We sold discos to individuals, parties with no ideas – Saraki

Senate President, Dr. Bukola Saraki has faulted the way Nigeria’s power sector was privatized, adding that the power company was sold to investors who had no idea about running a proper power distribution business.

Speaking at a workshop on power sector organised by the National Assembly in Abuja on Tuesday, Dr. Saraki said licenses were issues based on cronyism rather than capital adequacy, market experience and capacity to deliver. Agreements were faulty and transaction integrity hardly imperative.

He lamented that the sector, in spite of the enormous resources committed to it for the last 14 years, had remained in a perilous state. “We cannot shy away from the fact that inexcusable mistakes have been made in the past that brought us to this point and we must be willing to face up to them and clearly delineate them in order to ensure that we do not return to the mistakes of the past.

Emphasising that the problems in the sector were the country’s own making, the senate president said sacrifice must be made to overcome the challenges.

“Where we are is not an accident. We walked our way into the landmine we are facing with the decisions we made in the past. While privatisation is a right policy recipe to pursue in order to put in place a power sector that can galvanise our economy, we forgot that the participation of the private sector is not an end in itself,” he said.

According to the Senate President, the BPE did things that were inexcusable.” To imagine that even the sale proceeds of about $4bn was solely spent towards the payment of pensions and staff. Not one single kobo was expended towards catalysing the sector back to life.”

“GENCOS bought generating units without a clear assurance of source of gas to fire plants and government had no active roadmap for delivery of a gas market infrastructure to make this happen.”

He said despite these, gas companies and the IOCs were exporting Nigeria’s gas to create gas markets elsewhere in Europe and Asia while Nigerians languished in darkness as a result of incessant, persistent and erratic power outages.