ELECTRICITY DEFICIT IN NIGERIA

Nigeria should go for an integrated approach to electrification

By 2030, which is just nine years away, the United Nations will take stock of how its member nations, including Nigeria, have fared in accomplishing its Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A portion of the SDGs up for such assessment is Goal-seven, which focuses on improving universal access to affordable and reliable electricity to all people. Like other countries, Nigeria will be assessed on this as well. But there are already manifest indicators to suggest that the country could fail this assessment. Two weeks ago, the World Bank listed Nigeria among three countries with the largest electricity deficits in the world. It is another confirmation of how unserious Nigeria has become in resolving her unstable electricity supply debacle.

Two years ago, the World Bank recorded that 89.63 million Nigerians – about 50 per cent of the country’s population then, were without electricity supply of any form. Today, that number has increased–a shame to a country with immense energy potential, chiefly in solar, hydro, and gas. During the last decade, according to the World Bank, a greater share of the global population gained access to electricity than ever before, but the number of people without electricity in sub-Saharan Africa increased. Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Ethiopia, it explained, were the countries with the biggest electricity access deficits on the continent.

Beyond the social benefits of electrification for all, this also have implications on the economic wellbeing of Nigeria. In a separate report, the bank also indicated that businesses in Nigeria lose up to $29 billion every year to unreliable electricity. In clear terms, this equally means that Nigeria’s economy lost this much to unstable power supply as its businesses struggle to access electricity to create jobs and wealth for the country. Furthermore, the bank noted that among the 20 countries which have huge electricity access deficits, three of them – Bangladesh, Kenya, and Uganda – have improved immensely in their push to cut down the numbers since 2010.

In truth, Nigeria has never lacked ideas or policies, but the nerve to implement and follow through them. Commendably, the current government of President Muhammadu Buhari has initiated remarkable policies that could drive up national electrification and cut down access deficit using renewable energy. But it has also failed to seamlessly link its electrification policies. Nigeria is failing to advance its electrification plans and cut access deficits because the government is uncertain on how to proceed; it is either cheering or fighting private power investors. Such indeterminate policy approach will not yield results.

The government revamped the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), and directly charged it with making the most of renewable and off-grid based electricity systems to cut access deficit. It also leans its political back to REA’s funding hunts, working closely with the World Bank and credible multilateral entities to fund the agency’s activities, but equally fails to reinforce the frameworks that could support REA to scale up. But by failing to adopt an integrated approach to electrification, the country is losing grounds on the energy access fight. The absence of such integrated approach to electrification is chiefly evidenced in the way the Nigerian Custom Services classifies and processes imported renewable energy components.

Unlike Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda which are scaling up renewable energy adoption with the implementation of import waivers for renewable energy products, the cost of acquiring solar-PV systems by rural consumers in Nigeria becomes increasingly exorbitant while energy access deficit surges. The UN and other multilateral agencies consider decentralised renewable energy (DRE) as the quickest way to cut energy access deficits. It therefore rests on Nigeria to quickly push for an integrated approach to electrification, bringing its key energy sources into the mix.