Bukola Saraki, President of the Senate has faulted how the power
sector was privatised, saying it was sold to individuals who had no idea about
how to run it out of ignorance, selfish interests and fraud.
Saraki made this known on
Tuesday as he spoke at a workshop on the power sector organised by the National
Assembly in Abuja lamenting that the sector, in spite of the enormous resources
committed to it for the last 14 years, had remained in a perilous state.
“Today, we are on the
verge of a total systemic breakdown and I see this as an opportunity to stop
this train from derailing completely,” he said.
“We sold the discos to
individuals and parties who had no idea about running a proper power
distribution business. Licenses were issues based on cronyism rather than
capital adequacy, market experience and capacity to deliver. Agreements were
faulty and transaction integrity hardly imperative.
“This is the opportunity
for both the legislature and executive to come together to forge a solution to
this perennial problem. We cannot afford to waste the opportunity we have now.
We owe it to the people who have entrusted us with the privilege of working out
solutions to their problems by electing us to our various offices that we are
hard on our heels to bring them solutions not complaints.
“We cannot shy away from
the fact that inexcusable mistakes have been made in the past that brought us
to this point and we must be willing to face up to them and clearly delineate
them in order to ensure that we do not return to the mistakes of the past.
“Clearly some of these where innocent mistakes, others were
rather the product of selfish interests, some fraudulent, some borne out of
ignorance and others glaring lack of capacity apparent from day one. All of
these combined has brought us to the mess we now have to face up to.
“Where we are is not an
accident. We walked our way into the landmine we are facing with the decisions
we made in the past. While privatisation is a right policy recipe to pursue in
order to put in place a power sector that can galvanise our economy, we forgot
that the participation of the private sector is not an end in itself.
“We neglected that unless
this is done, observing transparency, competition, transaction integrity we
might end up with a sector worse than the past. The BPE did things that were
inexcusable. To imagine that even the sale proceeds of about $4bn was solely
spent towards the payment of pensions and staff. Not one single kobo was expended
towards catalysing the sector back to life.
“GENCOS bought generating
units without a clear assurance of source of gas to fire plants and government
had no active roadmap for delivery of a gas market infrastructure to make this
happen.
“Yet gas companies and the
IOCs were exporting our gas out of our shores to create gas markets elsewhere
in Europe and Asia while we languished in darkness as a result of incessant,
persistent and erratic power outages.
“In the face of all these
our people continued to be called upon to bear inexplicable bills estimated
beyond rationale service value.”
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