Open letter to Mr President: Start dance on electricity, privatization failed, owners billing darkness

Your Excellency, this letter is not to insult anyone, but to end a national pretense. In April, the regulator published figures showing that only 4,286 megawatts of 13,625 megawatts were available for dispatch. Thirty-one percent of the capacity was available. Six days ago, on August 22, the grid fell to 1,132 megawatts, down from over 4,000 megawatts.

Not a single plant was producing power. This is not an industry, but a rumor of an industry. The 2013 privatization was not a reform but a transfer of custody. The owners bought the assets with money to purchase them but not enough to run them. They confused owning a power station with capitalizing it. We should have sold the assets to multinational operators with the capacity to invest billions.

Instead, we handed the national utility to a consortium with bank loans. The result is PHCN, which owes nothing but cannot run the assets. Private owners are now owed N7 trillion, and the government has approved a N4 trillion bond program. Over N10 trillion has been spent on this sector in 13 years, yet the lights remain off. DisCos collected N801.16 billion in fees despite 5.1 million of the 12.31 million active customers being unmetered.

This is not a business model but a levy on a suffering people. To the DisCos, 5.1 million customers are still unmetered. To the GenCos, you are owed, but you contracted into an insolvent market and have spent a decade lobbying for tariffs and bailouts instead of capital. The answer is not another minister or summit. The solution is to have a PHCN for every village, estate, and community in Nigeria.

Each entity should build metered solar generation to supply its residents at cost plus a regulated margin. This will create millionaires and billionaires across every local government area, solve the electricity problem, and generate income for the private owners. The funds to implement this model exist, and the World Bank estimates that unreliable electricity costs the economy $26 billion annually.

The Electricity Act of 2023, signed by the President, removes electricity from the Exclusive Legislative List, making it possible to implement this plan.