The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, says that Nigerians have ‘stopped’ complaining about the hike in petrol price because they no longer need it to run their generators due to constant electricity supply.
The minister stated this while speaking in Abuja on Tuesday, October 15. Last week, the NNPCL increased the pump price of petrol at its retail outlets from N868 per liter to N968 per liter in Lagos and above N1000 in some other regions. The astronomical rise in the price of petrol led to a sharp increase in the cost of transportation, food items, and other essential household commodities in Nigeria.
During the conference, Adelabu said;
“People don’t need to buy petrol again as much as they used to do for them to have power. That’s why the noise is even at this level. If they had to be going to the filling stations to buy N1000 per litre of petrol to generate electricity, we would have even had louder noise from the public.
So, what we intend to do is to make sure that all the generators are replaced in line with Lagos State Policy of Replacement of 1 Million Generators in One Year. I saw that. We must replace all the generators.”
In the same breath, the minister lamented Nigeria’s abysmal performance in the area of power generation, stating that the country added only 2000 megawatts of power to the national grid in the last 40 years dating back to 1984.
“But we are over 200 million people, we are still celebrating achieving the 5000MW milestone. Why this seems to be an achievement is because it took us almost 40 years to generate an additional 2000MW from the 2000MW milestone we achieved in 1984. When we came to the office, we met 4000MW.
Now, we have taken it to an average of 5000MW, with a peak of 5,527MW on the third of September. But we are not deterred. If the last best time was 50 years ago, I believe the next best time is today, and this must wake us up. So, it’s an issue I don’t like to remember”, he said