The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has said Nigeria needs $10 billion annually for 20 years to have a steady electricity supply.
Speaking at the inauguration of a 2.5 megawatt solar hybrid power project at the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna State, the minister identified inadequate maintenance, insufficient investment, and the inability to upgrade transmission grids as major causes of the infrastructure gap in the power sector, which has accumulated for over 60 years.
He said President Bola Tinubu’s administration was trying to address the challenges of epileptic power supply across the country.
The minister expressed the government’s commitment to providing sustainable and reliable energy to critical national institutions like the NDA.
“For us to achieve functional, reliable, and stable electricity in Nigeria, we need at least $10 billion annually for the next 20 years. But there is some foundational bottleneck that we experienced in the past that needs to be fixed for the spending of this money to have meaning,” he stated.
According to Adelabu, the signing of the energy bill into law was one of the important steps taken by the government to tackle the challenges in the power sector.
“This bill has achieved liberation and decentralisation of the power sector to enable all levels of government — federal, state, and local governments — to legally and morally play roles in the power sector to give their citizens at sub-national levels electricity.
“This act has given autonomy to more than 11 states, and more are still coming. They can now play roles in the power sector from generation to transmission to distribution and even metering.
“We talk about infrastructure deficit, then we talk about fixing infrastructure deficit, which has piled up over the last 60 years due to lack of maintenance, lack of additional investment to revive our transmission grid,” he added.
