The Nigerian electricity supply industry has continued to face a real and present danger of collapse despite the efforts made in more than two decades to initiate a reform of the sector.
It is sad that the periodic and now routine system collapses we experience are mostly occasioned by avoidable situations like fire outbreaks at critical transmission lines across our major cities often resulting from a lack of diligent attention.
It is rather distressing that the total installed capacity for Nigeria, a country of more than 200 million people and about 40 million small businesses, is a mere 13,000 Megawatts. Worse still, only about 3,500mws are available for homes and businesses from the grid and
sometimes it goes as low as 2,500mw. Clearly, this is unacceptable. We can contrast the available supply of electricity with competitor countries in Africa like Egypt and South Africa with respective populations of approximately 112m and 59.6m people supplying about 60,000mw and
58,000 respectively. This difference in energy wattage has massive implications for human development and economic growth. Nigeria today has the world’s lowest per capita electricity wattage in the world, interestingly lower than those of most of our West African neighbours.
It is really sad that whereas our energy demand is above 200,000mws, we have only 13,000mw installed capacity and can only deliver regularly less than 4,000mw. After my consultations with experts in the sector,