Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu has said the whole
challenge around power generation and distribution in some major cities around
Nigeria, especially the vandalisation of pipelines was never envisaged by the
government.
Aliyu who participated in the Federal Executive Council
meeting presided by Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo on Wednesday, noted that gas
has been one factor that may have compounded the problem.
Recall that in the past few weeks, some major cities in
Nigeria have been thrown into darkness, impacting economic and social
activities negatively.
Shortly after the FEC, Aliyu made attempts to rationalise
the situation, when he told State House Correspondents that “The more reason we
are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of
the generators have to go to maintenance.
“It is scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be
scheduled outage but we had not envisage that we will have issues around
vandalization of pipelines which the NNPC has addressed as you can see
evidently, everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations. It is
a combination of many factors. That compounded the problem we are having on the
grid.
“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are
trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid. We have set up small
committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid.
Basically, the problem around gas.
“You need to have a gas contract between Generating
Companies and gas supplies- some are from contracts, some are not. We are
looking into this and have proffered some solutions in a few days to mature.
“We have a capacity of 8,000 megawatts – the one on the
grid, embedded and captive. If you combine all of them, you will get these
problems that we are encountering. We are on top of the challenge and very
soon, we will come out of it.
“We have gotten approval now of N5 billion from FEC to open
up and expand – Lagos/Ogun where presently, they may not be enjoying quality
electricity. We need to do this more.”
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