Uwaifo’s Conversations in Electric Utility Engineering Launch for August 2

With his latest book, Solomon Omorodion Uwaifo, one of Nigeria’s renowned authors and professionals, has given us an exposition on the power sector, and Nigeria and the world have been handed an incisive and well-informed insight into the endemic and debilitating power sector that the country has been grappling with over the years. Titled ‘Conversations in Electric Utility Engineering’, Uwaifo, who is an NLNG joint winner of the Nigeria Prize for Literature, has over the years written about the power sector offering the public his vast knowledge of the workings of the industry from his years as a former top-ranked employee of the defunct Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN). This time, he has told Nigeria what to do to change the industry and make it better.

This latest book to be presented to the public at a formal launch slated to hold at MUSON Centre, Onikan on August 2, is Uwaifo’s seminal work, which speaks of his passion and commitment to ensure that Nigeria’s power sector works, and serves as a fulcrum for the industrialisation of the country, as it has been done elsewhere.

This fact has been given credence by a former President of Nigeria, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, as he x-ray’s Uwaifo’s focal thrust in the forward to the book as follows —

“This book tells us something different from what we read daily in our newspapers. It converses with us and points out the wrongs the industry’s operators have done and are doing, and what they might do to correct them.‘‘It also sensitises our minds, and wants us to appreciate the essence of the industry and the impetus that it can bring to the modernisation of our economy. It seems to me that we may not have fully understood the essence of the industry in the past as Uwaifo has explained, and I would advise therefore that we listen, and act in the interest of our dear country.

Uwaifo says that the industry can do much more for the country than just supplying the electric light that she needs, adding that “It can incentivise us to ask for more through industrialisation, in the way that it did in the United States of America.’’

The public launch would be chaired by the Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), Engr. Professor James Momoh while other expected special guests include Lagos State governor, Akinwumi Ambode and the Federal Minister of Power, Works and Housing as well as the father of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), Babatunde Raji Fashola. It should be a great day for stakeholders of the sector, professionals and the academia to weigh in on the power sector and the way forward for the sector.