West African Power Stakeholders Begin Two-day Meeting in Abuja

•Nigeria urges member states to pay up arrears

Emmanuel Addeh

Finance Directors of electricity utilities in the West African Power Pool (WAPP), yesterday began a two-day meeting in Abuja, with Nigeria calling on other nations to pay their dues to enable the organisation run its activities.

Chairman of the Executive Board, Dr Sule Abdulaziz, who doubles as the Acting Managing Director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), declared open the third forum of the member states, explaining that no serious work can be achieved without financing.

The body is a specialised agency of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and covers 14 of the 15 countries of the regional economic community.

Abdulaziz, who was represented by an Executive Director, Victor Adewunmi, told the participating countries to pay up as it was essential to the entire process of advancing the building of a robust power pool for the West African region.

“As you all settle down to the business of appraising strides mode in the development of the electricity market especially as it relates to finance, critical on the list is the essential place of payment of contributions on time.

“This is to ensure that the nucleus (the secretariat) that helps coordinate the pool is sustained and that they are properly empowered to carry out activities on time, and this can only be achieved when our contributions as member utilities are brought in to fund the secretariat activities.

“Finance we all know is a critical aspect of running any and every organisation or pool such as the WAPP, we must play our roles diligently even as our project financiers continue to finance our projects,” he stated.

According to him, without adequately financing the secretariat, the region cannot ensure the proper supervision of ongoing projects in the pool.

He added that funding remains fundamental in this regard and for the sustenance of quantified and knowledgeable hands needed to run the system, adding that it is also essential in the payment of salaries of the secretariat staff, financing, meetings, among others.

“I believe the finance directors of all the countries of WAPP are here today. Therefore, I want to therefore urge you all to deliberate carefully and with the hope that by the end of this meeting we would have a clearer path to solving the issue of inconsistent contributions by member utilities.

“This is to ensure that those that we have assigned the duty of running the secretariat do it with confidence,” he explained.

He stressed that it was important to note that this is a critical issue in the growth of the WAPP because without sustained human capital to effectively supervise and coordinate the implementation and monitoring of the projects, no project would succeed.

“West African Power Pool is depending on you to come up with practicable ideas that we can all key into, together,” he assured.

An honorary member of the organisations, Joseph Makoju, in his remarks, stressed that the greatest challenge faced by the industry today is that consumers see electricity as a public good they must get free of charge.

He noted that this has caused illiquidity in the system, and distorting the activities of Distribution Companies (Discos), calling on the regional organisation to take up the job of sensitising Africans on the matter.