{"id":10765,"date":"2017-02-07T16:14:54","date_gmt":"2017-02-07T15:14:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalwire.com.ng\/?p=10765"},"modified":"2017-02-07T16:14:54","modified_gmt":"2017-02-07T15:14:54","slug":"power-sector-was-sold-to-clueless-investors-says-saraki","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalwire.com.ng\/sub\/power-sector-was-sold-to-clueless-investors-says-saraki\/","title":{"rendered":"Power sector was sold to clueless investors, says Saraki"},"content":{"rendered":"

Senate President Bukola Saraki on Tuesday criticised how the power sector was privatised, saying it was sold to individuals who had no idea about how to run it.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong>He said the mistakes of past governments \u201cborne out of ignorance, selfish interests and fraud\u201d, brought Nigeria to this point.<\/p>\n

Saraki said this at a workshop on power sector organised by the national assembly in Abuja.<\/p>\n

He lamented that the sector, in spite of the enormous resources\u00a0committed to it for the last 14\u00a0years, had remained in a perilous state.<\/p>\n

\u201cToday, we are on the verge of a total systemic breakdown and I see this as an opportunity to stop this train from derailing completely,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe sold the discos to individuals and parties who had no idea about running a proper power distribution business. Licenses were issues based on cronyism rather than capital adequacy, market experience and capacity to deliver. Agreements were faulty and transaction integrity hardly imperative.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the opportunity for both\u00a0the\u00a0legislature and executive to come together to forge a solution\u00a0to this perennial problem.\u00a0We\u00a0cannot afford to waste the opportunity we have now. We owe it to the people who have entrusted us with the privilege of working out solutions to their problems by electing us to our various offices that we are hard on our heels to bring them solutions not complaints.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe cannot shy away from the fact that inexcusable mistakes have been\u00a0made 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.<\/p>

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Advertisement<\/div>\r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a>\r\n \r\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n

\u201cClearly some of these where innocent mistakes, others were rather the product of selfish interests, some fraudulent, some borne out of ignorance and others glaring lack of capacity apparent from day one. All of these combined has\u00a0brought us to the mess we now have to face up to.\u201d<\/p>\n

Emphasising that the problems in the sector were the country\u2019s own making, the senate president said sacrifice must be made to overcome the challenges.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere 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,\u00a0we forgot that the participation of the private sector is not an end in itself,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe neglected that unless this is\u00a0done,\u00a0observing transparency, competition, transaction integrity we might end up\u00a0with a sector\u00a0worse than\u00a0the past. 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cGENCOS 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. Yet gas companies and the\u00a0IOCs\u00a0were exporting our gas out of our shores to create gas markets elsewhere in Europe and Asia while we\u00a0languished\u00a0in darkness as a result of\u00a0incessant, persistent and erratic power outages. In the face of all these our people continued to be called upon to bear inexplicable bills estimated beyond rationale service value.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Senate President Bukola Saraki on Tuesday criticised how the power sector was privatised, saying it was sold to individuals who had no idea about how to run it. \u00a0He said the mistakes of past governments \u201cborne out of ignorance, selfish interests and fraud\u201d, brought Nigeria to this point. Saraki said this at a workshop on …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":9807,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[1454],"coauthors":[2392,2393],"class_list":["post-10765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-news","tag-power-sector"],"yoast_head":"\nPower sector was sold to clueless investors, says Saraki - National Wire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/nationalwire.com.ng\/sub\/power-sector-was-sold-to-clueless-investors-says-saraki\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Power sector was sold to clueless investors, says Saraki - National Wire\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Senate President Bukola Saraki on Tuesday criticised how the power sector was privatised, saying it was sold to individuals who had no idea about how to run it. \u00a0He said the mistakes of past governments \u201cborne out of ignorance, selfish interests and fraud\u201d, brought Nigeria to this point. 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