A nation’s big shame

On March 12, the national power grid experienced what the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) called “total system collapse due to a massive drop in power voltage” nationwide. TCN is the government agency that manages the grid. The system failure was said to have affected, initially, 14 power generating stations or plants. 

Going by the grid operation trend, of the active 25 Gencos on the grid, 19 were producing power as of 6am Monday when the grid had 3,867.60MW, but that began to reduce gradually until it dropped to 2,761.20MW by 10am after six Gencos went down, leaving just 13, before crashing to zero at 10.40 am. It was learnt that at least 1,100MW was initially lost from the 3,867MW peak generation before the Gencos started shutting down. The affected plants included Azura-Edo IPP (Gas), which was generating 447MW earlier, and Shiroro hydropower, which had 300MW earlier and later went off. Trans-Amadi (Gas) lost 92MW, Alaoji NIPP (Gas) lost 75MW, while Ihovbor NIPP (Gas) lost 101MW.

That grid collapsed forced power distribution companies (DisCos) to issue a Florida of apologies to their customers. A note from Enugu Electricity Distribution PLC (EEDC) Tuesday, March 13, said: “As a result of this unfortunate development, all our outgoing feeders are out and supply to our customers in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo States has been affected.” Head, Corporate Communications, Emeka Ezeh said “DisCos have been on standby, awaiting further directive from the National Control Centre (NCC) for the restoration of supply.” Eko Electricity Distribution Company took to its Twitter handle, announcing to its customers: “We would like to inform you of another system collapse on the National Grid which occurred at 5:10 pm today (Tuesday). We are monitoring the situation and will continue to provide updates.” 

The minister of power, Mr. Abubakar Aliyu, responded to the present crisis in the power sector by calling an emergency meeting of “all stakeholders”. During the Tuesday meeting, he reportedly said “We must find a solution so that Nigerians will have electricity. I want us to have the patience to talk to each other, not blame each other.”

Aliyu maintained assured that the government would not relent in its effort to ensure that improvements in the power sector were sustained and built upon, adding that current challenges must be addressed.

The minister said there should be no finger pointing. Yet this is exactly what is happening with TCN, first, saying that grid collapse is a global problem and then blaming Generation Companies (GenCos) of not generating enough for the DisCos to distribute. The Gencos fired back, saying the worsening state of power supply in the country was due to a N1.6 trillion debt owed them by the federal government since 2013.

Our position, though, is that this is not time to trade blame. It is a national emergency that we have on our hands. It requires all hands to be on deck. This is not something that crept up on us. To give the power crisis a prospective, the national grid has failed 130 times in 8 years, 108 times since the power sector was privatized in 2013. The country’s installed grid power generation capacity grew from 8,000 MW to 13,000 MW between 2015 and 2020 while the distribution system had the capacity to evacuate 5,500 MW of power having grown from 4,500 MW in 2015. But the current crisis has has more than halved that.

The power crisis is unarguably a national disgrace  which deserves to be dubbed an emergency because power is our economic life wire. It must be handled with the urgency and determination as we are dealing with insecurity.