Nigeria’s vice president Yemi Osinbajo on Monday said more than 50 million people in the West African country lacked access to electricity, accounting for more than quarter the nation’s population.
“Nigeria’s 180 million people, over 50 million have no power,” the VP said in a speech at the Financial Times Africa Summit holding in London.
Osinbajo said the government had embarked on measures to improve electricity access – including providing solar power to 20,000 homes in rural villages.
Only one in four people in the country currently have access to the grid, and of those that do, only a small minority have supplies of electricity for more than a few hours a day.
The chronic power outages have been attributed to underfunding of the sector by the government.
Most companies in the country are forced to invest heavily on generators to provide energy for their day-to-day activities. Compared to the cost of electricity, generators consume much more, thus burdening the companies heavily.
Osinbajo however said the government was changing that by investing more capital into electricity generation and provision.
He stated that the Federal government had pumped more than US$3.6 billion into infrastructure development to enable better provision of electricity.
Minister of Power, Works, and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, last week said an Electric Power Sector Reform Act passed in 2005, once implemented, would ensure better provision of the crucial service.
Fashola explained that with the law, the business of power generation, transmission and distribution had been democratized, and will now be within the domains of both the federal and state governments to consider investing in.
