If Power Ever Comes…

MOST Nigerians are not interested in how much it costs to build a power station. They want electricity today. Nobody should blame them for this impatience. They have lived for years without the well advertised benefits of uninterrupted power supply. Individually, and as a nation, they have been burdened with statistics of the cost of darkness, yes, the cost of living without electricity.
What is modern existence without electricity? Can industrialisation, education, commerce, or hygienic living be possible without electricity? Are we not aware of the security implications of inadequate electricity supply?

Yet we have had governments that not only paid lip service to improving electricity supply, but showed no interest at all in the execution of contracts that they awarded, even where these contracts were meant to improve the conditions of the people and the economy, which everyone touts as growing.

The investigations into the award of contracts in the electricity sector point to the failure of the authorities to connect with matters of importance to the people. It would seem that the unwillingness to privatise the power sector had more to do with embedded selfish interests. Who would have lost if electricity supply took the leap that we have seen with telecommunications?

If the revolution that placed more than 40 million telephones in Nigerians hands had taken place in electricity supply, Nigeria would have changed dramatically in the past eight years. What we have rather seen is a decline in power supply, more private power supply (through generators that are expensive, ineffective, pollute the environment and leave more Nigerians with poor hearing).

Sadly, what went wrong in the power sector is very Nigerian in the sense that there is hardly any side of our national life that can undergo scrutiny without letting out the same rot that the power sector represents. The last nine years of reforms could actually have been squandered in a way that could have taken us further back, yet we were and are still being blissfully led into believing that we are making progress in all ramifications.
It hurts to note that there are defences for these things.

Those in government should however note that Nigerians were saddened when they thought government was doing nothing to improve power supply. While they calculated the cost of darkness, they never knew there were ancillary costs like contracts government awarded without abiding interests in their execution.

Now, it is time something was done to forestall repetition of this tendency to treat national interests with unbecoming mindlessness.

If these power stations ever produce power, they would be delivered at a time we may never need them. The situation looks that bad, but we treat it as comedy.