PHCN's DISAPPEARING ACT

I have written about this many times in the past five years but power supply is unfortunately getting worse. Getting access to reasonable supply of electricity by PHCN is getting less and less by the day despite repeated empty government promises and DISCO take over’s. Some areas have not had more than one hours supply in total in the last two weeks. People are spending hundreds of thousands to fuel their generators, just to have some reasonable quality of life, yet are still being hit with astronomically over inflated PHCN bills that do not reflect their supply and meter readings that they have fought so hard over the years to get installed and now the meters are installed, the readings are being ignored?

The country has been promised increased megawatts of power every other day for the last ten years or more. The latest being 10,000mw by the end of July 2014. In the last few years these promises were made by the Power Ministers and went out to privatisation, yet it seems that with each passing day and power report we receive, it is to say that one power station has closed down or a leak was detected in one or another plant. We are urged to be patient, yet it seems nothing is being done apart from blame being thrown about. Apart from a couple of years ago when a former Minister of Power as in charge and we could obviously see some improvements, we are yet to see any benefits of the current privatisation initiative. The current power output stands at about 2,500mw; five years ago it was 3,200mw.

We must however continue to rely on our trusted generators to power our homes and businesses and hope that one fine day we will see stable supply.  Estates must now provide power as part of its services in order to get buyers and renters. Individual home owners must now factor in two or more generators in their budget as well as servicing, fuelling and replacement of the generators. Interestingly, it is reported that Nigeria is the largest importer and user of generator sets in the world. It appears that we may hold this important title for many more years to come.