Energy Crisis

On Wednesday, we read in the dailies that our president, Umaru Musa Yar'Adua raised a panel on tuesday 19th February 2008 in Aso Rock, the seat of power, to check the energy crisis in the country.
One of the 7 points agenda of this present administration was ensuring constant power supply to Nigerians but months after, we are yet to experience it. IN fact the energy situation has gone from bad to worse since this administration took over. Some areas in Lagos that were priviledged to have contant power supply due to newness of transformers or few users are no more enjoying such as the supply had reduced greatly. In my area in surulere, we rely more on Power Holding for electricity in 2003 and 2004 but lately we rely on the generating set for power. The generating set is the main power supply while PHCN is the stand bye. In a normal situation or in developed countries, the reverse is the case.
Now the President has constituted an 11-member committee on power comprising of eminent personalities to ensure that we have constant power supply. The committee tagged Presidential Committee for the Accelerated Expansion of Nigeria's Power Infrastructure, is to deliver additional 6000 megawatts generation, transmission and distribution capacity to the so called existing capacity within the next 18 months. The committee was also mandated to add 11000 megawatts of power generation by 2011. Apart from this, the committee is to conduct audit of the infrastructure, source for fund, and put plans on the ground to attract investors in the energy sector etc. Like i mentioned earlier, men and women of high repute and accomplished technocrats are members of this committee. I wondered why Mr. Makoju the former boss of Power Holding Company of Nigeria is doing there. He was not able to deliver or accomplish the target of constant power supply so his membership of this new committee is waste of tax payers money. We need men who are determined to dare the cartel that are holding us all to ransom. We need to dislodge those men and women who are on the pay roll of generators importers from PHCN. We need to become desperate for change so that all the manufacturing industries may not die and our relations thrown into the unemployment market.
It is not panel and reports that we need now. We need action, we need implementation of reports or recommendation. We need to do something fast so NIGERIA can be great again.