The Director General of the Bureau of Public Service Reforms (BPSR), Dr Joe Abah, has warned that the nation’s power sector cannot be reformed, re-structured and made reliable overnight and urged those expecting miracles in the sector to be realistic.
He was speaking Thursday in Abuja at the bureau’s monthly reform lecture series on ‘Removing Constraints to Doing Business in Nigeria’.
Abah insisted that a lot would still have to be done if the sector would ever get on its feet.
“You cannot just go and switch on a light-bulb. The infrastructure needed to deliver that light would need to be put in place. That is the way the power sector works. That said, it would take years of consistent investment, years of staving off and fighting corruption in the sector, years of clear policy development for you to start to see constant power supply.
“As you are aware, the government has currently unbundled the power sector and, though there are challenges, the right steps are finally being taken and it would be dishonest for anyone to say the problem in the power sector would be solved overnight. There are multiple issues which have to be sorted with generation, volume of power generated.
“We can only get the kind of results we are hoping for in a few years, if we continue in this line. It is the only way we can ever get our power sector back to where it belongs,” Abah said.
The guest speaker at the event who is the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Industry, Trade and Investment, and also the secretary of the Presidential and Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC), Dr. Olajumoke Odewole, said many reasons caused rich Nigerian investors to take their businesses to other countries like Rwanda and Ghana because of the ease of doing business there compared to the conditions back home.
