The Minister of Power, Mr Adebayo Adelabu, has disclosed that the National grid will continue to collapse until insecurity in the north is addressed to make way for the repairs on Ugwachi-Bauchi-Makurdi line.
He also emphasised that the grid is old and requires a total overhaul to make it efficient.
The minister made this disclosure when he appeared before the Senate Committee on Power for the 2025 budget defence of his ministry on Monday.
When asked by the senators if other measures can be taken to avert further collapse of the grid, he said he couldn’t give that assurance but could confirm that the power ministry will swiftly restore it when any incident occurs.
Adelabu said it was erroneous to say the grid collapsed 12 times in 2024, saying it experienced only 8, out of which 5 were full and 3 partial collapses.
For 2025 proposal, he said, “If you look at the 2025 budget, the total budget for the sector, which is the ministry and its agencies is about N2 trillion. Out of the N2trillion, overhead and personnel which is salaries is about N10.5bn. Out of this N2.086 trillion, you see that the the whole recurrent is about 80 percent of this. So I will go to the Federal ministry and you will see that out of N1.189 trillion for the Federal ministry as the capital budget, N810 billion is for loan repayment.
“That is N585billion and N225billion for multilateral and bilateral tied loans to the power sector. That is PPSR and the multilateral and bilateral tied loan, distribution sector recovery. Plus that is the N150billion that is meant to be transferred as our counterpart funding for the Siemens project. So N150billion plus N810, which is N960billion taken out of N1.189billion, leaving N229billion for the power ministry. So out of this N229billion, N29billion is for ongoing projects in the power ministry. I will try to explain the N200billion additional which are for new projects based on proposed activities for the power sector.
“The Federal ministry’s intervention for completion of TCN priority projects; this is a Federal government intervention for TCN projects. If you remember the last time we were here, I said we have over a hundred TCN uncompleted projects some at 35, 36 and 30 percent completion. No appropriation for TCN is a major problem that we want to register at these sessions.
“With all the noise, all the hues and cries about the instability of the grid, grid age, grid fragility, grid unreliability, there is not one naira appropriation for TCN. I think we need to walk the talk. We expect TCN to fund its programmes through its internally generated revenue which have been dwindling over the years based on the fact that we do not want to increase the tariff. If you pay TCN, it goes into the tariff setting so I believe this committee should help us look into this by appropriating funds for TCN.
“Be that as it may, we have decided from the ministry to do a little of our own part by completing between 8 and 12 of the projects, which is why we appropriated this N25billion. It was more than this but it was cut down. We wanted about N100billion to do something about this year’s projects. That’s number 1.
“Number 2 is that, this is also an attempt to strengthen grid stability. It is the distribution segment. Today, as representatives of the people, when you go to your constituency, the first thing they will tell you is our transformer is down, our transformers are not working, our poles are bad; our poles are falling and all that,” he said.
Credit: News Express
