Former Vice President and African Democratic Congress presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar has declared that the Tinubu administration’s latest shift in electricity policy is nothing but a belated endorsement of a decentralised power model he first proposed more than two decades ago.
In a statement issued on Sunday by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, Atiku said the recent admission by the Minister of Power that Nigeria can no longer depend solely on large, centralised power plants confirms what he has advocated since 2005.
It should not take a government three years in office to discover what was obvious more than two decades ago, Atiku said.
He criticised the administration for increasing electricity tariffs before implementing structural reforms, arguing that a government that thinks before it acts would have fixed the system before asking citizens to pay more. Unfortunately, this administration has done the exact opposite, raising tariffs first and only now beginning to think about the reforms required to justify those increases.
Atiku recalled that during his tenure as Vice President under President Olusegun Obasanjo, he consistently urged the president to decentralise electricity generation by harnessing Nigeria’s diverse energy resources, including hydroelectric dams, solar, gas and other viable sources.
He disclosed that his conviction was so strong that when President Obasanjo established the Power Sector Reform Committee based primarily on a gas-fired generation strategy, he declined to preside over it despite being appointed chairman.
I believed then, as I do now, that Nigeria’s electricity future lay in a diversified and decentralised energy mix, not an overdependence on a single source, Atiku stated.
He noted that billions of dollars contributed by the federal, state and local governments were committed to that gas-focused approach, yet the expected results never materialised. Contracts were awarded and huge sums paid upfront, but much of the promised work was never done. The National Assembly subsequently investigated the power sector reforms and held President Obasanjo accountable for the outcome. Atiku said he was never invited by the investigators because he had declined to chair the committee.
The former vice president said he publicly restated this position during an interview with ARISE News in 2022 and made it a central pillar of his presidential campaigns from 2007 through 2023.
For more than two decades, I have consistently argued that Nigeria’s overdependence on a centralised generation system was economically unsustainable and technically inefficient. Today, the Tinubu administration is merely acknowledging what I proposed years ago, he said.
Atiku argued that affordable and reliable electricity remains the foundation of industrialisation, job creation, economic growth and national competitiveness. He lamented that instead of implementing coherent reforms, the current government has spent nearly three years experimenting with the livelihoods of Nigerians, resulting in higher electricity tariffs, struggling businesses, collapsing manufacturers and households paying more for less power.
The greatest tragedy is not that this government has finally embraced the right idea. The tragedy is that it took three years of policy drift, higher tariffs and prolonged darkness to discover what could have transformed Nigeria’s power sector more than two decades ago, he added.
Atiku said an ADC administration under his leadership would pursue a diversified and decentralised electricity generation strategy driven by hydro, gas, solar and other viable sources, while expanding transmission infrastructure, strengthening distribution networks and encouraging private sector participation to guarantee stable and affordable electricity across the country.
Abuja Network News
Tags
News