A few days after Nigeria’s First Lady, Remi Tinubu, advocated capital punishment for kidnappers, a minister has advocated a similar punishment for vandals of power infrastructure.
The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, om Monday, recommended the death penalty for persons who steal power infrastructure.
The minister said this in Abuja on Monday while reacting to the frequent vandalism of power infrastructure across Nigeria.
PREMIUM TIMES reported that there have been at least five cases of vandalisation of power transmission lines in the past month. The latest was the Shiroro-Katampe 330 Kilo Volt (kV) transmission line which occured on Sunday.
“The company’s personnel confirmed the vandalisation of the transmission line 1, from Towers 244 to 245, and the conductors stolen,” the spokesperson of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) wrote in a Sunday statement.
The vandalised equipment usually take time and resources to repair and temporaily put large sections of the country in darkness.
On Monday, the power minister said that power infrastructure vandalisation and theft is one of the pains the sector is going through.
He said ”the ministry of power and agencies under it is pushing for capital punishment for those involved in vandalisation and power thefts of all forms.”
Mr Adelabu justified his call for the death penalty, saying, ”Capital punishment is not too much because they are gradually killing the nation. They are killing the economy. They are killing the people.”
”Vandals are getting too many comfort all over transmission and distribution power assets.
”This is not only frustrating our efforts to achieve uninterrupted power supply, It is driving the nation backward,” he said.
He said Nigerians must realise that these assets belong to them, so they must jealousy protect them, adding that it was the taxpayers’ money that was used to acquire them.
He said the ministry of power was collaborating with office of the National Security Adviser and security agencies to protect them as it cost a lot of money to replace them when damaged.
The minister said that the ministry was also collaborating with states to have their protection framework to protect the infrastructure.
Mr Adelabu’s demand as well as that of Mrs Tinubu indicates the increasing frustration the Nigerian governmnet is facing as it attempts to tackle the various security issues bedevilling the country.
While the officials believe the death penalty would eventually reduce the crime rate, critics such as Amnesty International have argued that the death penalty does not really deter crime. They also argue that apart from the sanctity of human life including the lives of criminals, a lot of innocents end up being killed when the dealth penalty is implemented.
Electricity Meters
Mr Adelabu also spoke on the provision of prepaid electricity meters to customers.
Many Nigerians have called the provision of prepaid meters to stop what many say is the arbitrary and exorbitant imposition of charges by electricity companies on users without prepaid meters.
Mr Adelabu said the federal government is also trying to provide at least two million meters on a yearly basis.
“So that in four to five years, the huge meter gap will disappear or significantly reduce,” he said.
He said that there was already a presidential metering initiative that was working on the metering gap.
“We already have a seed fund of ₦ 75 billion to start working. And we are also going to have some debt injection from the Nigerian Sovereign Investments Authority to complement the fund.
“There is even a possibility of increasing the fund to a ₦100 billion. We have a planned intervention to reduce the meter gap. But the electricity distribution companies (DisCos) must also sit up.
”We need to interrogate their metering plans and give them the minimum target they must achieve in a year,” he said.
The minister said that as the metering gap was being reduced, there were new connections with new communities being connected to the grid. So we need to be aggressive on this, he said.
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