By Ikeogu Oke
RECENTLY, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Mr. Babatunde Fashola, brokered a peace deal that resolved the issue of which company should supply electricity to the commercial city of Aba and its environs between Geometric Power Limited and Interstate Electric. The development should be good news to Nigerians. For three years now, there has been a conflict between Geometric Power Limited with its founder, the former Minister of Power Prof. Bart Nnaji, and the rival Interstate Electric, with businessman and politician, Sir Emeka Offor as its main promoter.
Whatever the cause and details of this feud, a country like ours currently facing power supply crisis should have seen it as unnecessary and counterproductive and so nipped it in the bud by reconciling both parties and harmonising their interests as Fashola has done, to facilitate the operations of Geometric Power Plant and improve power supply in our country. But it is gratifying that the matter has finally been resolved on terms satisfactory to both parties.
Undoubtedly, the administration of former President Goodluck Jonathan did so much for the power sector for which it deserves credit, especially by drawing attention – perhaps more than any administration before it – to decades of infrastructural decay and underinvestment in the sector and the need to reverse these through the power sector reform whose road map it launched on August 26, 2010.
Ironically, however, while the power sector reform canvassed for private sector investment in the sector of which the yet-to-be-commissioned Geometric Power Plant, an Independent Power Project (IPP), is a remarkable example, the government allowed the feud with Interstate Electric to linger for several years, thereby frustrating the quick operationalisation of the Geometric Power Plant. The result of Fashola’s intervention shows that the disagreement should have been resolved long ago through negotiation. The call for foreign investments in the power sector while government allowed what seemed to be an incubus of bad politics to hold down a rare example of such investment by one of our own is in itself a case study on how not to handle a crisis.
But that bad politics was not a cloud without its silver lining. As C.Don Adinuba wrote in his recent piece published on page 18 of Daily Sun of April 11, 2016, entitled “Aba Power Project and National Development,” the former Director General of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Ms. Bolanle Onagoruwa, in a rare exercise of moral will, withstood political pressure to disregard the agreement the government had signed with Geometric Power Limited, which gave the latter the licence to supply electricity it produces to Aba and its environs, to which the BPE was a signatory.
In an intriguing turn of events, as recounted by Adinuba, the two business units owned by the former Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) in Aba as part of the geographical area covered by the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) were handed over to Interstate Electric on November 1, 2013, following the privatisation of the PHCN assets. “The handover,” he further notes, “flabbergasted many because the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) displayed documents and published notices to prospective buyers of EEDC stating categorically that the two business units in Aba had been excised out of the EEDC coverage area based on the 2005/6 Federal Government’s agreement with Geometric Power Ltd.”
Sadly, Ms. Onagoruwa lost her position as the BPE boss for allegedly resisting such impunity, fired, as Adinuba stated, by some powerful political entity unable to compel her to support a brazenly wrong act. And the silver lining – a clear and inspiring sign of hope – is the evidence, offered by her good example, that there are Nigerian public servants who can stand up for the right thing despite the risk of losing their positions, who can sacrifice their jobs for honour and conscience.
The Geometric Power experience is a clear indication that it would take more than technical expertise, passion, commitment, and the willingness to make investments. Such anomalies as undue political interference in the sector, apparently driven by vested interests and perpetrated by people capable of influencing public policy, will have to be eliminated if the sector must make genuine and sustainable progress. And the government of President Muhammadu Buhari should be conscious of this, since it has listed power as one of its major concerns.
I happen to have considerable knowledge of the 188-megawatt Geometric Power Plant located at Osisioma, near Aba, beginning with my first visit in 2010 to research a feature story on the plant. That was before I met Prof. Bart Nnaji. Again, I visited the plant in 2012 as a member of Prof. Nnaji’s entourage as Minister of Power. The Geometric Power project is a hallmark of entrepreneurial genius, with its location of a plant that produces the most vital developmental commodity in our country today close to a city which desperately needs the commodity to drive its renaissance as one of our country’s leading industrial and commercial hubs. But, beyond its potential to prove that privately produced power can be affordable and good business, there is another significant reason for which the operationalisation of the Geometric Power Plant should be supported by our government and other stakeholders.
Simply put, as a pioneering venture, its operationalisation – and success – will be a major triumph for the can-do spirit of the Nigerian and encourage others to venture into private power production.
n Oke writes via [email protected].