 So good day, everyone. My name is Kelechi Wamadi, one of the fellows of CDD Center for Democracy and Development. So I wish to welcome all of us here for this great occasion. Before we start, I will briefly talk about why we are here, and also introduce the panelists. For the participants, we've taken note of you. We appreciate your time, and we encourage each and every one of us to be patient. We won't take much of your time. This meeting is slated for two hours, and we'll try as much as possible to work within that time. So just a brief about SOAS, ACE, before we go into details of why we are here. I know some of us have heard about SOAS and ACE. Just to refresh our mind once more, if you want more information, it's also on their website. So for the ACE project, which is the Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Conducting, it's led by SOAS University of London. And they have different approaches that are usually adopted for their work. ACE takes an innovative approach to anti-corruption policy and practice, and the ACE program is a program being funded by the UK aid, and it has two components. The first component is basically the SOAS-led ACE Research Consumption, which is under which what we are going to discuss today fall on. OK, so the research paper we are discussing today is under this first component. And the other component is actually a parallel program led by Global Integrity, the Global Integrity ACE Partnership. OK, so the approach that ACE usually adopts is more of identifying visible and effective anti-corruption strategies. They analyze how policy resources are located in specific sectors and how unproductive capture of these resources affects development outcomes. OK, so from there, we move on to the foundation of our discussion today. OK, so we are here to do some kind of presentation on a research work we did. That's SOAS-ACE, a collaboration with CDD. It was a Nigerian study. So the study looked at the power sector in Nigeria. OK. OK, the Nigeria electricity sector. OK, so the motivation for that research is digital privatization. Privatization, if you recall, when privatization was launched, it was some kind of a laudable state reform. That's citizens hoped that it would improve electricity supply, bring about improvement in livelihood and all that. So several years down the line, after the privatization of the electricity sector, Nigerians are still yearning. They are still expecting the desired outcome. OK, many homes' businesses are still expecting, hoping that the desired outcome will materialize. OK, so from homes, family, citizens, businesses that are unable to afford the regular power supply through the off-grid solutions, through the grid solutions, are now resort to generators and the off-grid solution, inverters, solar panels, and all that. OK, for those who cannot afford that, remain in dark, the businesses are shut down. So for us, really, it became obvious that the national grid has been pushed to a capacity that is unable to meet the demand for electricity supply, OK, especially for the business community. OK, and for us in this context where we were referring to the SMEs, OK, the SMEs are based on PricewaterCoupage reports. They account for 96% of businesses in Nigeria. OK, so is within this narrative that part of our argument was that the privatization process in Nigerian power sector has led to rent seeking and capture across generation transmission and distribution activities with the collusion of both the private and the public sectors. Given the nature of SMEs operations and their vulnerability, OK, to losses due to lack of electricity supply, the research, the paper we are going to do today, you will find out that it involved the SMEs in the manufacturing clusters across Newi, Onishi, Andaba, and the federal capital territory, OK, to further provide evidence that supports a strategy of incentive alignment. So this is one of the issues you'll be hearing today from the panelists. Then it's also important to let us know the analytical framework adopted in the paper. So the framework for analysis of the Nigerian sector in the paper really is based on Sowars University of London at the corruption evidence at the ACE program. That framework identifies the rents being allocated in the power sector and their destruction. So the beneficiaries associated with these rents and the configuration of organizational power in the power sector. That's a brief background to what we are going to be discussing today. For our panelists, we have Professor Jibril Ibrahim, a senior fellow of CDD, and he will be speaking to us on the situation of power sector in Nigeria within the context of the trust of the paper. We also have Ayo Ebo, who is a member of the board, New Frontier Development. He will also be speaking on a privatization of the power sector, what went wrong and what went right. And we have Pallavi Roy, who is a research director of the ACE research partnership consortium. And she will be speaking on why the research focused on SMEs. So this will be for the first section. Then after the first section, we'll move on to the second section, where we'll have Dr. Jibril also speak on the role of citizens, non-state actors in the fight against corruption in the power sector. Then at that second section, also Ayo will also be speaking on financing technology solutions in power sector, why Pallavi will throw more light on ACE research on power sector. May I hand over to Professor Jibril for his remarks and his presentation. Thank you very much, Kelechi. I was just looking at the title of our discussions today. And it set me thinking the first five words are off-grid solutions to corruption. And there's a sense in which that's really the problematic we are trying to confront. That corruption in this country is systemic. Every institution is densely wired to sources of corruption. Everybody appears to engage in the process. And everything you throw at corruption to stop it just bounces off. So in a sense, maybe the problematic the whole project is looking at is, well, if you have this dense tapestry of wiring of corruption that affects everything and everybody and all the actors, can you get out of that wire mesh and find alternative solutions that will at least move you forward, even if it will solve all the problems of corruption? Those of us who've been in Nigeria for some time remember with amusement when the late Bolaiege was appointed Minister of Power. And he did this huge press conference and we were watching him on NTA telling us that in six months, all the power problems in Nigeria will be solved. It will stop the corruption in the system. But above all, you'll ensure Nigerians have full access to power supplies in their homes and in their businesses. That was in June 1999. About six months when he was supposed to announce his grand success, he quietly went to President Obasanjo and said, OK, this power sector passed my power. Can't you shift me to justice where at least I know what the issues are because I completely underestimated the challenges of the power sector? In a sense, that is really the heart of the problem of power sector crisis in Nigeria. But it's a huge problem. It's layer over layer of problems. Just understanding the system is a huge challenge. And even the former Minister of Power, the former governor of Lagos, was saying when leaving the ministry that he underestimated the challenges of the ministry when he came in and that it took him over a year just to understand the dynamics of what was going on before he could even start talking of solutions. So it's a very complex system. And it's a dense web of corruption. But the central issues about the power sector crisis are obvious. The first dimension is for the past 30 years, we've been unable to generate and supply power to Nigeria. And Nigeria is one of the countries with the least availability of electric power relative to the demand for it. So that's a very simple challenge. And we've had this challenge for decades upon decades. The second dimension of the crisis has to do with the nature of power itself. That it's a sector where you need significant planning, where you need to anticipate demand. And it's a sector where the solutions are heavy technology solutions that takes years and years to implement if you have the solution and hand and if you have the resources to offer them. It's therefore a challenge to states like Nigeria where people really prefer short term fixes, where you just give a contract and you have a solution to the problems you are facing. The whole question of how to solve the power challenge in this country has been addressed for a very long time, at least from the very beginning of the Fourth Republic, that if only we privatize the system, we can have private sector providers who are in it for the money for their profits and who will address all the challenges that government wasn't able to address and then would have the solution that works. And in a sense, this was an assumption that today is being questioned, that it's simply not that simple. And one way of looking at the complexity of the system is the arguments that were made about why privatization would be an easy solution. Everybody said, look at the telecom sector. It was privatized. And as we all know, business schools around the world are looking at the Nigerian telecom sector. How within six months, these new companies were able to start making profits. And a country that had only a few hundred thousand lines suddenly jumped to tens of millions of lines that were working. I remember when we were doing interviews for the project and I was interviewing one of the operators of the electricity distribution system. And he said his biggest regret as a businessman is investing so much money to buy this distribution company. And he said what he had in his head when he mobilized the funds was he was looking at telecoms. How within six months they were all making nice profits. And that was what he had in mind. And I asked him, but you people had extensive documentation. You are giving a dossier. And I did look at the dossier. One of the first things they said is there are no company coming into this sector will make profit in the first 10 years. So you should have read it and you should have known you are not going to make a profit. I looked at me and laughed. He said, you think business may read these dossiers. They are not meant to be read, but you're just coming with your assumptions. And in a sense, there's a tragedy we are facing. People who have no understanding of what is in this sector moved in thinking there was easy money only to find out there were lots of traps. And I think it's important to understand those traps. The most important of which is that there is a history of privatization in this country. And in that history, people who are politically connected get state resources, state enterprises at very cheap price, and they make an easy profit. And everybody thought this sector was the same. So we followed the rules as it were. People who are politically connected got the companies only to find out it's not as easy as they thought it would. And part of the difficulties has to do with the fact that it's not like telecoms. In telecoms, it was possible to leapfrog the technology that they found of the analog telephone. So they didn't buy the national telephone system and try to fix it. Technology has changed and all they did was to create a totally new technology that leapfrog the earlier system. But for electricity, it's not that easy because we haven't discovered revolutionary new ways for producing a considerable quantity of electricity just from the use of your computers. And you need to do the nitty-gritty of setting up generating companies that could generate sufficient power and actually distributing that through a grid. And as long as that was the basis of the privatization, it presented huge challenges. The fact that we had a grid that was completely inefficient has been a huge factor. And that grid, in fact, has a maximum capacity that's not much higher than what we have been producing. And that explains why when you look at the beginning of the story in 1999 and where we are today, we've simply moved from production of about 2,000 megawatts of electricity to just over 4,000, which meant all the projections about significant expansion of production were not at all met. Don't forget, Obasanjo, in his valedictory speech in 2007 said he was living a legacy on the basis of the NIPP projects of 9,000 additional megawatts that his successor, Umaru Eradua, would soon be enjoying. And of course, till today, that success is what we are still waiting for. And I think one of the key issues as I end this part of the presentation is the complexity of the corruption legacy in this sector. From the very beginning, it was a sector with massive corruption. And petty corruption even at the level of the poorest consumers who will connect illegally. But you also have that same corruption at the very top. For decades, the major arms of governments, the military, the police, the ministries never paid their electricity dues. So the whole question of supply of electricity was understood to be something that you just enjoyed, poor as it is, but you don't have to pay for those services. And in a sense, that mentality, that this is a service with a cost of production. And therefore, if you are to improve that service, that cost of production plus profit has to be paid for by consumers. That message is still what I think everybody in that industry is trying to get understood so that we can establish a rational basis of how that industry can work. Thank you, Kellage. Thank you, Professor Jubry, for that intervention. May we quickly move on to the next speaker, Ayo, to speak on the privatization of the power sector. What went wrong and what went right? Thank you, Kellage. So what went wrong, what went right? Let me take off from what Professor Ubrahim has been saying. The problem we have in the power sector, and forgive me if I sound like I'm doing no problem, but I'm not, the problem we have in the power sector, to my mind, from my experience, is not an engineering problem. It's a human problem. It's a governance problem. And privatization has not quite solved that governance problem. Why do I say governance? The sector is one that is interconnected, made up of four interconnected parts of the main. Fuel supply, generation, transmission, and distribution. The government privatized was the generation and the distribution side. The fuel supply side, which is in Nigeria, is really about gas and then water for the hydro plant. And then transmission, the vital connection between generation and distribution, remained under government control. Now, when you have, and that's a major bottleneck, now, when you have government as regulator, as owner and operator of the bottleneck entity that connects two privatized entities, essentially, you're saying that you don't want to solve that governance problem, because you have a constant conflict. You also have embedded in the system all the inefficiencies that we have in the first place been trying to get rid of. So with that in mind, let me try and address what went right, first of all. The one thing I can, and by the way, I'm not looking at privatization here, as just the process of selling the transaction. I'm also looking at the aftermath. The transaction itself, to my mind, went very, very well. And it doesn't sound like I'm being correct, but let's just see. The rules were set out. I was a commissioner in the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission at the time. I was in charge of market competition and rates. And I was also a member, by the way, of the National Council on Privatizations Technical Committee, the Power Subcommittee. I was a member of TC, which was responsible for the processes. And in TC, I was also a member of the Power Subcommittee. One of the things which I stipulated as a commissioner in NERC, which had to approve these new entities, these new owners of the community was that we would use our own process to identify who the best qualified bidders were. And that's what happened. So these winners, who emerged from the process, were actually the best that we had. But let's remember something about Nigeria of 2013, 2012, 2013, 2014. At that time in this country, the people that really had money in Nigeria, by the way, we couldn't persuade foreigners to participate in the process with all that we'd get for an opportunity where we couldn't. For instance, like I'm pretty obvious, risk metrics were looked at, risk assessments were made, and the felt, well, let's watch how this one goes. So essentially we had to deal with domestic capital, domestic investors. And in those days, the people that really had money to dispose of were the oil traders. So when you look at the owners of these businesses, they're mostly oil traders. Those who dominated the investor groups that took up the level of this group. In almost every one of them, you had one orchard out there and you should get that money. But in terms of process, we went to the process that was to provide directly, if I must say so, by the Electricity Commission. We used the Mitre model, which was well known to the world, to use as a basis for evaluating the bids. And we didn't look at what was the highest bid, but since we looked at what was the most responsive bid within the Mitre tariff setting framework that was directed at investing in the discos to reduce their loss. Now, this is a summary of a very technical formula, but essentially we said, who is going to put the best quality money, not the most money, but the best, the most effective use of funding to reduce the losses of each disco, which losses were not the same for the disco. And that's how we identified winners as well. Now, that process was transparent, if you remember. It was transparently undertaken. All the calculations, all the bids were opened under the glare of anti-camera light. And one individual, who by the way, happened to have been my assistant in-line at the time, he's now the head of the team leader for the World Bank, Mohammed Wakil. He did all the calculations under the glare of the camera and the outcome was what we all saw. So, in terms of identifying who the bidders were, I don't see there was anything that could be enriched. And indeed, that was the testimony of everybody. The personality, which, a brand I've spoken to, of these bidders was of course a different company. They were all short-term thinkers, who thought, without exception, that we're going to be given a license to print money like the discos, like the telcos were done. So, as he said, it didn't bother to do due diligence. It didn't read the document, the marks of document that were given to them. Otherwise, they would have known that they were convinced for the long haul. But I personally didn't have an issue with that. I felt that they were coming. They realized the amount of work that needs to be done and there would be a second wave of privatizations, which hasn't much to realize. And that is what really is what we talk about, what went wrong. Regulation went wrong, if I may say so, I was a nerd at the time. And we did all the right things, right until about 2015, when, if we remember, a week before the 2015 elections, nerd suddenly reduced the tariff. It is said that this was on the instructions of President Gulag Jonathan, but to my knowledge, that was not the case. It was a decision that was taken entirely by a community nerd. I opposed it at the time because it made no sense. We had been saying to the entire country that we had to take tariffs up to the right levels and return for the right quality of service and the right kind of investment. And we had been doing that. We brought in a new tariff on the 1st of January, 2015. It was successfully taken into the market. But for some reason, which I think was clearly pointed out, my colleague, the nerd, decided that they were going to reduce the tariff as that brought infirmity into the network. It brought a lack of credibility to the network. The network is still suffering from today. The market couldn't trust us any longer because we took this decision out of the blue three days before the elections. And I think that is what we have been living with for the last six years. It's coupled with the economic downturn consistently that we have suffered the country because as you know, the vital tariff is tied to the exchange rate because the foreign exchange is probably about 67% of the input into the electricity in every unit of electricity that is produced in the country. So the process itself went right. The bidders were the bidders the best we could get at the time. But the aftermath, the management of the privatized market hasn't been well done. We have continued to retain the transmission greed in the hands of the government and that has limited the quality of management and investment into that vital area. And we have spent the last six years really trying to do the same things over and over again with absolutely no success. The outcome is that we had 4,000 megawatts as of 2015 when this administration came in 2014 where we handed over to the new entity, the new Bitcoin investors. And that's probably just about where we still are six, seven years later. So there's been a real change in the amount of energy that people get in their homes and businesses. And that is to my mind, a function of the manner in which we have tried to govern. We haven't held discourse through their obligations. The government has not met its own obligation to keep tariffs and to keep the market design at the right level. So you have discourse and government accusing and counter accusing each other of abuse to blame for the impediments of market. The outcome is that the customer suffers. So in a nutshell, that's what I would say and the thing that have gone right and have not gone right. And we really need to get not the question of how much we are putting or how many megawatts we are putting on the grid, but we need to get right how we govern the market. You can't have policymakers being also operators. You can't have the locus of regulation being uncertain. Today, it's not clear to me who is the regulator of the power sector. Is it the CBN or is it NERC? And if it is NERC, is it NERC on its own or NERC acting on instructions from the Ministry of Power or even from the office of the vice president? These are questions that people who are eligible of the industry have to ask and they do ask. And onto the government issues I dealt with at the discourse level, how are we holding our investors to their obligations? How are we ensuring that they govern their discourse properly? How are we ensuring that they do not take funds that are supposed to go back into investment for themselves to pay off their acquisition loans? These are questions that we really need to look at. So it's not so much the privatization as the management of the post privatization that I think really is where we haven't got it right. So Kelechi, in summary, that's really what I would say. Thank you. Thank you very much for that provocative intervention. It's quite insightful. So let's move now to Balavi for her talk on why the research focus on SMEs. Thank you, Kelechi. Thank you, Professor Jibrin and thank you, AO. They were obviously, as is expected from you, extremely fascinating interventions. And I'm glad that while Jibrin talked about what was going wrong and every word that he spoke was completely true. Here at CDD and SOASAs, we also wanted to get somebody on board, like Ayo, who could also tell us what went right, because too often we see what's gone wrong and we tend to focus on what's gone wrong in Nigeria. But even though we are an anti-corruption evidence program, it's also good to step back and see, well, what went right and what can we learn from certain instances of what went right and apply them to anti-corruption policies. So that was extremely interesting to hear. And this whole idea of the fact that the privatization, for us to say, actually went well and was designed well, but it's how it's been implemented. It's how it's been governed. And I think that really speaks to, sorry, the heart of what we are trying to do at SOASAs, which is to try and look at governance issues. What is policy, but how you govern, how you design a contract and how you implement that contract. And if you look at it, and you'll pardon me for a second if I talk like an economist, but a lot of these policy and governance failures are actually contractual failures because contracts have been designed in a way that actually leave a lot asking for in terms of the implementation of that contract. So in other words, there is a gap between how a contract is designed and how a contract is implemented. But while that's happening, in the middle as a sort of a collateral damage, we have millions of consumers in a vibrant dynamic country like Nigeria who are actually without power. So that leads me to two things that Kailichi said I would talk about. One is why SMEs? And the second is what really is the policy that we're talking about when we are saying SMEs? What is the policy situation that we are looking at? And essentially we've been talking about very large sort of big questions about how privatization was right, but how corruption sort of mangled a lot of the implementation process. It's a big ticket questions, but we really broke it down after looking at the entire national grid from end to end. We really broke it down to where it was possible for us to suggest interventions. Now, we are not research which we'll go out and implement. We will gather information in the sense of providing evidence, synthesize that into evidence and tell, well, hopefully policy makers and funders. And here is evidence that we think would work in a context as adverse as the Nigerian power sector. Now, as you've been outlined, we have the problem of intractable corruption. There are connected players who can now operate within Nessie who don't really need to turn profits around because they have deep political connections. And frankly, Nigeria is no exception. There have been power sector privatizations across the developing world. In fact, India, one of the sort of benchmarks that Nigeria looked at has long been known to have extremely adverse political economy contexts within the power sector. So in one sense, Nigeria is not an exception, but obviously there are specificities in the Nigerian context because generation, average generation is so low. That's not the case for a lot of other developing countries. What do you do when generation is so low in a country that's hugely driven by demand for electricity, you're obviously going to find lots of ways of inefficiencies and corruption. Therefore, at one level, you have the very large political connectedness, the political nature of corruption at the national grid, whether it's gas supply agreements at the generation transmission distribution level. At the micro level, you actually have consumers who frankly, and consumers including small and medium entrepreneurs, who simply don't have a choice but to indulge in certain corrupt transactions because they don't otherwise have any way of solving this daily problem of, I simply don't get enough electricity to run my machines. And our research in Kailichi will probably talk to that towards the end, actually went to what I actually call the once beating heart of Nigerian manufacturing in the southeast of the country, maybe on each and above really to find out what the main constraints were. And that's where we focused our research. So one was the macro level, one was the micro level and the other is the interconnectedness. Now, if you think of the national grid, it's really an end-to-end value chain. And even if one part of that value chain is constrained or in some way dysfunctional, you're actually seeing the entire grid breaking down. And in Nigeria, we've got multiple points of dysfunction and the grid breaking down. So solving these interconnected problems is not something we can probably concentrate on in the short to medium term, but in the meantime, something needs to give. We really need to find the solution to that problem of scarcity of power and address it to those who really needed the most. This is not to say that residential consumers don't need it. This is not to say that commercial consumers don't need it or large industries don't need it. But let's think about it this way. Have solutions been found? I think one of the successes of privatization has been the leap that Nigeria has made in renewables. You can now, residential consumers can now opt for solar. There's huge potential in the north for solar and wind. Industrial, large industries have their own captive power plants. So what about that base, that really solid base of small and medium enterprises, which actually carry the Nigerian economy forward? Like with any developing economy, and Kelly Gave this sort of figure out, most of the manufacturing enterprises in Nigeria are actually small and medium enterprises. SMEs are employment generating, youth participation in SMEs is very high. So we're actually linking this aspect of power scarcity to inclusive development and broad-based growth. You do not have electricity really, therefore just having a large part of the Nigerian economy from taking part in the economy. So what was our solution? Our solution was in a sense twofold. One was to delink it from the national grid and therefore the problems of the national grid because the incentives to upgrade and become profitable don't exist. If I have political connections and I can survive without being formally profitable, I will take the easy way out, especially when the other link in the value chain is dysfunctional. I might improve, but if the other person's not improving, what's my incentive to improve? I'm going to be stuck because remember a chain is as strong as its weakest link and there are lots of weak links in the Nigerian national grid. So one was to delink. Can we look at disaggregated supplies that are delinked from the national grid? And yes, technology is now available for that for embedded power plants. And in fact, the policy architecture, despite a recent flip-flop and confusion by the NERC on the eligible customer policy is actually moving in that direction where disaggregated and embedded power clusters are actually being encouraged. Unfortunately, that policy hasn't been pushed to the extent that it should. And here possibly the state governments need to play a bigger role, but that's the discussion that we can have later. So it was to delink and to find a productive consumer base, a base which would satisfy investors that well, here is a constituency I can find who is willing to pay for electricity. And this particular consumer base that we identified are the SMEs in Nigeria. So one is to delink and one is to find a consumer base where an investor today in Nigeria was looking at the national grid and saying, my God, there's so much uncertainty. I'm not investing in the national grid. We'll actually say, well, but there is a cluster here which looks promising and maybe I'll give it a shot. So that's where we're really coming at it from putting it very, very simply. So as I said, I'm just going to read up some statistics here from our research. The significant proportion of SMEs received just between one to five hours of electricity per day. 100% of the SMEs that we surveyed, this was in the Buja as well as in the Southeast, had generators. We know that's far, of course, across Nigeria. In total, 80% of all our respondents felt that power was the chief constraint, but here is interesting big. 100% in the Southeast, as I said, which I call the erstwhile beating heart of Nigerian manufacturing, 100% of our respondents in the Southeast actually said power was their main constraint. It wasn't financing, it wasn't corruption. It was just that I need power. I'm losing competitiveness. And for us, that was a compelling argument to look at this segment and design policy around them. So I'll just give you a small example. Why are costs so high? Why are SMEs losing competitiveness? Now, I have to use diesel every day on top of, let's say, what I'm paying for EDC. And that really makes my operational costs very high. My unit costs for power really, really very high. I'm not just using diesel. I'm also using diesel on really, really old DG sets, Listers, generator sets, where I don't even have the money to spend on them for operation and maintenance. That actually makes my operating expenses higher. So those are physical costs that people compute, but then there are costs of corruption. I am hooking, which is basically I'm stealing from transmission or distribution lines. I might be paying some sort of speed money to engineers to give my little unit extra electricity because I have an order that I absolutely need to complete, but I don't have electricity formally. Now, these are very unfortunate, but very descriptive examples of corruption where we don't have a choice. In the large majority of cases, corruption is not about greed. Corruption is usually not about just somebody going out and abusing power. In most of these cases, if you gave that SME owner, that firm owner access to a consistent, good quality power supply, she or he would be willing to pay for it. And let's not forget, for all of us here as participants and panelists, when we talk about gender inclusion, a lot of women are also... Kelly, have I run out of time? I'll finish in a couple of minutes. So yeah, you can add extra four minutes to talk about the policy options and recommendations. Thank you. Thank you so much. So a lot of women are also firm owners in the SME sector. So she or he would gladly pay that little extra if she's getting consistent power supply. So what are our basic findings therefore here? The one challenge that we identified was to align incentives. What do we mean by align incentives among SME entrepreneurs? It's that power supply and their buying of power was achieved at a low cost of corruption. Right now, when we add in all the operational inefficiencies and the corruption inefficiencies, the unit cost of power is very high. It's just not possible for them to continue at this particular rate because it harms their competitiveness. So while they're paying for it, it harms them. How do we bring it down so that we hit a particular sweet spot? It's really at reaching that developmental tariff that an entrepreneur is formally going to pay. That's what's going to be important. So how are SME's devising solutions around this informally? And this is something that also informed our sort of policy suggestion that I'll be quickly coming to. It's that informal private provisioning is already happening. They are renting power from generators. This is in one sense, they're trying to kind of bridge that productivity gap which electricity constraints are inflicting on them. But most of the other solutions are actually not productivity enhancing. Some of our respondents from Navy were actually moving production units to Asaba in Delta State. That's not good for the region, for instance, might be certainly good for Asaba. Some have cut down shifts and some are renting generators in a sort of pay-as-you-go model. And I know that this pay-as-you-go model is sometimes celebrated as, oh, this is entrepreneurial, this is innovative, but this is really a short-term fix. It's like putting a little bandaid while things are healing. And things don't seem to be healing very quickly around here. So that's not something that's actually going to push them towards a kind of competitive growth. So we didn't look at that. But what we did take away from that is that there is interest in collective mechanisms of paying and that there is willingness to pay. And what basically our research showed was that the unit cost of power for all the entrepreneurs we surveyed, when we take into account the diesel, the hooking, the paying and the illegal buying, it was far higher than the EEDC rate. So anything between their real unit cost of power and the EEDC rate, the Ennebu distribution company rate would be optimal for them. And we know that technology for this exists. We now are taking this evidence to finance us and are saying, well, here is the evidence. Why don't you take a look at these clusters? You don't have to create clusters. This is something that can be replicated across the country. This can be replicated in Lagos. This can be replicated in the South-South. This can be replicated in the Northeast where there are clusters and clusters which are actually losing competitiveness because of a lack of access to electricity. It's, we're looking at an existing problem and actually creating a solution around them. It's not that the SME cluster that are a problem. It's the fact that they can't be competitive. That's the problem. And here is the solution around them. You're not creating a zone. You're not creating, there's no buying of land. There is no extra contracts to be entered into. The technology exists. What we've proven is that willingness to pay also exists and that there is a model where you can lower the cost of corruption. If it's not in my interest, why will I uphold the rules? If I can design or redesign rules that it is in my interest, that's when I'm actually going to be enforcing the rule on myself. Once I start enforcing the rule on myself, that's when enforcement and rule following become sustainable. That really is the heart of the ACE program and the ACE solution. This is essentially what we are talking about in terms of what the ACE program talks about in terms of policy solutions. So two things are, VISAAD says that incentives to support external enforcement are clear in the case of SMEs, as the solution is in their favor and disaggregated grid-based solutions have the power to potentially lower corruption risks and prices and SMEs are willing to pay for this. Now, what does this mean? This provides fresh investors who might not be politically connected and incentive to take part in a market where they are not competing with those with political connections. I'm sorry, I think there was a problem with my audio feed, but I at least do hope that you got the video. Thanks, Kelly Chi. I'm done for now. Thank you, Palavi. So the second round of talk will be around the role of citizens and civil society, non-state actors in fighting corruption in the power sector. I know Professor Jubrin highlighted some of these, but here we would like him to place more emphasis on the critical role of citizens expected to play and in the power sector in terms of the corruption. Then after that, we will now move on to Eyo to talk on financing technology solutions in the power sector. Professor Jubrin, over to you. Thank you, Kelly Chi. I'm from Amadu Bello University School. And when we were in Amadu Bello University, everybody was a majest learningness. So that's a tradition I was brought up in. And one of the things I remember from my days as Maxis was Vladimir Lenin's famous quotation. Basically, he was trying to describe what is communism. Communism here understood as the highest level of the development of human society. And for him, that communism, that paradise as it was, is Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country. And Lenin's argument was, if only you can electrify every town and village and house in the Soviet Union, then you have paradise. In Nigeria, of course, the tragedy is we haven't had that electrification of the whole country. And when you look at the paper which has been posted, you'll see we have one of the lowest per capita consumption of electricity in the whole world. And part of the issue, and I'll just speak for three or four minutes, is that we have somehow developed a trap for ourselves when we look at the attitude of the Nigerian consumer to this power sector. Basically, the position of the Nigerian is that I'm not ready to pay more for power, simply because I get power in a very episodic and partial manner. If you want me to pay for power, give me 24 hour power supply. If you don't give me that, I'm not going to pay you the tariff you are requesting. So that's the position of the Nigerian. And what this means is that it becomes extremely difficult to actually improve power supply when consumers are not ready to pay for what they receive. I think one of the challenges we are facing today, and this was very interesting for me. When I had distribution companies, discourse were telling their suppliers, there's a gencause, that they should reduce the amount of electricity they give them each day to sell. And that's counterintuitive for me. So I was very interested in that question. Why are they saying give us less electricity when the consumers are all screaming, give us more electricity? And this is an issue related to what Palavi was saying earlier, or is it Kelechi, I don't remember, that the power companies, the distribution companies know that the lower end of society, the poorer sections of our cities, refuse to pay for electricity. And therefore, they decide they will not give them more electricity, they will give only those who pay. And one of the issues of our electricity, why it's such a difficult and important subject, is that, as Lenin said, electrify the whole country, every home, village, and city, and let everybody have 24-hour supply. And this is where I think non-state actors have a role to play. I've seen Nigerian progressives, my friends and comrades, whenever the issue of tariff is raised, they all come out unanimously and say, no, Nigeria's must not pay more. But these are private entities. And we all know that the cost of electricity in Nigeria today, as it has always been, is less than its cost of production. When Eyo said earlier that, well, when the electricity regulation authority reduced the tariff price for petrol in 2015 and they don't know why, of course, it's because he was a member. Everybody knows why, there was an instruction from ASSOROC, elections are coming, reduce the tariff or else we'll remove all of you as commissioners and bring some who are faithful party members. That was what happened and everybody knows it. So my sense is this, it is important that non-state actors in Nigeria, first of all, educate themselves on the fundamentals of this industry. And part of that fundamentals is that we have to get consumers to pay for what they consume, whether or not they obtained for our power or not. And this is a very difficult argument to make. But I think it's a difficult argument we must learn to make. The second issue is what are the new forms of corruption in the industry that we need to address? And since privatization, it's been very interesting how new forms of corruption have developed. The basis of privatization was that everybody will be charged what they consume. That is every consumer unit will be metered. The discourse have refused to provide meters for their consumers because they find it more profitable to do estimated billing where they can charge people more than what they consume. So this is an issue in which there is guilt on both sides. Consumers don't want to pay and they do everything not to pay. The providers don't want people to pay just what they consume. They want them to pay more than what they consume. So the corruption and the unrealistic expectations are on both sides. And I think cracking this within Nigeria's civil society is extremely important. And you cannot crack this paradox until you begin to understand how the industry actually operates. Thank you, Kellage. Thank you, Professor Jubry, for that. We quickly move to Eyo to talk on financing technologies in the power sector. Okay, Kellage, thank you very much. Electricity, there's nothing esoteric about how electricity is generated, how it's transmitted and how it's distributed. So what we need, to my mind, if we agree collectively that the challenge we have is a governance challenge, then the obvious solutions would have to be also governance related. Oh, by the way, there's something I've presented. Ibrahim said, which I really have to deal with. He said that there were in 2015, and this is going back, but it's important. I was in charge of tariffs in that. I know that nobody called me either on the commission or from the villa. In fact, when the announcement of a tariff increase was announced, was made, I got a call from the villa asking, who told you guys to do this? Why did you do this? From the same villa? So I'm not sure that what Professor Ibrahim knows is the fact. What I do know is that without being prompted by anyone, made a change in tariffs, perhaps to support the government, perhaps I was thinking of some people, but certainly it wasn't my thinking because we're totally wrong. And that was why, effectively, I resigned from Merck in 2015, after that tariff increase was affected. It was against my advice as a commissioner in charge. And I left Merck for that reason because they didn't listen. And of course we can see what the aftermath was. Now, the solution that we need to look at have to the governance-related. The view that I take is that Nigeria cannot provide electricity. Well, and by the way, I agree with the Leninist solution, electrify everybody if we still know by providing you. And I think that the way to do that is to accept, first of all, that we cannot address the electricity needs of 200 million people plus via a single electricity market. The needs of the farmer, the householder in Goso is not the same as the need of the oil palm plantation owner in Cross River State. The needs of the overnight in Lagos where I am right now as I look around Lagos, I'm actually on the rooftop, I'm looking at all sorts of skyscrapers in the lucky area, cannot be the same as the need of the villager in Bequira and Cross River State. Yet, this is how we want to address these countervailing, diametrically opposed needs through one single electricity market, through one single carrier model, through one transmission grid. I don't think it's gonna happen. In markets or jurisdictions the size of Nigeria, the number of people that we have, the variety of our heterogeneity, you have different electricity markets. And I think that the sum of the parts of Nigeria, the Southwest, Lagos as a market, the North Central area, Kano as a market, Potacos, River State as a separate market are much greater than the whole that we have right now. So my first proposal is that we move away from the conventional wisdom that has been implanted into all of us, that Nigeria under a constitution and under a law has to be a federally driven electricity market. That is not correct. Our constitution is very clear in making electricity a concurrent matter. In other words, you can have state focused or regional focused electricity market as well as federal regulation of electricity. So when you have to sell, generate and sell electricity across the border from one state to another or across states to another state. So Kainji mainstreaming, Kainji wants to sell electricity to enlarge user in Lagos, that cross border trade that's regulated by NERC. But when or if you set up an electricity market, in Lagos, as Lagos state is seeking to do now, that of course, the generation in Lagos, the distribution in Lagos, the transmission within Lagos is subject or should be subject to Lagos state regulation. And that's the way it should be. But today we have everything been driven from Abuja. And I think that is the foundation of the governance problem that we have because you can't sit down in the federal culture and then set rules for every one of us, 200 million in number from Abuja. It's just not gonna work. And that's what really what we are seeing. So I think that we need to have a dialogue that looks at how do we enable states, enable parts of the country to establish and set up their own electricity markets and to decentralize to separate what we have today, which is the wires business, the hardware and the software, the customer care, the customer services all being conducted from one or by one single entity. In other places, it is separated. The wires business is very different from the customer care. So we need to deepen the reform and go beyond a federal market to both a federal market for wholesale electricity, generation and transmission into separating our distribution markets and making them state-based or regional based. Now, when you do that, you then see, you will see that if you have a Lagos market, if you have a Southwestern market, if you have a Northern market that is driven by its own wealth in hydro and renewable energy resources, then you will have people actually being able to drill down into the investment opportunities that there may be in the various parts of the country. Today, you have not had any new generation being built after Azura was commissioned in 2015 or 2016, simply because every generator that comes into Nigeria today is required to sell power to an insolvent Nigerian bulk electricity trader that really cannot pay its obligations. And so who's gonna put money into that? Nobody in his right senses. But when you have a market that is focused on the Southwest or on Lagos or on the Northwest, right, and it's hydro driven, it's renewable driven, then of course you will find investment going in there within nearly faster than you would have investment going into a national Abuja driven market. And so my own proposal as to a solution is we shouldn't look at engineering in itself. We should first look at governance. Let's be clear about the locals and the nature of regulation. Let's be clear about having various markets within the larger Nigerian electricity sector. Let's bring the closer connection between gas in the South or in the Southern part of the country, renewables and hydro in the Northern part of the country and those markets in those regions or in those areas. And you will see that the investment opportunity will become a lot more clarified, a lot better. This is important in my view also because of the imperative that the climate change discussions which are coming in Scotland in November impose on us. At the rate we are going, we will not be able to utilize our gas resources quickly enough because we are trying to put those gas resources into one single market. If for no other reason, we need to create this multiple market because it gives us the opportunity to actually look at our various energy sources and how we can deploy them faster into markets that actually need them. And if we don't do this, then of course the world's gonna leave us behind. So without going into too much detail, I think that we've got to look at that element of our solutions from the point of view of how do we decentralize? How do we create more markets? How do we enable investors to narrow down, to drill down on the opportunities that there are across the various parts of the country not to look at Nigeria as a whole, but as Nigeria as various parts, each of which is rich and capable and financeable or bankable in itself than one single market in which all our infirmities are put into one port along with our advantages. So that's something that I think we need to look at. And I really do not think that in this regard our donors have been of much help to us because what they tend to do is to put money into wherever it is, looks like where you can have a quick win and they promote this quick win mentality that we have. We really have to put ourselves to work to look at how states can come into the matrix, not as owners or as operators, but as enablers who are to make laws for their states and those laws come together to create state and regional markets as opposed to one single national electricity market. So in summary, that's what I would propose. And of course, I'm open to questions around this. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. For that, I don't speak in on Azura, you know, we hear that Siamian is on board or planning to be on board. How do you, how would you describe that? Is it to compliment Zimens was the, Azura, as far as I know, is privately driven. There's a whole bunch of ECAs and BFIs along with private sector investors in it. Zimens is not, as far as I know, a shareholder in Azura and doesn't intend to be. It is the technology provider. Azura is running on Zimens machines. And of course, Zimens is always willing to build more. Azura I know has plans to expand. And I think that's where you have the involvement of Zimens, but not as an owner, more as a contractor, a provider of technology and a service provider to the Azura consortium. Okay, thank you for that. Palavi, maybe you use the next five minutes to speak on this welcome power sector. Thanks, thanks, Kelluji. Thanks again, Jibreen and Ayo for those very, very relevant interventions. Just a quick point on Azura, really. Azura was, well, it was one of the success stories that I think there is also a lot of learning to be taken from Azura because Azura was constructed as, or contracted and designed as a take-off pay mechanism. And we're actually left holding the situation where the hydro power stations have to climb down when we know hydro power is much cheaper, have to climb down because I think Azura works on a sort of contract designer for almost 90% plant load factor. I could be wrong, but it's somewhere quite high. And even the sort of gas guarantee with acugas, again, the off take that was assumed hasn't really happened because of transmission bottlenecks. So this is not to say that this was something which was done very consciously, but it's probably in terms of, and this point that you was making about donors and about the kind of assumptions you're going to make, about the market, about off takes, all of these should go in as learnings if one is indeed to look at Nigeria as a series of markets. And that's, I think, where the research that CDD with Jibrin and Kelechi and we've done in Soasis actually speaks to that, takes a small segment of that with the SMEs. But if one is to look at Nigeria in this manner, one also has to learn from the mistakes of the past. How can we design contracts better? Azura was certainly not a contract to my mind works in Nigeria's favor, but to quickly broaden it out because ACE is not just working on the power sector in Nigeria. ACE is actually working on the power sector across a number of countries, including Tanzania, Lebanon and Bangladesh. And the one common factor that we see across these electricity sectors is the need for risk mitigation. I think as both Jibrin and Eyo said, it's not about the technicality, it's not about engineering, it's also about making sure investors have certainty. And it's not always economic certainty. It equally has to do with political risk mitigation. I know for those of you who are technically minded, risk and uncertainty aren't quite the same. But we're really talking about political risk mitigation. Therefore, if we are solving problems of willingness to pay, if we have a set of interested, capable entrepreneurs willing to enforce rules in their own interest, you actually have much more buy-in and an investor has more political certainty as well as economic uncertainty. And there are not too many opportunities where political and economic risk certainties can be provided together. But I think one way of doing this would be to look at Nigeria or indeed context like Nigeria as a series of very remunerative markets, which helps us further this whole idea of inclusion and broad-based development because let's not forget, this also needs to talk about inclusion and broad-based development. If we are talking about the state being involved or not being involved, at one level the state can't be at the margins of the electricity sector because there is something about distributional justice. There is something about energy justice and the role of the state. And as Dabrin says, we need to get non-state actors in there and there have been organizations working very closely keeping tabs on the state. And there is an accountability framework that's now emerging. But that's very important. We cannot lose sight of the fact that the state has a role to play. Other developing countries that have successfully privatized have actually kept certain sections, whether it's been generating, whether it's been transmission, certain sections of the national grid within public sector hands, whether it's the state or the central level because you do need a coordinating mechanism. Just for purposes of interconnectivity, there is, if there is a disbalance and there's a power surge, you do need a central organization that manages the wheeling or distributes the load, you need a regional load dispatch stations. So while I'm getting technical, this also talks about the need to design solutions from Nigeria that don't throw the baby out to the bathwater, that not everything privatized is a good thing, not everything that the state does is a good thing. We need to find the adequate role for each of these stakeholders and we need to find the right kind of pressure points to our mind in the world that we do an ace that pressure point actually comes from designing solutions where people actually will be adhering to that particular contract or taking to that particular rule that's been devised in their own interest first, rather than somebody else coming and knocking you on the head and tapping you on the wrist and saying, well, you're wrong and you're going to go to jail if you don't stick to these rules. So that is the kind of mix that we policy and sort of framework mix that we are bringing into this research. I'm going to stop here because I know that there probably will be a lot of questions. We'll all be very, very happy to take them. So thank you again, Kelechi. Thank you, Palavi. Thank you, Eyo and Professor Gibrin. And we've heard from the panelists. I think we've also been able to throw more light on the problem and the possible solutions to the problem in the power sector. So from the panelists, we're able to understand that the complexity of the kind of corruption in the sector is a major challenge as Professor Gibrin rightly put it. Then Eyo was able to explain the fact that it's more of a human problem, a governance issue and government overbearing interference in the sector really. So it's good that we've heard from the panelists and been able to understand the issue properly. It's also interesting to see what really went right during the privatization. I'm sure out there from our research and also from what is available in the public domain, it's more of the negatives. People always come across more of the negative, but it's good that Eyo had been able to throw more light on what really went right, particularly the process of the privatization. There was some high level of transparency in the bidding process and they made sure that the qualified bidders were selected. Okay, but in terms of what went wrong, see boys down to the issue of regulation and it revolves around government. So we are citizens, we've also had what we can do, as citizens to be able to help solve the problem in the power sector. While we are waiting for an indication, Pallavi, can you respond to, I think it's all fair but I ask a couple of questions for you to respond to. So is it the first one? Is it Ikenna? Yes, yes. Ikenna, is there something specific that you'd want me to sort of respond to? As I said, you said, we need to question what accountability and transparency frameworks exist to be on ridden off respect. The issue about transparency is just imagine the irony of the discussion that we are having. All of us participants panelists know exactly how it is that the system, and I say system within court, court system operates on the ground. So we have a very clear view of what is going wrong and how it is going wrong. What we don't have a handle on is how to ensure that that view then is translated into something that we can actually stop or interfere in and ensure that enforcement takes place. So to me, I think accountability and transparency frameworks need to change in a manner where we can bring them as close as possible to enforcement feasibility. I think the problem with a lot of these kinds of efforts and these kinds of frameworks, including privatization is that if you privatize and you keep the government out and you bring in the private sector, everything is going to be hunky dory. We don't imagine the incentives and essentially the incentives and cost benefits that people bring to the table to say that the private sector has no incentive except for being profitable and equitably distributing whatever they're producing. That's also asking too much of the private sector. So to my mind, it's about designing policy in a way that is the most feasible to be implemented and to be kind of geared to. It's not easy, but I think the way to do it would be to start disaggregating. And there's just one point that I'll pick up that AU mentioned about COP26 happening in Glasgow. And I think in a sense, a lot of the transition to green growth that we are talking about is quite unfair to many developing countries. Nigeria included. I mean, the whole problem of standard assets is something that we know about. One issue of using CNG, this whole embedded power plant policy solution that we are talking about of CNG. I know some people have come to me and said that CNG is fossil. But if you actually go to these clusters and see the diesel machines that are being used, they're not, you know, there's no operations and maintenance. The diesel is of poor quality. CNG would be a huge legacy. So we need to start making these transitions in incremental way. And that's how we are going to improve these accountability and transparency frameworks. I don't know if that sort of answered your question, but I'm going to end here. Thank you. Thank you, Palavi. Hey, you can come in if you have something. Yeah. I want us to put what we are trying to do here in context. Tijani Abrukarim, who made some comments in the chat box, says that we are living in darkness. Imagine that it's not in darkness. And let's put this into context. At the end of the day, all we are addressing is at best a 12,000 megawatt market because that is the restrained capacity which generators have today. 12, so between 12 and 13,000. If all the generating plants in this country on the grid were to generate their energy and you had a grid that could take it, they wouldn't do more than 13,000 megawatt a day. But you, me, Nigerians have put together probably something between 14 and 60,000 megawatts. And we use that energy, we use that capacity every day. So when the grid fails, we don't collapse. We don't go to sleep. We don't die. We don't cry. We just simply go to our solar inspectors. We go to our generators. We go to our home systems. And we go on with business as usual. So the point I'm making here is that our national grid is becoming, in many ways, increasingly relevant. And we are only discussing it because the federal government and public funds are involved in it. And that's really why it's relevant. Otherwise, it really doesn't do much. I don't know that anyone in this country, public or private, depends on the grid for its daily or its daily energy needs. So let's understand this and put this into context first. Our grid is becoming increasingly relevant. And if the government doesn't want to act and free up, open up the sector so that people can look in their own parts of the world at how they can solve their problem in an organized steady-state market, they will still go ahead and solve the problem themselves. And that's where the upgrade conversation comes in. So I really wanted to put this into context for us, for our donors, for the government. At the end of the day, what the Nigerian electricity grid, the formal market cell, is all of 4,200 megawatts distributed over maybe 12 to 15 hours. So that's a total of 60,000 odd megawatt hours. That's nothing for 200 million people. That's a per capita distribution of something like three or four megawatt hours for the 300 million Nigerians that there are in this, I'm 200 million Nigerians that there are today. And that's not even like one single bulb for 24 hours. So it's really not something that we should hyperventilate over. But it is important, that said, to have a formal electricity market. And all that I for one have been advocating is that you can't keep having this situation where our solutions come only from Abuja. We have to widen the space, the opportunities for engagement. We've got to compare states. Almost like what is happening with reverse states and VAT, we've got to do the same thing with electricity. Many of us do not know that electricity is actually a concurrent matter, that states can get involved in it, can create the enabling environments for the private sector to work whether it's upgrade or ungrade, whether it's renewable or distillate fuel or fossil fuel driven, whether it's gas or hydro or bio sources, but states can and they should be going to recognize that this is something that they have to do if they really want to deliver on public good for their citizens. So I just wanted to bring this into context. I haven't had any questions yet, but we need to put into context that at the end of the day, all we are talking about is a really small part of the total Nigerian electricity market, formal and informal. And we all know that the economy is really driven by the informal sector. And it's no different with electricity. Thank you Aya for that clarification and context. Maybe we'll move on to, I don't know if there is any other person that wants to ask a question. You know, it's from the discussion so far, it's obvious that part of the team we're also suffering is of the ranting efficiency, both on the government side and the discourse and all that. Okay, so drawing from the point Palavi raised earlier, with regards to incentives, from the study, we were able to see the willingness of the SMEs, we focused on their willingness to pay, to pay once there is electricity. And I think that also applies to many Nigerians. But incidentally, some of them they pay for this electricity, but they don't get it. We saw situations where shoe manufacturers tell us and all that every month, just like other households in Nigeria, they receive NEPA bills, they pay, if they don't pay NEPA, we cut off their lights. And that's also boils down to the issue of meter, you know, because some places are yet to be metered. And the discourse are catching on this, to also defraud citizens and all that. So I don't know, how can we address this issue? Government have been saying of recent, giving Mondays to meet every household and all that, but we've seen that that's not really happening. Particularly with the business community, we interacted with, you know, some of them with resort situations where some locations they've not seen lights for one year or two, but they keep receiving NEPA bills and all that. And we've seen businesses that resort to, you know, for instance, I see a location in our back where they have, some people have stand by a big generator and get orders to connect, you know, and they supply them light six hours, eight hours, depending on how much you're able to pay. You know, on daily basis, they spend this, just as Palabese, you know, they spend more money than even the electricity bill brought to them. So how do we reconcile this kind of situation? You know, where citizens and businesses are yearning for electricity and willing to pay, but they are not getting it. I don't know if Professor Gibo can come in here. Yeah, I think in a sense, what we are seeing is going back to what we used to have. You remember those of my generation who remember just used to have 24-hour electricity supply, which was private, was working, and nobody in that city had ever had about NEPA till one day, the federal military government said, we want every Nigerian in every nook and corner of the country to have electricity supplied by government that is cheap and that's reliable. So that's what they offered. So just was forcibly removed from their private suppliers and placed on the national grid. And since then, of course, they've never had regular electricity. So a lot of what we are seeing, and I completely agree with Ayo, is that the idea of one federal solution for the power sector simply cannot work. The requirements are too complex, the investments are too huge, and the management of the system is extremely problematic. And that's basically the proposition we are making in this research product. Why don't you look at specific needs of sectors where there's effective demand for electricity and they are ready to pay and you supply them? And what we are seeing is actually a first step towards dismantling this unitary system. You know, the irony is that everybody in Nigeria is saying, we want a return to true federalism. And this is actually the issue in true federalism that in a federal state, you don't have one unitary solution to everything. And that states have areas of competence where they can be effective and supply needs of their citizens. And the private sector has a role to play in terms of addressing some of these specificities. I think the system that we developed post privatization is a very complex system. And as we have argued, once there is a gridlock at one level or a blockage at another level, then the whole system collapses. And what we are seeing is introduce flexibility in the system, encourage multiple suppliers and distributors to emerge, allow true federalism to operate in the system, create conditions to encourage private enterprise to play its own role. And you'll gradually move to a situation in which power begins to improve simply because there are many sources of supply and people who require power able to get access from a supplier that's close to them. The other issue that I think is important that we really need to discuss seriously is if we have put one-tenth of the money we've put into fixing our electricity supply into solar systems, in terms of provision, especially for private homes would not be where we are today at all. We have a lot of availability of solar systems in this country and we seriously underuse it. Today, a lot of us who are part of the elite have set up solar systems in our own homes. The challenge for solar systems is that for low income people, they are unable to put resources into batteries which is really taking a two, three year supply into one pack of batteries. So, financing solutions for democratizing access to solar energies are very much part of the solutions that will help. And I really feel we should insist on the point I admit that the reality is that most of us in this country provide our own electricity but the way we provide it is very costly to our individual budgets and collective solutions are important. And what's on the table is that it's not one collective solution but multiple collective solutions that depend on the geography of the places we are talking about, on its needs, on the effective demand in terms of a spatial distribution that this is a way of thinking out of this major crisis that has become electricity supply and consumption in Nigeria. Thank you, Kelechi. Thank you, Professor Gibri. Yeah, just to reemphasize again, you know, it will also be good if we take this conversation forward, particularly on the points made so far, especially from Eyo on what really went wrong, you know, where he made the point on transmission grid still in the hands of governments. And this goes, seems not to be accountable at the moment, okay? And also the issue of how we generate, how we govern the electricity market and who governs the electricity market, that is a big question that is seeking for answer, that is CBN or NEC and all that. So I think that has these points are points that we should take forward and do more conversation around it. You know, on the discourse not being accountable, not from my last point, I can see somebody I think is anonymous also asks a question, why should the discourse not be prosecuted for failing to supply meters to Nigeria? I don't know why government seems to be treating them with kid gloves, even after giving deadline and given mandates, still they're not being able to meet our Nigerians. Okay, I don't know whether you have some kind of answer to this question. Can I change? First of all, you can't prosecute it, just go for money in the middle, because it's not a crack, it's a fail to deliver, it's not a sanction. Yes, of course, you can and they should be sanctioned. However, the government will tell you that they're in a metering program, they've licensed what they call meter asset providers and so on and so forth in this talk. But again, it comes back to the point which I think Professor Ibrahim and I, you know, have kind of, you know, agreed upon. It's the problem with central regulation, central policymaking and central enforcement. No way in the world do you have federations in which you have single regulators for electricity markets. We're just too many and we have too much demand. We are, there are too many of us complaining for, look, NAC, like electricity regulatory commission, has a consumer affairs division headed by a commissioner. That commissioner is in charge of all of less than 25, 30 staff at the end of the day. It is those 30 people, along with what they call forum offices in six geopolitical zones, each staff with less than four people each that will deal with all our consumer issues, millions of consumer complaints per day. That's all. It's physically impossible to deal with consumer affairs issues in Nigeria as we are presently set up today. It hasn't changed since 2006 when NAC was set up, when it was still NEPA. It was still one single entity. It hasn't changed with the breakup into 11 discos. It will not change if we have 37 discos unless you have the states actually waking up and recognizing that they play a key role also in creating the environment in which all our various, multifarious needs can be addressed. So for me, we are really backing up the wrong team when we pursue a disco that is really at the end of the day focused only on providing service to its best quality customers, who are the industrial and the large commercial customers, and they forget about the rest. That's the bottom line. That's what is happening today. Only the high-end customers and the consents of the disco, they really, and that's why you have a phenomenal what they call rejecting load. Because that load is the load, that energy that goes to the less financially viable, the less lucrative set of customers. They don't want to serve those customers. And it's a question of, the economists would tell you, it's a question of where are the incentives? Are incentives in Nigeria today askewed? They are skewed towards serving those kind of customers who get service. I'm forgetting about the rest, we don't define. So yes, you have consumer issues. Yes, each of us has issues with our meter asset providers with our discos. But really at the end of the day, the government itself cannot solve that problem because the entire set of incentives that discos respond to are totally, totally miskewed. OK, thank you. Thank you for that. I think we've really gone beyond our time. But just before we wrap up, there is a question for you. We know you're not, you've left neck, but I think your response will be appreciated in this. The question is, Nick recently mentioned that they want to scrap an estimated billing. I think so. OK, so what is your thought on this? You can't scrap estimated billing. No end word, you use scrap estimated billing. It's just not practicable. Some customers are best estimated. The question is, what do we use estimated billing to do it? Discos have, in the past, historically used estimated billing to fill in the gaps in their revenue collection. And that's how they impose on helpless customers who have no choice but to make those estimates. The solution to estimate, I think, fundamentally, is to separate the hardware business, the wires business, from the customer focused business. Let's take the telcos. The telcos sell airtime in bulk to various providers who sell us those little scratch cards. That's what we should be doing, right? If you farm off customer care to people who will invest in managing and caring for customers, you will have less and less and less of complaints and more and more of meters going into it. This is 2021. We have the technology to send middle spacecraft out to Venus and to Pluto and all that. Technology also exists today to cheaply cost-effectively manage the needs of customers, whether it's to complain about the poor connection or low voltage or meters not working. Whatever it is, the technology does exist. But when you have one single entity dealing with three or four different aspects, diametrically oppose very multifarious aspect of market. Diametrically oppose various classes of customers. What you have is that automatically, what I call the miscuing of incentives begins to come out, begins to emerge. And it is natural for Discos to want to deal with their best quality customer and leave everybody else. That's really what is happening at the end of the day, like I said, in addition to the last question. So again, the solution comes back to what Professor Gibrin has said. We really need to look at Nigeria as what it is. Nigeria is not a unitary state. Electricity markets should not be unitary. Nigeria is a federal state comprised of people of different colors, regions of different colors, different needs, different types. And so we have different energy sources. We have different methods of generating. We have different distribution companies that can drill down into the needs of the customers. And that is really what we should drive as a country. When we drive that, then you'll begin to see those customer issues really going away because you now have the ability to have people living in the locality with regulators in that same locality focused on each need of each locality. And again, it really comes back to the same thing at the end of the day. Let's look at Nigeria as a collection of various markets because Nigeria is a collection of heterogeneous people with different demand, different drivers. And we can meet those needs. There will always be someone somewhere who's willing to meet a particular kind of need and address it. But as long as you have only 11 disputes, which are effectively monopolies and so have really less of an incentive, particularly when you have regulation that is increasingly absent or disinterested or distracted, because you have the CBN on one side coming up with his own needs and demand as a provider of funding for the electricity market. You have NEC on the other side. You have the Ministry of Power itself, the Ministry of Finance, UNBET. You've got TCN also doing its own. And then there's the vice president. You have all these countervailing forces that all have some interplay of regulatory authority. You have automatically uncertainty. Now, this again speaks to what I have said and what you have said consistently, the question of governance. When you have disinterested regulation, then players in the market are able to play fast and loose because regulation is not on point. It is not focused. So they can play with the rules. They can game the system. That's what is happening in Nigeria today. And that is why the danger that we have is that those are folks who are living extensively as pros and cons pointed out, providing our own energy ourselves will end up calculating the cost. Is it better for me to pay for that higher cost of energy but not have to chase my discourse? The answer will eventually be yes. And that is how our organized market, like our wired telephone system will disappear and we'll all begin to become our own providers of electricity, expensive yes. But at the end of the day, when you look at the bigger picture, it's a lot cheaper because we don't have to worry about chasing one regulator who doesn't care about or some dispute that is not interested and is only interested in focusing on the 1% or the 2% of the market. But that's really what I would say to that. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. And we will use those points as closing remarks for this meeting. As I said earlier, this conversation continues. There are some other questions coming in, but we'll take it out of this platform and continue the conversation on Twitter and other platforms. Thank you very much the panelists and participants who were able to endure to this point. We know we really stressed it, but it was the conversation was it. So we encourage you to, we've circulated a link for the report, share it and read it. If there are other questions that you seek for answers, you can join us on the social media platforms and we will continue the discussion from there. So hopefully the policy makers, the actors involved, we pick something from this and we get it right someday. I wish to also thank CDD for setting up this meeting and once again, the panelists, we are grateful for your contributions and participants for your questions and all that. So may we call it a day and thank you and have a very good night's rest. Thank you very much and have a good day, all of you. Thank you. Thank you, goodbye. Goodbye, everybody. Nice to end here with you all. Bye-bye.