An advocacy support group under the hashtag, #Where’s is the Light Movement# has expressed outrage over the exclusion of over 100 million electricity consumers from the national grid.
A baseline study conducted by the group noted that with over 46 per cent of Nigerians cut off from the electricity grid nationwide, it is anybody’s guess that most of the affected population suffers a lot of socioeconomic privations more than they are willing to admit.
Speaking separately at a press conference held at the International Press Centre (IPC), Ogba Lagos, recently, the group’s representatives including Sina Odugbemi, the Convener and Chinedu Bosah, the Secretary, said it was scandalous to note that, “Over 60 years of independence, the self-serving bourgeois ruling elite and power companies have condemned Nigerians to avoidable darkness and hopelessness as uninterrupted electricity has been made impossible in Nigeria. Electricity is life; it is extremely instrumental to production, service, education, healthcare, wellbeing etc. Due to the epileptic power supply, private generation through generators add to between 30 to 40 % production cost, a situation that renders local products and services uncompetitive in the global market and has forced many companies to collapse with its attendant mass job losses.”
Raising some posers, the group queried, “Why is Nigeria still battling with 2,000 to 4000 MW of electricity for a population of 200 million people? About 46% of Nigerians are not connected to the national electricity grid. Electricity is a fundamental right of all Nigerians that must be fought for, protected and guarded jealously.”
Going down memory lane, the group further lamented that previous exploitative metering policies just like Meter Asset Providers Regulation 2018 failed because most Nigerians cannot afford the outrageous cost even as it upbraided the government for spending about N27 billions of taxpayers’ money to facilitate the metering process with consumers still forced to buy the meters for about N50,000 for single-phase and about N90,000 for three-phase meters.
“The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has just doled out another N18 billion to power companies as part of the federal government Mass Metering Programme. All these government’s interventions amount to fraudulently using public funds to bail out private power companies.”
