirring to life, even if not for the same reasons that
most Nigerian cities are known to be lively.
Over long stretch of roads very few motorcycles can be seen sputtering gas
fumes from their exhaust and disturbing the peace unlike a common sight in
most large cities in Nigeria where at a single traffic stop, hordes of
motorcycles converge, sending pockets of fumes into the atmosphere like industrial
chimneys. And in front of business centres, hotels, supermarkets, workshops and
offices there are no more irritating noises coming from the small buzzing
generators that used to supply electricity round the clock, holding up to the
world Nigeria’s ridiculous failure to supply enough power to meet both its
domestic and industrial needs. In Ilorin the noise these days is to be found
indoors in welding workshops, furniture workshops, barbing salons, business
centres and grain mills. The buzz all around is ‘light, light, light’.
‘Light’, which has become the local euphemism for electricity supply has
been steady for four weeks now and this has infused a new found productivity
around that some motorcyclist have abandoned their contraptions and gone back
to the hand craft and trade they had to abandon because of irregular or
absence of electricity. “We’ve been enjoying constant light now for more than a
month,” says Ola Hakeem, a welder who was busy trying to couple together a door
frame he was contracted to supply to a new house. “In the past I would have
been thinking about how to buy diesel to start my generator but now with the
availability of light I don’t need to buy the diesel. I spend less and
deliver fast to my customers without disappointment. I hope things will continue
to remain this way. It will sustain small business people like me.”
For this newfound hope in the electricity agencies where previously it is
bitter cynicisms that is usually expressed once the subject of electricity
supply is mentioned, Hakeem has the success of the National Integrated Power
Project (NIPP) in Kwara State to thank. And no, his debt is not to the Federal
Government, particularly, but to the state government. Kwara is only one out of
several other states in the country that were funded in the NIPP project to
improve electricity supply in the country. Other states have private
arrangements to introduce independent power projects where billions of naira has been
spent to meet the shortfall in electricity supply with nothing to show. But
while the NIPP projects across the country are still wobbling that of Kwara
is the first and the only one to be completed and in operation on the 23rd of
January this year. It wouldn’t have happened says Dr. Toyin Ayo Ibrahim, the
Special Adviser on Project Monitoring in the state whose office is
responsible for the project if the state government had not quietly taken the
decision to curb its reliance on the Federal Government and decided to do something
with the resources at its disposal to help itself. “When the state government
came in it was about to be abandoned,” says Dr. Ibrahim. “The Obasanjo
administration funded the project and paid the entire off-shore component,
remaining the onshore component which cost about N800 million. It was at this point
that the Yar’adua administration came in and suspended all the NIPP projects
in order to carry out proper investigations on them. The Kwara State
government felt it cannot wait to get the benefit of the project so it started
funding the project.”
The suspension of the NIPP project by the Yar’adua administration was as a
result of the controversial probe of the activities of the power sector under
the Obasanjo administration that was started by the House of Representatives
Committee on Power. The Speaker of the House, Dimeji Bankole, alleged that
$16 billion was spent on power supply by the previous administration with
little to show. When the probe started, a lot of messiness was unearthed. The
revelation from the power sector probe brought a numbness into the hearts of many
who had hoped that with the huge amount pumped into the sector the power
situation should be recording some significant improvement. But the whole probe
exercise got bogged down by politics. The House Committee on power has not
made its report and recommendation public several months after the conclusions
of its sitting.
When the contractor in Kwara State threatened to abandon the project site
the State government simply threw the politics overboard and cut through the
bureaucratic red tape. Officials say the state government informed the Federal
Ministry of Power that it would like to take over the project and complete
it and wait for a refund later when the Federal Government decides to continue
with the project. When the state government got no response from the Federal
Ministry of Power after some time it decided to negotiate directly with the
contractor handling the project. Says Dr. Ibrahim: “There is an agreement
between the state government and the contractor that when the Federal Government
starts funding NIPP and pay the contractor, the contractor will pay us our
money. There is a solid agreement between us.”
Even as investigations into the NIPP is been awaited the saga of
embezzlement in the power sector had not abated, neither had the politics that converges
to confuse the investigations. Recently, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory
Commission (NERC) was embroiled in a N1.5 billion fraud allegation. The
Economic and Financial Crimes Commission arrested the NERC chairman, Dr. Ransome
Owan and six other commissioners on allegations of perpetrating the fraud.
The NERC officials deny any wrong doing and allege political motives to their
ordeal. Corruption and politics, it is a usual mixture anywhere the Nigerian
power sector is concerned.
The Kwara State government, it seems, simply cut the two monsters off and
for once decided to do the right thing and set an example that shows with the
right will Nigeria could solve the problem of its perennial power shortages.
What the Kwara State government built was not a power generating plant which
is the buzz in the top tier of government at the moment but it simply built a
transmission station on a 2.5 hectares of land at Ganmo that could better
utilize and maximise the available power that is been generated by the existing
generating stations but wasted because of inadequate power infrastructures.
Now, the state capital and the towns and villages in the state heave a sigh of
relief for this simple foresight. At the Ganmo project site where Weekly
Trust visited there were basically two sets of transformers. Two numbers of
150MVA 33O/132KVA that step down the power from the Osogbo and Kainji power
generating stations, which are the state’s two sources of power supply, from 330
KVA to 132 KVA. Another two number of 60 MVA 132/33 KVA transformers further
step down the power from 132KVA to 33 KVA.
Residents in Ilorin city centre, where the smaller transformers have been
supplied, say they enjoy electricity for days at a stretch without power cut.
In the Zango area, where the new transformers have not been available,
residents say in the past they went without electricity for weeks but now enjoy
significant improvement of supply.
But nowhere is the impact more significant than in small scale industries.
The South Africa-born General Manager of Kwara Technix, a joint venture
business between the Kwara state government and a South African furniture
manufacturer, Mr. Frank Cross says the recent improvement in electricity supply in the
state has reduced significantly the company’s expenditure on diesel to fuel
generators. “We used to spend about N100, 000 a week on diesel,” he says. “
But during the past four weeks we’ve probably spent about N50, 000 throughout
the period. In the past four weeks we have used our generator maybe a total
of eight hours whereas previously we used to run our generators 6 hours a day.”
Also as a furniture company they rely on a drying kiln to dry their timbers
24 hours for 7 days but “the problem was we cannot use our generators in our
drying kiln. So when we close at 6 o’clock in the evening we stop the drying
kiln and start it up again when we come in the morning. But now with the
consistent power supply the kiln now work 24 hours a day.” He now says that if
the current feat is sustained he is optimistic of making more profit and
employing more hands to work in the company’s workshop.
Sunday Afolayan, a welder who manufactures security gates in his workshop
talks about a newfound enthusiasm that has suffused him since he began having
stable power to conduct his business. Most of his work is done manually using
hand tools like chisels, but now, he says, he intends to buy some machines to
ease and help improve on his work. “I’m supposed to buy some cutting
machines which I couldn’t because of non-availability of light. My generator cannot
carry the machine. Now with the light, I will buy the machine. Previously,
it takes two weeks for me to deliver to my customers, now I deliver within a
week.” Afolayan counts other benefits in the brief period that he had enjoyed
some stable electricity to do his business. He says the N3, 000 to N4, 000 he
spends to buy diesel every week to fuel his generator has now been replaced
by the N1, 000 PHCN cards which had paid for his electricity consumption in
the past one month. “Can you see the difference?”
There are others who had noticed the differences and are quietly staging a
comeback to the businesses they abandoned and took to commercial motorcycling
because of the quick money to be made. Joseph Ali, a commercial motorcyclist
who went into a hire-purchase agreement where every week he is supposed to
remit N1, 000 to the owner of the motorcycle he uses, is full of regret that he
is tied down by his current business agreement when he could have used the
present opportunity to go back to the packaging business he abandoned because
of unstable electricity. “I’m afraid that by the time I’m ready to go back,
my business rivals might have taken most of my customers. Something tells me
things are changing here.”
Two 300 level students of Sociology at the university of Ilorin echo the
same optimism. Akerele Adelaja, who few months ago had a harrowing experience
where the candle he was using to read at night fell off while he dozed off and
nearly burnt his room, now says “the recent improvement has helped my studies
tremendously.” Gbadeyan Olawale James, another student in the same
department, says “you can easily pick your books at night and read. It has really
helped. We hope they sustain it.”
But is their optimism in the right place or highly misplaced? “That is my
fear,” says Abubakar Yunusa, a lecturer in Sociology at the University of
Ilorin. He added: “Some of us see it as a cosmetic arrangement. But that may come
to pass very soon. We still ask ourselves are they deceiving us, can we
really have such stable supply of electricity?”
But the recent success in Ilorin goes beyond the state and says much about
the Federal Government’s approach to provide the nation with electricity. It
is beginning to look like states waiting for the magical Seven-Point Agenda to
connect them with constant and regular electricity will have to abandon
their lethargy and act to help themselves. And contrary to the huge figures
reeled out the Kwara State government’s expenditure of just N800 million to set up
a transmission station that now supplies all its towns and most of its
villages with electricity shows the figures needed to bring some semblance or even
remarkable improvement in power supply is not as monumental as it is made
to look by government officials. Though a much bigger doubt is the promised
ambition of the Yar’adua administration to achieve a target of 6,000 megawatts
of electricity generation by December this year. Apart from the shortage of
gas experienced at the moment that makes this difficult to achieve officials
involved in the Kwara project say even if the Federal Government succeeds in
raising this much capacity it will not help the current situation in any
significant way because at the moment the country lacks functional transmission
and distribution lines. Meaning the power will be generated as promised but it
will only be wasted because it has not been made safe enough for use to the
end consumers. The officials say what the country needed so badly at the
moment is transmission and distribution lines to complement electricity generation
as Kwara has shown.
The sad irony though is with the past suspension of the NIPP project and the
slowness of the Yar’adua administration to resume it some of the
transformers provided for the NIPP project in some states might have been quietly
looted. Even though they were not mentioning names, officials spoken to are
positive that some states will have to start all over from scratch because vital
components for the NIPP project might have grown legs.
Does this mean that the Saraki administration in Kwara State should start
celebrating as radio and television jingles in the state have been hitting the
drums about the current success of the administration in power supply? “I
will not say it is time to start celebrating,” says Muhammad, a University of
Ilorin lecturer in Political Science. But there could be applause for the
governor, because if the Chief Executive of a state is doing well, he deserves
commendation, just as if he is not doing well he deserves a knock. But all said,
for me it doesn’t call for celebration at the moment.”
Presently, it is a little over 30 days. Some celebration might come if this
is sustained to about 100 days in a stretch or probably even more. Will that
day come, or is Kwara’s apparent success story a mere flash in the pan?

Great News.
The question we should all be askin our selves is "IS THIS GOING TO LAST".we all know dat continuity in nigeria is our greatest problem, I pray it last forever and all other state learn form it.

Successful power supply in Kwara via private/state effort I said that to Afam, Debosky, and others 1 year ago. Unless Nigeria somehow privatizes power, it will never be regular. Go ask P&T and NITEL vs. the many private phone companies we have today.

This na Good news ooo. Investment go boom for Kwara be that oooo

People want to relocate to kwara because there has been electricity for a month.
R U F**king KIDDING ME?

hajifaty:

This na Good news ooo. Investment go boom for Kwara be that oooo

investors think long term and not short term.

do you guys think it can really last,  lets see if it survives another month,
people thinking of relocating to kwara because of a month stable light would be making the greatest mistake of their life

Wow, but will it last 4 long.u no 9ja mata nw

@ All the doubters

I dont know the last time any of you had constant light for a month.

It has happened or is happening in Kwara, means something good is happening. i think it can be sustained if all aspect of the project are monitored and payments of electricity bills are prompt and regular.

We need to encourage what is good, although i understand why a lot of people are kinda sceptical about it cos of what we have all experienced in this country.

This is laudable and i hope it it sustained and monitored.

omo una dey enjoy shey make we move to kwara

ok now there's power. what next?

@ coded guy, you sure know this wont last so stop consoling yahself its all flashing ,same o flashing like fashola did here in lag

Hope other state Governors will follow suit. Gov. Uduaghan I hope your ears are on the ground to follow suit instead of electrifying Onitsha expressway to scare thiefs as he said. Wonder shall never end.

E be like say Bukola na the man o. A cousin of mine that lives in Kwara has nothing but praises for Bukola. The guy is here in the UK but testifies to the many developments of Kwara.

@ blacksta too long post
@ post great news
maybe i should start returning home

How can one be sure this is for real and sustainable?

Mogbe o, Saraki delivered this interesting value. I'm impressed

What is the super slowpoke doing in Oyo state. Adebayo Alao Akala is a born bastard. Nothing to show, nothing

This is anothe plus for Obasanjo, for making it possible for states to do this.

What are you guys saying here?  Are you saying light only constant in Ilorin or the whole of Kwara because part of Kwara I came from there are no constant light please pple explain better.  I just call to confirm from my home town and they saying light is not regular.

It pains me so much to hear how cynical some Nigerians can be. Why should the question be "will it last?", "will it be sustained?".

Someone has demonstrated strong political will to implement what we thought was elusive and all some people could think about is cynicism.

Well done Kwara

I don't think we have to worry about payment of electricity
I will will assume and also going by the news above, that the billing system is with the Prepaid meter
What we should bother ourselves with is whether the system is generating enough income to sustain this project
And also the longevity and sustainability of this achievement
I bet you if the Kwara state Govt can maintain this momentum, i dare say we will see an increase investment and business activities
in the state. My projection is one yr. Or rather 7 months.

Sustaining uninterrupted power for one month is Today's Nigeria is like seeing Jesus!!!!

KUDOS to Bukola Saraki
Abia State should follow suit. I heard they are at the verge of completing their power plan
Courtesy Barth Nnaji and Geometrics Power.

if this continues till the end of the year. . .

Ilorin here I come

All I want Nigerians both home and abroad to know is that wether we like it or not, things are going to change for the better, everything can't start at once, even if this one fails, i am sure, the government will try again. I know BRF has something in the pot for all lagosians. Just give him time, let him finish with the road building, transportation issues, he's sure going to face power ( The ultimate of what Lagos need)

@all

I was at ilorin last week, the power supply seems stable but i must say its not in every part of ilorin, and lets say its too early to be praising NIPP, time will tell, but honestly for the two-three days i spent in Kwara North there was power supply. But my mum told me that 'it is as if they know I am home, cos I have been living in Jos for like a year now and from that statement you can deduce that the supply has not been always there.

But Sai Bukky, You can do better, at least its almost 6 years now, those election drained wells suppose don full,

We are waiting ooo

Cheers

Im telling you it will not last long. Abuja used to have 24hour power supply, now Abuja has 24 seconds per day power supply, in fact, we have none. This happened, because when people hear of 24 hours power supply, especially business men, they will rush to that location, I hope your government has checks against large inflow of population.

D matter seems complicated.Because it is not true in Offa here.But i hear it in Radio and T.V. stations that it is constant but the irony is in Offa.Thanks for this discussion

The matter seems complicated because it is not true in Offa.

So NO LIGHT IN ABUJA? NOT EVEN 2 SECONDS?

Nigerians with their whining attitude

I sure hope it lasts
who knows might be the beginning of something wonderful in Kwara state

I wonder if business and in general people will flock to Kwara for this much coveted trophy, LIGHT!!!
Nah I doubt, but lets watch and see, or better yet lets watch and see how long this light situation lasts

is this Kwara State in the United States of America

JosBoy4Lif:

I wonder if business and in general people will flock to Kwara for this much coveted trophy, LIGHT!!!
Nah I doubt, but lets watch and see, or better yet lets watch and see how long this light situation lasts

Why won't businesses flock there? this coupled with web access in Enugu is positive development. State governments in Nigeria are getting serious, maybe those LGA would do some work too.

bawomolo:

Why won't businesses flock there? this coupled with web access in Enugu is positive development. State governments in Nigeria are getting serious, maybe those LGA would do some work too.

Your right am just being a doubting tom

What of Imo state?