There was another man Professor Olukotun who wrote in The Punch. How can you talk about money when you don’t even know what size of power Nigeria needs. You have to do a study, it can be studied, I have studied parts of this country, so why are people running away from studies. Study the problem, what does Nigeria need?

With your experience, how can this be done?

I left the system in 1973. These days google will give you the plan of any town, beautifully laid out so you don’t have any problem of oh I don’t have a map. In 1976 regional manager of the ECN made me draw the whole map of Ibadan to show the position of every pole, whether it was wood, concrete or iron and the location of substation in Ibadan. In 1956 I was very young, Ogbemudia hired me to study Benin city in 1974, I studied it, I took two engineers there, we were camped in one hotel and we showed them what to do and they did it, we did all the calculations, I have a copy of it, so it can be done, these days it is easier to do it because you have computers.

You cannot invest millions in an electric utility and are lazy to do the basic thing you need to do, if you plot them out. You will begin to see what you have, what is wrong, what is good, what is bad, you can have a panoramic view of what your problem is and you will start sorting them out.

We have to reclaim the industry and all the vanguards of stealing you take them out. I have written in a report where we should not locate meters because where you locate it is important. For instance in Sweden electric utilities are located around buildings, garages, but when you don’t pay your bills, they move the meters outdoors, so in Sweden if you are driving and see a meter, you will say this one is a debtor, so people avoid that. We have to help our country and begin to devise things that we can use to frustrate many of the wrong things that we do. For instance in my house here, before you came you had to pass through a gate. There is a wall, I suggested over 30 years ago that the owners of the house, Mr Uwaifo is the owner of this house must put a hole on his wall and then fit a box, I suggested then that to make it easier, to make it beautiful, to entice people to do it, have a post box on one side of the box and then your meter on the other that is the meter is outside. If the meter is outside, from that wall into my house is my responsibility. Why can we not think of a simple thing?

In 1969 when I did a study for ECN, I went to Isale Eko and some of the meters were on the back, on the wall. This particular place, there was latrine, bucket latrine and faeces, you could see faeces pouring out of that place, and akon (crabs), the big ones would be making yanga (walking with swagger) there, so I said me I wont go near that latrine, look at the ground, that was when I found my idea of where meters should be located and where it should not be located. There was one elderly gentleman, so there was a bed, the meter was right behind the bed, so I said how are we going to move this bed so that I can read the meter, he said don’t worry just step on the bed. I then bent down and removed my shoes and then stepped on the bed to read the meter. So, I wrote a report 1969 that was before I went to America.

So put the meter on the wall outside, so you don’t have to beg anyone anytime you want
to read, just go there and read it and go away, nobody will even know that you were there to read and if you want to vandalise the meter you have to break the wall and maybe when you are doing it one or two people will see you although in this country we hardly observe anything, these are some of the problems that we can overcome so easily but we don’t want to think, we don’t want to do anything,

What in your view can be done to make things right? We are already in it now, the
Gencos are there, bought by people who are not supposed to buy them, the Discos are there too messing things up.

At least government has to admit its errors, any law that is not workable they should
know. I give you an example, I studied Warri for NEPA in 1987 and the problem was there starring me in the eyes but NEPA was not prepared to know that the problem was there but there were engineers roving around, based in Warri, so what problem are you talking about? In Warri, the SPDC, had its offices, headquarters and then they have the staff quarters, both their offices and their staff quarters were supplied by Shell’s in power station. The lines connecting their staff housing passed through public lines. There was an oil servicing company in a community, it had its own power station, served its own facility. Their excuse, NEPA was incompetent but NEPA had the mandate to supply electricity within Nigeria, the law was there and I blamed NEPA because they could have gone to SPDC to say sorry by law we are supposed to supply, alright do you think you want to build a power station, yea you can build it but we jointly own it, all your customers, staff quarters must pay electricity bills to us – to NEPA, not to you.

Basically let me explain, what government has done over these years is that by its action. It has kept off people who can make the industry rich, when you have those people off, you have the poor, the poorer people to bear the cost of the system. The cost of a power system is shared by the population it serves. If you now start removing prosperous members of the population so that they can have their power supply on their own, you are reducing the number of people which should share the common facility.

So you leave the Discos to people who they will be pursuing to pay their bills. There is no society in the world that people are equally rich, there are few people who play mago mago but it is these others who are better empowered who will pay their money on time that keep the overall system going.

Some people have suggested an alternative source of generating power: wind and nuclear. So how possible are these in Nigeria?

They are all possible. But I pray to God Almighty that they will never be able to bring nuclear power when I am alive! I pray they don’t. The fact of the matter is that we still have a lot of resources, we still have a lot of primary energy resources available to Nigeria so we don’t really need nuclear plant because most sensible countries are running away from nuclear plants.

Could you talk about crazy bills because a lot of people are protesting about PHCN sending them crazy bills?

I understand what you mean. I mean you don’t have to be an engineer if you study Physics, when you get kilowatt hour, kilowatt is the power that they supply you and the hour is the time over which it was supplied, kilowatt hour, one kilowatt in one hour is kilowatt hour, kilowatt times hour. If you cancel the hour what is the result, if kilowatt is zero then the power is kilowatt times zero which is zero. So instead of people saying, what PHCN and NEPA, not ECN, ECN would never had done this stupid things, what they have done is that they come to your house and say oh you have 13 airconditioners and you have one fridge and one freezer and when you add it all together it is so many kilowatts, so every month, it is 720 hours, all the power in your house times 720 hours is your bill. When 720 hours is what we got in a month if you did not supply hour for that 720 hours how can you multiply it by 720 hours, that’s how you talk about crazy bills, it is very easy, you have NERC, what NERC should do about it I have put it in this book, there is no magic in it

They know me, not that am clever, they know me that I will shout, I will ask them to come and prove to me that I used the power, tell me the number of hours you served me, if you ask people in this area I will tell you until they did some silly things they did few days ago, I will say in the average some areas will get power like 18 hours every day which is good by Nigerian standard so 18 times 24 is the number of hours, 18 times 24 is 540 hours and also you cannot say because I have 13 airconditioners in my house and therefore you are going to say 13 airconditioners, two kilowatts machine is now 26 kilowatts.

Now there is no such thing. In engineering there is what we call diversity, there is a demand factor, there is a diversity factor, as a matter of fact although I have about 13 air conditioners in this house, in the busiest of times, only about 4 will work at a time and that’s mostly when my children are at home, when they come on holidays from the UK and US, the rooms are air conditioned, if there is no body there I wont put it on. That is why in this book I have said it is not impossible to estimate electricity for anybody because all human beings have their idiosyncrasies, there are people who go out and there are people who stay at home, there are those who will go out and go and play golf, spend hours before the come in, there are people who work at night, so people cannot consume electricity the same way that is why there is so much diversity.

Lets talk about meters, there are those who said they should not be paid for by the consumers, that the Discos should supply meters free?

No No No, Nobody will ever supply you meter for free but what ECN did which is the correct thing to do or what is done all over the world is that you have supplied the meter and when the tariff is designed, the cost of the meter is taken into account so the electricity bill you pay every month pays part of the meter. So you are not asked to pay for meter, you should never be asked to pay for a meter, PHCN was wrong. It is their own property but if you get someone to pay for it then the person that pays for it should have it and that is what is happening, that is why a meter somebody bought when he was a civil servant in Lagos and then when the man goes back to Umuahia, he carries his meter with him. Thid confusion started years ago and over the past 40 years it has been declining and declining and declining and we have not started on the rebound because Discos have to sort themselves out.

What actually influenced your passion for Nigeria to have stable power supply?

What inspired my passion? That is a life story. At the age of 22 was when I joined the ECN (Electrical Corporation of Nigeria). That was 4 October 1954. I was 22, now I am almost 86. At that time, myself and many other young people like myself were being trained as assistant technical officers, it was a three-year course in Yaba Technical Institute, my colleagues, most of them came from Government College Umuahia, Kings College and so on and so forth. I was a product of Yaba Technical Institute, junior school where we had secondary education in technical balance. I remember that about that time we had about 18 teachers and out of the 18, only two were Nigerians.

From where did the other teachers come?

All the others were expatriates, particularly British. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, I think the British government was looking for opportunity to give employment to soldiers who had been demobilized after the Second World War and many of the teachers they brought here were soldiers, but many of them had technical background, and some with electrical power machines for making mechanical parts. We had a workshop also where we did metal works – cutting metals by machines and by hand, filing and all sorts of stuffs. That is how we grew up. I joined Yaba Technical Institute then at the age of 17 – that is the precursor of Yaba Tech and Yaba Tech was the precursor of Yaba Technical Institute which survived for only 14 years because I understand that by 1962, they stopped the Yaba Technical Institute as we knew it and they changed it to Yaba College of Technology.

What was the effect of the change?

They served development because in my view what they did was to replace an umbrella with a straw hat; a straw hat is small as you know. They destroyed workshops where Nigerians were trained to industralize their country and they built theatres to train philosophers. I remember that in 1953 our last year in Yaba Technical Institute, some of my classmates, I remember Dimeji Paul, Samuel Ogunseye, Mr Stephenson (we used to call him Baba Eru), he used to be a staff member of the Railways. In the olden days, we manufactured railway parts, they had foundries, they had everything to be able to build parts for the rolling stuff but gradually the railway themselves started falling apart and Papa Stephenson was brought to the Yaba Tech to teach Nigerians the art of iron works.

In 1953 we built a single stroke engine in Yaba from the start. The engine block Papa Stephenson himself made from the railways was brought to Yaba Tech to the machine shop and machine did the work from the beginning to the end. I remember what that single stroke engine was. Papa Stephenson mounted it on a bicycle so that you don’t need to pedal, it was that small engine that provided locomotive power to move the bicycle and it was making tu-tu-tu-tu-tu sound all over the compound. By the time, many of us were excited that within the next 10 to 20 years our country would be industrialized. But in 2017, I am not aware that we can make what we made in 1953, I am not aware that we can make it today.

My training was to do practical engineering. Like I said, I joined the ECN in 1952 and I was trained as an assistant technical officer and later changed to junior engineering assistant. In 1955, I had my practical training in Ibadan, our office was in Dugbe at that time. In 1956, ECN chose me to take care of UCH substation which was built for that day when the Queen (Elizabeth of England) came to commission that hospital. I was the one the ECN nominated to take charge of that substation to make sure that there was no mess around. I still look on that day with pride. After that, I came back to Yaba to finish my course, it was a sandwitch, you go for one year and come back to do the final year, we came back and did the final year, I won the scholarship best engineering student in 1957.

In 1958, I had federal government scholarship to study Electrical Engineering in the UK; I came back in 1962 after working with the central electricity generating board (CGB), a stint of one year with them to gain a little more experience before I returned as an engineer grade one in the ECN. I was with the ECN until 1973, 2 Januarywhen I decided to withdraw my services because the industry was not going in the direction that I had hoped. By 1969, I won the Eisenhower Fellowship and I represented Nigeria in the US. Nigeria was one of the 39 different countries that sent representatives to the US after winning the fellowship and that gave me a formidable experience because I went through many activities in Philadelphia, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and so on. After eight months I returned to Nigeria, the rest is history.