Why FG Must Grant Power Licences To States, By Akpabio

AKWA Ibom State governor, Chief Godswill Akpabio, has challenged the federal government to grant generation, transmission and distribution licenses to states in the country and prove if the intractable problem of power would not be a thing of the past.  Once this is done, he explained, such states would distribute power to other state of the federation.

Akpabio made this statement in Uyo at a summit on power themed: ‘Resolving Critical Issues Militating Against Service Delivery’, organised by the Federal Ministry of Power at the Le Meridian Ibom Hotels and Golf Resort.

The governor said that by 2013, he would achieve 100 per cent electricity coverage in the state as 1, 463 out of 2, 525 villages have already been provided with electricity and linked to the national grid. He told the minister that he is building a gas plant through public-private partnership (PPP) and has paid $33,000,000 upfront for gas supply to the state for the next 10 years.

“This is going to be the first PPP gas plant in Nigeria with 69km gas pipeline from Uquo to Ikot Abasi, where you have Aluminium melting Company of Nigeria (ALSCON). We need more of such partnership. We need to look at the problem of

wrong pricing of gas and other issues militating against investment in the

power sector. We need to overhaul transmission lines. It will need a lot of financing and removal of bureaucratic red tape if we would move forward.”

Earlier, the Minister of Power, Prof. Bart Nnaji, said that the summit is aimed at taking stock of the performance of the power sector so far. Nnaji said that the summit was packaged to discuss power generation challenges, transmission capacity, distribution efficiency, new tariff implementation and ways of achieving targets. The minister expressed confidence that the summit would chart a new course for the attainment of stable power supply.

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