Mary Onyia
The National Labour Congress, NLC, has called for the immediate reversal of the privatization of the power sector, claiming that the whole exercise had been a colossal failure.
The NLC President, Mr. Ayuba Wabba who made the call at the union’s National Executive Committee meeting in Abuja, on Friday, insisted that the original purpose for the privatization had been defeated and must therefore be scrapped.
“We have said that the privatisation of the power sector has failed, and clearly before the privatisation, a lot of promises had been made, that power is going to be affordable, that it is going to be stable, and that there will be no challenge,” he said.
“But all of us are aware that five years down the line, nothing has improved, and we have demanded that the privatisation of the power sector should absolutely be reversed because it has not actually provided any headway into addressing the challenge that was very evident before the privatisation process.
Ayuba’s comment is coming in the wake of massive public outcry over the inefficiency of the power sector to provide electricity to Nigerians since it was privatised in November 2013, with the distribution and generation sub-sectors split and sold to private owners.
This is not the first time notable public figures are calling for a review if not outright cancellation of the privatization of the power sector.
Last year in 2020, the Senate President, Ahmed Lawan had lent his voice to similar calls. He made this call during the deliberation of a motion on Nigeria’s power sector recovery plan, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, said that power sector privatisation has failed, and called for its review.
The privatization of the power sector led to the distribution and generation sub-sectors split and sold to private owners. One of the aims of the split was to enhance power distribution in the country, as only the transmission component, through the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), remains a public property.
Insisting that they the failure of the exercise was glaring, Lawan in his remarks during plenary said:
“If we leave them for the next 10 years there would be no power in Nigeria… We gave them our common patrimony and they still come back as DisCos and GenCos to look for money from the public. I think it’s time for Nigeria to consider reversing the privatisation of the power sector or they should just cancel the entire privatisation process completely.
The NLC also decried the delay in signing the electoral amendment bill into law and said it would not hesitate to resort to protests over the increase in the price of petrol come 2022.