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Mahakwe Anyanwu, a concerned Nigerian, has called for the decentralisation of the moribund national grid as a panacea to the protracted crisis in the power sector.
The retired Director of the Central Bank of Nigeria told Panorama News that the national grid is overly large, ridden with a corrupt bureaucracy and needed to be unbundled.
According to him, the national grid to which all generated electricity is pooled, was, perhaps, designed not to work.
“The so-called national grid should be regionalised, perhaps, across the six political zones of the country, to achieve supply efficiency and effectiveness,” he posited.
Throwing more light on his recommendation, the High Chief explained: “Each zonal system should be responsible for the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity, enjoy reasonable autonomy, and result in manageable scale efficiency.
“This transformation is very likely to produce a more reliable and functional solution. In this arrangement, good performance or poor output can be localised. And performance monitoring can be much easier. Accountability could be surer.”
You will recall that the national grid has collapsed multiple times this year with no assurance that Nigerians have seen the last of it, even though the people have continued to reel under the heavy burden of paying unjustifiably high tariffs for darkness.
The national grid is an interconnected network designed to deliver electricity from producers to consumers.
It comprises generation stations that produce electricity, high-voltage transmission lines that carry this electricity over long distances, and distribution systems that reduce the voltage for delivery to homes and businesses.
Sadly, it has continued to perform below par due to longstanding issues within Nigeria’s power sector, driven by inadequate infrastructure, maintenance challenges, vandalism, and systemic corruption, transcending virtually all administrations in the country.
However, Anyanwu believes that the problems would cease once the government summons the will to do what it should have done long ago, beginning with simplifying the operation model of the national grid.
“A very small national grid can be maintained to take care of emergencies that could arise from time to time in the regions,” he added.
