Although Nigeria needs 160,000 megawatts of power to be able to satisfy its needs, the federal government on Friday boasted that it now generates 5,500 megawatts of power.
This was made known at a joint press briefing by the Minister of Power, Chinedu Nebo and Benue State Governor, Gabriel Suswam at the end of the last meeting of the Board of Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) Ltd, held at the vice presidential wing of the presidential villa. The meeting was chaired by Vice-President Namadi Sambo.
Nebo said Jonathan’s administration had achieved minimum electricity generation capacity of 5,500 megawatts despite unrelenting sabotage of oil and gas pipelines by vandals.
He also said N1.5bn is lost yearly through vandalisation, stressing that deliberate vandalism of pipelines every two weeks by vandals resulted into the nation losing about 1,600 megawatts of electricity at a particular time.
Nebo therefore charged the incoming president, Muhammadu Buhari to step up security surveillance of the petroleum pipelines in the country and also consider the digitalisation of the surveillance system.
The minister also said that President Goodluck Jonathan will soon commence commissioning of completed power projects across the country.
“Four power plants have been completed and will be commissioned in the next couple of weeks, Sapele is one of them, Ihobor is another one. And hopefully and by the grace of God, we intend to do the commissioning very soon so that Nigerians will enjoy even more the benefits of what the current administration has done in the power sector.
“There are literally hundreds of other projects that need to be commissioned. So very soon we are going into commissioning exercise,” Nebo said.
