Nigeria may never have stable power supply 'Minister

The Federal Government has saidstable power supply may never be achieved in the country if the structures remain the same.Speaking with journalists in Lagos on Sunday, the Minister of Power, Professor Barth Nnaji, stated that the structures had been the same for years and efforts by the government to inject new structures through privatisation were being sabotaged by the labour unions.In his words, 'if we are not able to set the structures right so that there can be expansion of investment in power, we will never be able to get to the point of stable power supply.'He expressed concern over the desire of some workers that the system should remain the same.'We cannot keep the status quo and expect to get improvement in power. What we are expecting is a leap frog in quantum of power. We should not be talking of 4000Mega Watts(MW) of power for a country of 167 million population,' he said.He said what the government wanted to do was to get the structures right and get to where 'we intend to be as soon as possible. We expect that during the life of this administration, we should be able to have stable power.'Meanwhile, Nnaji said power output had hit a record high in recent times of 4300MW as against a record low of 2300MW during the year noting that one of the challenges of adequate power supply was shortage of gas supply to power gas stations.According to him, the Federal Government, through the Petroleum Ministry, is constructing new pipelines that will facilitate more gas supply to the various power plants.He added that the country was losing 80 million standard cubic feet of gas to vandalism.
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