The Minister of power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola has blamed the recent drastic drop in power supply in the country on lack of funds with which to pay for the supply of gas to power stations.

He said this while briefing State House correspondent alongside the Minister of information and culture, Lai Mohammed at the end of Wednesday’s Federal Executive Council, FEC, meeting which was presided over by the Acting President, Yemi Osinbajo at the presidential Villa, Abuja.

Fashola added that the issue was further worsened by attacks on pipelines by Niger Delta militants, as well as fire incidents at the the Afam and Kainji power stations.

He said: “We heard there was liquidity problems, gas suppliers haven’t been fully paid you have back and forth between DisCos and GenCos. So, those are the issues.

“Apart from the sabotage that we have had from the Western axis of the Niger Delta, so the Escravos Lagos pipeline is not operational, the Forcados export terminal too has been out of operation.”

Explaining further, the minister said that once power generation falls below 3,000 MW, it becomes unstable.

“It is like in your house when you have surges and your circuit breakers trip to protect the system. So, once it falls below a certain threshold, you then have those trip offs,” Fashola clarified.

“While we were trying to start last week, we had a fire in Afam and that affected the control room and these are normal engineering accidents that can happen, the mechanical parts can break down, we also had another fire in Kainji. We have tried to repair them over the last weekend.”

The Minister however said that he was in talks with gas suppliers just as he stated that repairs were ongoing at the station, assuring that there was an improvement at the moment.

“I have been meeting with the gas suppliers, trying to see how we can pay off some of these debts whilst fix other problems.
“As I continue to say, it is not technical but financial, vandalism of pipelines is not technical, people are destroying, they are hungry,” he said.

The Minister tried to sound more optimistic, saying that “As at yesterday, we were back to 2900, so we are building up back again and very soon you will see some stability. These are set backs on the road to incremental power but we will overcome them”.

Fashola also said that FEC approved the sum of N274.3million to complete Odogiyan transmission substation in Ikorodu, Lagos and to provide additional transformer capacity at the substation.