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OPEN LETTER TO MR PRESIDENT: START THE DANCE ON ELECTRICITY. THE PRIVATIZATION FAILED. THE OWNERS ARE BILLING DARKNESS. Your Excellency, I write not to insult anybody. I write to end a national pretence. In April this year, our own regulator, NERC, published the figures. Of 13,625 megawatts of installed generation capacity, only 4,286 megawatts were available for dispatch. Thirty-one per cent. Ten plants out of twenty-eight produced eighty-one per cent of everything the country generated. Six days ago, on Saturday 22 August, the grid fell to 1,132 megawatts at half past eight in the evening, down from above 4,000 megawatts the same afternoon. Twelve stations were producing nothing at all. Egbin. Geregu. Kainji. Shiroro. Zungeru. Nobody has explained why. Nobody ever does. That is not an industry, Your Excellency. That is a rumour of an industry. Let us name the original sin. The 2013 privatisation was not a reform. It was a transfer of custody. The men and women who bought the GenCos and the DisCos had enough money to purchase the assets. They did not have enough money to run them. Owning a power station and capitalising a power station are two different economic acts, and we confused them. So let me say the thing everybody in Abuja knows and nobody will put in writing: by the standard of what this industry actually requires, the people who bought Nigeria’s electricity assets are poor. Not poor as men, but poor as utilities. A serious distribution company in a country of 240 million people needs a balance sheet measured in billions of dollars, not billions of naira. They do not have it. They never had it. They were never going to have it. We should have sold these assets to first-class multinational operators with global brands, technical depth and the capacity to sink billions of dollars into the network before earning a kobo back. Instead we handed a national utility to a consortium of gentlemen with bank loans. What did we get? We got PHCN, with debt.
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