What Obasanjo Did To Electricity Distribution At Akwa Ibom After I Built Power Plant — Attah
A former Governor of Akwa Ibom State, Obong Victor Attah, has alleged that ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo stopped him from distributing electricity to the people of the South-South state after he built a 191 megawatts power generation station.
Attah, who was Akwa Ibom governor from May 1999 to May 2007, the same time Obasanjo was Nigeria’s democratically elected president, said the then president instructed that the electricity generated from the Akwa Ibom power plant be added to the national grid.
Attah decried the current constitution and arrangement in the country, saying a new constitution and federal arrangement will enable federating units to have powers to be coordinates and not subordinates.
He said what we have now is an authoritarian system called the Constitution because it was imposed by the military. “We need to go back to an agreeable constitution by our founding fathers at Independence,” he said, expressing disappointment that President Bola Tinubu has not started moves to make Nigeria have true federalism.
The ex-governor said, “I decided I want to give Akwa Ibom state power. The president said no, the Federal Government is providing power for the country. I said: ‘I want to give Akwa Ibom State power’ and then I succeeded in building that power station. The president came and I saw that he was happy about what I was doing. He commissioned the power station but went back to Abuja and brought a law that if you generate, you cannot distribute it.
“I used Akwa Ibom money (to build the plant) but I cannot distribute power to Akwa Ibom people? I have to put in the National Grid that is failing all the time. That was how that ended.
“So, Akwa Ibom State, like every other state doesn’t have 24-hour constant power which was my dream for Akwa Ibom. If I had had it done, several other states would have followed suit.
“Interesting enough, only this morning I was reading the papers and I heard where our respected Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala said we should decentralise power generation and distribution. That’s what I was trying to do but because of the faulty federal arrangement that we have I was stopped. It should not happen in a federal arrangement.”
Attah said he was a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at the time so Obasanjo’s disapproval wasn’t about party politics but about a faulty federal arrangement.
He said, “It does not say much about party politics; it says much about the constitution that we have — the non-federal constitution that we have. If we have a true federal constitution it would never have happened. I would have built my power station. Whatever party I belong to won’t have mattered. What is fundamentally wrong with us is the nature of the constitution that we have today — it is not a federal constitution and unless and until we go federal, we will not make progress.
“We generate power and put it in the national grid – the inefficient national grid that is always collapsing…Every kobo that was spent was in Akwa Ibom money to build that power station but a faulty constitution and constitutional arrangement makes it possible for a president to say even this power station, I’m taking it from you and I’m putting it in the national grid.”
Attah applauded the amendment of the Electricity Act 2023 which significantly opened up the space for states to step into the power space, generate and distribute electricity as well as regulate the sector in their respective states.
“Now that the new law has been brought out, our governor (Umo Eno) is working very hard to make sure that we now have an Akwa Ibom power company that not only generate but distribute power to the people,” he said.
For decades, Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, has been faced with intractable energy challenges, no thanks to an epileptic power supply that significantly affects productivity levels. Despite the privatisation of the electricity sector, power generation, transmission and distribution have remained bogged with hydra-headed monsters of policy inconsistency, low investments and operational challenges.
In 2024, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) approved the upward review of electricity prices with a unit of power costing about N250 for Band A customers. The cost of petrol and diesel which are readily available alternatives have equally increased by fivefold, compounding the dilemma of consumers.
In the same year, NERC granted at least eight State’s Electrify Regulatory Commissions licenses to power plants and power distribution. The states are Enugu, Ekiti, Ondo, Imo, Edo, Kogi, Oyo and more recently, Lagos. Experts have described the move to democratise the electricity market as a step in the right direction, necessary to give a boost to the industrialisation of the country and increase productivity.
