Every well-informed Nigerian living in the country since the second coming of the military in December 1983 knows that very little investment was made in the power sector until the Olusegun Obasanjo administration came on board on May 29, 1999. For many, this is a misconception. Another misconception was the one peddled by the late political orator and former minister of power, and later Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, that the sector could be fixed within six months. Those two misconceptions drove the thinking in the power sector. There were also very fundamental structural problems. Public utilities were run as a monopoly. Not just a monopoly, but also very top heavy and centralized in its administration, in the case of the power sector. And so, there were a number of things that had to be done.
*Obasanjo
There were the reforms, for instance, the 2005 Act, which provides for the unbundling of the utility into different entities which happened during the Obasanjo administration when Senator Liyel Imoke was minister. I think, Imoke worked closely with the Bureau of Public Enterprises, BPE, to make sure that the law was passed. In fact, the Power Reform Act was one of the most difficult laws to be passed in the National Assembly for obvious reasons. But it was passed, and that was the beginning of the reforms in earnest. With the passage of the law, Nigerians started seeing the unbundling of the utilities into smaller entities and this, in turn, saw them independently managed and being run more like business entities. This, of course, was a step in the right direction heading towards ultimately what we now see as the privatization of these utilities.
All the structural amendments that needed to happen, and all started during the Obasanjo administration. There was an attempt to re-bundle the utilities during the Umaru Musa Yar'Adua administration. This delayed for over two years the reforms and progress that had been made. Yet, the fact that the Goodluck Jonathan administration came back to that same blueprint of the Obasanjo era has led to some of the improvements we see in the sector today. We now see that the Federal Government budget for the power sector was very huge. Now, with the private sector buying in and taking some ownership through the privatization process, we are now seeing the Federal Government spending less and the private sector taking more responsibilities for investment in power supply.
