Omorodion Solomon Uwaifo

Kindly explain…

On this road which I live, I arrested somebody twice over a period of five years connecting his own customers to the power system not to PHCN customers but to his own. After connecting, no metering, why should he bother about meters. He will tell them, if I connect you I will collect N10,000 every month, if he collects that amount from 50 people, that is half a million, a lot of money and there are people doing that all over the country as we speak. So NERC should have insisted, in fact NERC should have worked out a programme before this Discos took over. Do this as number one, reclaim the system, maybe at night from about 7 to 10; come to Maryland crescent, the transformer is on, everybody is switched on, give everybody notice, this is what we are going to do, then enter homes and tell them let’s see your papers, are you a customer of the supplier, if he says yes, then bring your application and approvals and so and so forth and regularize them. Put their names on paper, from street to street, this thing, we are not joking, we are talking of billions upon billions or trillions of naira so it is not a play thing.

The power industry is the life blood of development, therefore it is a serious affair, you have to go from house to house to make sure. I mean I did a study for NEPA in Ikeja. I went to a house in Toyin street, where St Leo Catholic Church is, that road that goes by the cathedral, about three or four houses from there, a house that is owned by a former army captain. During this study I found out the meter that I was looking at was only a decoy. The man or whoever it was, has bypassed that meter and passed the wire through the ceiling, so the meter was just useless.

He said, you are looking at my meter, the meter that this people gave me I don’t know whether it was working or not, so I laughed. You see I told NEPA, I took the meter, I said sorry this meter is not working so I am taking it back, it is not your own, it belongs to NEPA. He said, you said it is not my own but I paid for it. I said well this property belongs to NEPA but you are not NEPA, whatever you paid, maybe you should go to them and get it. After I left he went to PTC opposite Ikeja General Hospital and took his meter back from them, said how can you take my meter after I paid the money, which was part of the report that I wrote. I told them you created this mess when you started asking people to pay for meters, how do I pay for meters and it is not my own?

You have a bullion vehicle, for example, you asked me to buy, so if I buy it, it is no longer yours it belongs to me, so these are all the mess that the monolith built for themselves over the years because the government messed them up, telling them what to do and what not to do, these should have been corrected.

But recently Minister of power, Mr Babatunde Fashola identified shortage of funds as part of what is responsible for the mess. What is your reaction to that?

There is no doubt about that, that has always been the problem, recommendations were made, the projects you were going to do, government will not approve until after about 2 or three years, no power industry can survive at all.

In the same interview, Fashola also suggested that government should intervene just like the United States government did during the recession in that country by bailing out the automobile industry. What do you say to that?

Of course, no country can survive without the power industry; the power supply
industry is the life blood of every form of development, so every government has it as a duty, a primary duty to ensure that the power is vital and sustainable. We started developing power industry in 1951, at that time Nigeria was already in existence, and only very few townships in Nigeria had power supply and these were townships either they were on the railway line and electricity got there because the white people were working and they wanted power .

They wanted a conducive environment, Abeokuta started having power supply around 1928, Lagos had the first taste of power in 1896. Places like Ibadan around the same time, Port Harcourt, Kano, these were the places that had power, places like Benin for instance, I had left Benin to come to Yaba College of Technology before 1954. 1955 that was when power supply got to Benin, I was, as a technical officer after I graduated in 1957, responsible for the building of Shagamu, Ikenne, Ayepe, Ijebu Ode, Ago Iwoye etc. I was assistant technical officer running those areas at that time. The first place was at Shagamu before I was transferred to Ijebu Ode. That was in the 1950s. In 1958 I was in the UK before I came back they had finished all these. So power is a very new thing in Nigeria and when people start talking about power deficit I laugh because it has always been a deficit. You have just started from the beginning and until you have served the whole country, we don’t talk about deficit, you should talk about serving the country, after that, and then you say oh the country needs more power. You have never been able to serve the whole country up till today; I think we have served less than half of Nigeria so we have a problem.

Some people have suggested that the national grid should be scrapped. What’s your take on that?

They are talking nonsense because they don’t know what the national grid is all about.

We have 36 states, why not have 36 different grids that will serve them, without having just one grid connecting everybody?

Well ok, let me tell you, Nigeria is a little bigger than Texas and America has 50 different states and America is trying to serve all that number of states with the same grid system. They are still trying to have as many grids as possible, refined, and consistent with the economy. The whole idea of the grid system is first and foremost to save your energy resources in a particular country. I give you example, like this street, if everybody was to buy his own generator for power supply, first and foremost, noise on this street will kill you. The next thing is the environmental hazards, fumes all over the whole place and every house, whether the house will provide generate more it had to use, if he does not give to anybody that extra is wasted not just in that house but the entire economy.

How did the grid system evolve?

You mean the original builders or the first people that first thought about electricity supply. Example is rural Manhattan in the USA. They put a power generating facility there and it was making noise and it served one person and they tried to serve another person and it worked. If this is so noisy why don’t we take it out of human habitation and put it somewhere where the noise will be in the bush, but just get the power to serve people, they brought cable and connected it. If the distance is too long, there is what we call voltage regulation, the voltage falls low here, it will be too low by the time it gets to Abeokuta? So what do we do? We now put a transformer, a transformer will now boost it up, by the time it gets to Abeokuta the power will get brighter, so the plant itself, the generator they had then was too small and technology kept developing, so they started making them bigger and bigger. Now we have a situation when the bigger the generator the more efficient it is.

When you run a generator whether it is small or big, there is what we call the inertia. The inertia is the power you need to make the moving parts of the machine to start working, they don’t start working on their own, you have to inject power for them to work, so they consume power, to serve other loads, that power they need to generate themselves is a loss you have to maintain, that loss will not be there if it does not work but when it is working it must overcome its internal problems to continue to work and if you want it to serve more and more people, more and more electrical loads, you put in more fuel. It burns more fuel, it consumes more fuel to do it so the idea of the grid was that technology needed to be able to harness the properties of the huge machines which become more efficient because of their size, that efficiency rebounds on the fuel that you use, so you have to locate few of them around the country, stringe them up to a grid system. The grid system ties all of them up, if one of them fails, the others are still there and the power is still on the grid to serve even people in the area where one of them had failed or even one of them is being maintained.

The grid helps you to save the primary energy resources you have in the country. Gas, Coal or whatever you have, they are wasting assets, the fewer the number of places you burn them for electricity the lesser, I mean the more efficient you are in handling your energy resources. If you burn them out in so many different places, energy resource that might have lasted you say 100 years for example will probably last you about 70 years, that’s what the grid system does.

Now if the grid system is inadequate, that does not mean that the grid is bad, it is the same way, the same reason that we are talking about that developments were not allowed to take place. ECN was very good in the beginning. It was growing beautifully. Around 1957, Eleyele power station in Ibadan was having problems, today you have to fly this part there, ECN quickly said alright, let us increase Ijora, the power station in Ijora, ECN then built Ijora B power station and put in more plants, they built a line from Lagos to Ibadan and relieved Eleyele. That line was the beginning of the grid system in Nigeria.

Talking about injecting capital, the Obasanjo government did it between 2003 and 2007 before it left, some people collected this money and did not do anything. It became a subject of probe by the House of Representatives. Names were constantly bandied around, people like Emeka Offor, collected huge amount of money for the rehabilitation of the power sector. Now would you still suggest that government should assist the investors – the Discos with money?

I will never suggest that. Nigerians are suffering, Nigeria can never industralise without a good power supply system so it is the responsibility of the government to ensure that, that power supply must be sustained and I have written in this book what I think should be done. To improve the power system, I don’t talk about money, what is the name of this professor of robotics who became minister of power, Barth Nnaji, who said in one interview, that Nigeria needed $7 billion to sort out the power supply problem, I laughed.