Fashola gives conditions for stable electricity

While lamenting the poor power situation in the country, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, yesterday in Kaduna, gave conditions under which the country can achieve uninterrupted power supply.

Fashola, who spoke to journalists in Kaduna at the end of the second edition of National Council on Power, said until unpatriotic Nigerians stopped the vandalisation of pipelines, it would be difficult to arrest power outages in the country.

Also in order to attain stable electricity, Fashola said Nigerians awarded contracts to build distribution accesses must do so properly and to the standards obtainable elsewhere in the world. Fashola further posited that the communities that host power infrastructure in the country have a role to play, saying they must “understand that they must make sacrifices so that the nation can benefit.”

According to him: “Communities should stop chasing contractors, and threatening them with shrines, spiritual invocation, taking laws into their hands and cutting down transmission assets.Electricity has to be produced like all other products such as newspapers, food and others.”He added that the production of electricity as a product comes with costs that must be paid for.

On the improper composition of the current regulatory body to address current electricity challenges, he said: “El-Rufai made recommendations based on the way of reforms such that when he was in the BPE then, they were implemented. Those are things that happened before I came here. I’m dealing with what I have inherited. As I have often said and I’ll repeat again, I don’t moan about the past. The past is gone; I deal with today and what I can do with it.

“So, we need to reconstitute National Electricity Regulatory and Control (NERC). We are in the process to do that, and the implementation of the rural electrification funds is in the process also.”