Omon-Julius Onabu in Asaba
The Managing Director/Chief Executive Officer (CEO), of Transcorp Power Limited, Mr Christopher Ezeafulukwe, has harped on the need for conscious and disciplined investment efforts by the next administration in the country in addressing certain challenges in the power sector in the country.
He said that the country requires at least 20,000 Megawatts of electricity to drive its industrial, economic and social activities round the clock and end epileptic power supply in Nigeria.
Ezeafulukwe stated this while addressing newsmen at the company’s plant in Ughelli after a guarded study tour of facilities in the plant by a delegation from the Army War College of Nigeria as part of their environmental study tour.
The theme of the tour, “Protection of Critical National Assets and Infrastructure for National Defence”, he noted, was laudable, he noted, adding that the aim of the visit would equip them in assisting the company in vital areas such as “surveillance and intelligence gathering for security of the company’s facilities.”
On the objective of the study tour, the Transcorp Power chief executive said, “The security agencies came to know our needs in areas of strategic alliance with them in order to safeguard our property and facilities as well as certain security issues challenges and how we have been dealing with them”, he said of the study tour by the military personnel.
Ezeafulukwe stressed the need to decisively tackle the current epileptic power supply in the country Nigeria stating that, noting that it was distressing for a country of over 200 million people to be grapling still with driving its economic and social activities with a meagre 5,000 MW of electricity.
He said that deliberate and significant improvement in generation, transmission and distribution of electricity was invaluable towards finding lasting solution to the headache of inadequate power supply in the country.
He bemoaned the heavy cost implications of servicing turbines as such services are not available within the country vis-a-vis sourcing overseas components of the required items in hard currency.
Ezeafulukwe said, “For instance, to carry out routine inspection of the turbines, you need to fly them out which is a huge foreign expenditure which exposes us to logistic challenges.
The Transcorp Power MD, who bemoaned Nigeria’s overdependence on technical services from abroad, said that the situation on ground was bound to increasungly expose gas plants in the country to the vagaries of logistics changes because “we queue to wait for some clearance before being allowed to do our jobs, which to a large extent affected our tournaround. That is, if you have a turbine that would have come back in six months, it then takes some eight to 10 months.
“This also denied us running the turbine from generating power that you would have put on the National Grid to support the nation’s economy.
However, he urged the Federal Government to work on incentives for investors in the power sectors by identifying gas fields for accelerated development.
He, nevertheless, scored the company high on provision of various corporate social responsibility programmes spanning quality education and vocational training and empowerment to provision of health and other social facilities particularly for several host communities in Ughelli North and Ughelli South local government areas.
Earlier in an address, the Deputy Commandant/Director of Studies at the War College, Brigadier-General U.M. Alkali, noted that the study tour was of strategic importance towards identifiying and understanding ways and means of safeguarding various critical infrastructure in the country important to national economic growth.
He assured that the outcome of the detailed study tour will help in fashioning policies and programmes that would translate into ensuring seamless operational activities of critical assets like Trancsorp Power.
