Once, in the Second Republic, while the then President Shehu Shagari was delivering an Independence Day broadcast on national television, an unplanned power outage occurred, knocking off power supply nationwide, inevitably interrupting the broadcast and its reception by the citizenry.
When power was eventually restored to an embarrassed nation and long after the President had concluded the broadcast, an explanation for the outage emerged. It was that a snake had climbed up the tower members of a transmission line and bridged one of the phases and a tower member, causing a temporary earth fault that forced the line to trip.
The Second Republic lasted from October 1, 1979 to December 31, 1983. But that incident, occurring over 30 years ago, is probably a good symbolic illustration of how long our political Independence as a nation has yet to be complemented by freedom from the many natural, man-made and accidental causes of our lack of adequate and reliable power as a nation.
For while we can be said to have received our political Independence from Britain, our colonial masters, it may not be wrong to describe us as a nation still being colonised by darkness – the symbolic and summary objectification of our perennially inadequate power generation and supply . And the result of this inadequacy, as we all know, continues to manifest as the chronic distress and underdevelopment of which we have only recently begun to see sustainable signs of their reduction with the relative stabilisation and improvement of power generation and supply nationwide.
It is heartening, though, that President Muhammadu Buhari appreciates the challenges posed by this situation, like Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan before him – who, through their reformist interventions in the power sector, laid the foundation for the improvements currently being experienced in power generation and supply as a result of what some have – I think rightly – termed President Buhari’s “body language” or the Buhari effect.
To drive home the fact of the recent improvement with a combination of facts and symbolism: The peak power generation value in the country on October 1, 2013 and 2014 (our last and penultimate Independence Days before that of this year) was 3,166.6 and 3,687.9 megawatts respectively. However, from the May 29, 2015 inauguration of the present government, the country has recorded several new different peak generation values, i.e., 4,662 megawatts on July 29, 2015; 4,748 megawatts on August 25, 2015; and 4, 810.7 megawatts on August 26, 2015. Prior to this, the last peak generation value of 4,516 megawatts had been recorded three years earlier, in 2012.
If the above progressive trend is sustained – as I believe it will – then we can expect to have inched further to freedom from our symbolic colonisation by darkness by generating more power on this year’s Independence Day than we did on the previous one. This optimism is founded on our having already maintained a power generation value higher than what we had on the 2104 Independence Day for most days in September 2015, the month that precedes the Independence Day.
However, even as President Buhari has repeatedly promised to give priority attention to power, the perennial lack of which he has described as intolerable, the real challenge, I think, is in sustaining the current improvement in power beyond this year’s Independence Day, and making it a lasting condition. This can be achieved if, beyond relying on the President’s “body language” as a stimulant for improved power, active steps are taken by his government to develop the power sector sustainably, such that the factors that make for improved power become features of the power system – factors such as quality personnel, reliable infrastructure, dependable equipment, efficient sectoral management, etc.
Indeed, as the President was quoted as saying during a recent engagement with The Ministry of Power, “The problems besetting our power sector are not difficult to identify. Therefore, priorities can be easily set in order to tackle them. The problems are more with transmission than generation, and we equally need to secure the power infrastructure round the country.”
So there is an indication that even the President understands that, to sustain the current gains in power, there is a need to reinforce his “body language” with a multi-pronged action to develop the power sector and secure our decolonisation, as it were, from darkness (or the paucity of electricity) and the general distress and underdevelopment it continues to foist on our nation.
But as even the President would admit, what has often been lacking is not the ability to identify such problems. It is the will – political and otherwise – to tackle them in spite of the vested interests that benefit from the dysfunction in our power sector. And I am persuaded that, beyond developing the power sector, it would require our leaders continuously sending a message of zero-tolerance to such interests through their “body language” for any improvement in our power sector to be sustained without the possibility of reversal.
And by “body language”, I mean a psychological disposition whose impact does not necessarily depend on its being deployed consciously. For its can also be an unconscious expression and yet be no less effective as, I think, in the Buhari case and the power sector – the way a cat’s mere presence can check the harmful activities of mice, which are likely to react instinctively to the sight of the cat even without the cat being aware of it.
PUNCH
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