In a bid to address the concerns of Nigerians regarding the upcoming electricity tariff hike set to take effect on July 1, 2023, the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu-led administration has assured citizens of its commitment to enhance the power supply across the nation.
Temitope Fashedemi, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Power, disclosed this on Thursday, June 22, 2023, during a meeting at the ministry. The announcement came as Olu Verheijen, the Special Adviser to President Bola Tinubu on Energy, paid a visit to the Ministry. Chinwe Udouwem, the spokesperson for the ministry, conveyed Fashedemi's statement in a press release.
During the meeting, Fashedemi expressed optimism that the technical directors and heads of agencies operating under the ministry would identify the key challenges faced by the sector. He urged them to provide a comprehensive brief on these issues.
In response, Verheijen emphasised the critical role of power in the growth and productivity of a nation. He stressed that implementing reforms in the power sector would lead to the desired positive impact.
What you should know
Meanwhile Nigerians had been spending more on power supply as the Muhammadu Buhari led administration disclosed last year that it had quietly removed all subsidies in the power sector, even as it plans to gradually stop similar subsidies on petrol.
The former Minister of Finance, Budget and National Planning, Zainab Ahmed, who made the disclosure during the 2nd day of a virtual meeting of African finance ministers and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), said: “We are cleaning up our subsidies. We had a setback, we were to remove fuel subsidy by July this year but there was a lot of push back from the polity. We have elections coming and also because of the hardship that companies and citizens went through during the COVID-19 pandemic, we just felt that the time was not right, so we pulled back on that.
“But we have been able to quietly implement subsidy removal in the electricity sector and as it is, as we speak, we don’t have subsidies in the electricity sector. We did that overtime by carefully adjusting the prices at some levels while holding the lower levels down.”
Fastforward to today, The National Bureau of Statistics reported that Nigeria's power supply witnessed an increase to 5,852-gigawatt hours in the first quarter of 2023. Notably, this increase in power-lit-hours caused an increase in power expenditure for citizens.