Minister of Power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo
The Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Power, Ambassador Godknows Igali, said on Thursday that the nation had lost 1,800 Megawatts of electricity in the last one month.
Igali, who stated this at a meeting between officials of the ministry and the Senate Committee on Power, Steel Development and Metallurgy in Abuja, also attributed the deteriorating power outages in the country to the activities of vandals.
He lamented that hoodlums had been destroying both oil and gas pipelines across the country in recent times.
Igali said, “We have been able to explain to electricity consumers that the current power outage is as a result of high rate of pipeline vandalism. The hoodlums vandalise both the crude pipelines and gas pipelines.
“The more sinister one, which is with a lot of pain, is when people deliberately blow up the pipes clearly marked as gas pipelines. They blow them up almost every day and that denies the power plants some gas.
“Unfortunately, our country depends on a lot of gas. We have hydro plants in Shiroro, Jebba and Kainji, which are the major ones. But in the dry season, the hydro plants do not do well.”
Igali, however, said that security operatives had in the last two months caught about 200 people who were vandalising gas pipelines.
He noted that the vandals were in the custody of the security agencies and undergoing interrogation.
“Security agencies have arrested 200 people vandalising gas pipelines in the last two months and they are interviewing them and working with communities to solve this problem and put it behind us,” the permanent secretary said.
The Chairman, Senate Committee on Power, Steel Development and Metallurgy, Senator Philip Aduda, consequently summoned the Director-General of the Bureau for Public Enterprises, Mr. Benjamin Dikki, and other heads of agencies under the Ministry of Power to appear before it on Tuesday next week.
He said the top government functionaries would be required to give further clarifications on the current diminishing state of power supply in the country.
Members of the committee had during the meeting expressed serious concern over the worsening state of power supply in the country.
