TCN former Managing Director, Usman Mohammed on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily programme on December 28, 2022

Ahead of the 2023 general elections in Nigeria, a former Managing Director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Usman Mohammed has said most political parties and presidential candidates don’t understand the power sector.

Mohammed described as a mirage, the plan by some of the leading presidential candidates to solve Nigeria’s power sector in four years and move the country’s power generation from a 4,000 megawatts to 25,000 megawatts.

“If you talk about these declarations – moving from 4,000mw to 25,000mw, where in history do we see a country move from 4,000mw to 25,000mw in four years?” the former TCN boss queried on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily on Wednesday.

Mohammed said he was at a programme in Lagos of late organised by PricewaterhouseCoopers. “We analysed the manifestoes of the political parties and the conclusion is that most of them didn’t do any deep-down analysis on why we are still at 4,000MW for years. And then they come up with declarations that we are going to move to 20,000MW, to 25,000MW,” he said.

“The conclusion is that most of the political parties don’t even understand the power sector and the fear is that like previous interventions, it is likely that if they enter government like that, vested interests will come in and at the end of the day, they are not likely to move forward.

“In four years, you are not going to solve the problems of the power sector. We need to have a non-partisan consensus on how we want to move forward,” he stressed.

He, however, advised presidential candidates to understand the sector to be able to solve the intravenous and decade-long challenges in the sector.

Mohammed also advised the next president to resist vested interests and not expect money from the power sector to make progress.

President Muhammadu Buhari in 2018 had promised to expand Nigeria’s electricity capacity to 25,000mw by 2025 when he inked a deal with Siemens Energy in Germany under the Presidential Power Initiative but his administration is far below the target as his eight-year tenure winds down.

Similarly, the 2023 presidential candidates of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Atiku Abubakar; and Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, promised to increase the country’s power generation capacity to 25,000 megawatts (mw) by 2025 if elected President in 2023.

However, Mohammed, a former TCN managing director, said the power industry is a slow one and it takes time for investments to manifest.

“Any intervention including the Siemens is useful but to say that it is the Siemens that will take us to this megawatts, it is a mirage,” he said.

‘No Investment Since Privatisation’

He further opined that the main problem transmission is not the challenge with Nigeria’s power sector but distribution. According to him, no investment came into the sector since its privatisation about a decade ago. He also cited lack of investment and managerial capacity as part of the cause for the conundrum.

“TCN is supposed to work on the capacity of redundancy, meaning if the generation capacity is 10,000MW, transmission capacity is supposed to be 20,000MW and distribution is supposed to be double of that transmission. That is how you can have a reliable power supply.

“But I don’t believe, even as at today, that transmission is the main problem. No; the main problem is actually distribution because no investment came into distribution since the privatisation took place,” he said.

He said the power distribution networks should not have been privatised at the same time but in phases to learn and move forward.