 |
| Babatunde Fashola (SAN) |
By Engr. Joseph Ibekwe
Senator Shehu
Sani is a human rights campaigner and well meaning modernizer, but he is not
always right on some fundamental issues. In fact, he needs to obtain basic
information on some of these issues. Take electricity where he feels that the
solution to the crisis which has bedeviled the sector perennially and has
contributed significantly to the country’s development problem is the
appointment of an electrical engineer as the Minister of Power. In other words,
the lawmaker is of the opinion that Mr Babatunde Fashola, a Senior Advocate of
Nigeria (SAN) whose sterling performance as the immediate past Lagos State
governor is recognized far and near, is not the right person for the job
because he is not an electrical engineer. Senator Sani is dead wrong...
It is
clear that the senator is blissfully ignorant that it is not only electrical
engineers who are power engineers. The first engineer in the electricity supply
chain is the mechanical engineer. It is the mechanical engineer who generates
power from gas, water, solar, wind or any other source like nuclear energy. Why
doesn’t Senator Sani reckon with the mechanical engineer? It all has to do with
the lawmaker’s profound lack of understanding of how the electricity business
is conducted.
The truth is
that a person does not need to be a power engineer to be a successful minister
of power. What the power sector needs is a leader, and not a power engineer,
whether an electrical or mechanical or electromechanical or even a
mechanotronics engineer. Professor Bart Nnaji, easily Nigeria’s most successful
minister of power ever, is not a power engineer. He is a robotics professor,
one of the top three worldwide. Nnaji came into office in 2011 fully prepared
because he had earlier served as the Special Adviser to the President on Power
and Chairman of the Presidential Task Force on Power (PTFP). What is more, he
had in 2002 built Nigeria’s first indigenous power station, and this was the
22-Megawatt Abuja Emergency Plant. He was in the process of completing the 140-MW
Aba Power Project when he was called into government in 2010. All this
experience helped him to hit the ground running as the power minister, but the
public did not feel the impact till after some months. This is the nature of
power supply chain.
Interestingly,
when Fashola was appointed last October the Minister of Power, Works and
Housing, Nnaji was over the moon because he knew that the erstwhile Lagos State
governor has what it takes to reform the electricity sector. As Nnaji himself
said repeatedly when he was a minister, Fashola demonstrated greater commitment
to the development of the power sector than any other state governor. Not only
did Nnaji get maximum cooperation from Fashola in the reform of electricity
business and the rapid development of existing power infrastructure, any time
he spoke on power, the then Lagos State governor offered uncanny insights. Take
his speech at President Goodluck Jonathan’s launch on August 25, 2010, of the
Road Map for Power Sector Reform at Eko Hotel in Lagos where the highly select
audience gave him a long and thunderous ovation. The speech was so insightful
that when President Jonathan began to speak, he spent considerable time
praising Governor Fashola. Needless to add, Fashola, like Prof Nnaji, has got
rich practical experience in the power sector. He initiated and completed a
number of power development projects in Lagos, which are all doing very well to
this day.
To repeat the
obvious, any person who will do well as Nigeria’s power minister need not be an
engineer, but a reformer. Fashola is a reformer through and through. And he is
aided in his new task by his rich experience as a distinguished lawyer. One of
the first things he has done beautifully is the resolution of the problem which
paralysed the takeoff of the Aba Power project, the biggest investment in the
Southeast in years; the problem was deliberately created by the Jonathan
government for purely private reasons. The Jonathan government stoutly refused
to respect the 2005/6 agreement between Prof Nnaji’s Geometric Power Ltd and
the Federal Government to build the Aba project and offer the company the right
of first refusal in the event of the privatization of the Enugu Electricity
Distribution Company (EEDC). The government rather handed over Aba business
units during privatization in 2012 and 2013 to Interstate Electrics owned by a
surrogate of the Jonathan government. With the resolution, Aba power will come
on stream this year.
It is truly
immoral for Senator Sani to blame Fashola for the country’s current electricity
problem when misguided Ijaw militants are almost daily bombing gas pipelines
which provide fuel to the country’s 23 thermal stations. Only Kainji, Shiroro
and Jebba plants, all in Niger State, are hydro stations. Fashola is
already working on the development of energy mix, which makes plenty of
strategic sense. Frankly, Senator Shani needs to do his homework before saying things
in a public forum.
Fashola is
very competent as power minister, and will certainly deliver the goods. He
became a minister only last October, and I am not sure he has received any
money yet from the 2016 budget. It is less challenging to be a star governor of
Lagos State than to be a successful power minister. Fashola is no your regular
Nigerian public officer.
Engr Ibekwe lives in
Port Harcourt, Rivers State.
No comments:
Post a Comment