 Welcome back to The Breakfast here on Plus TV Africa. Our next conversation is on the National Power Grid. Yesterday, news statements, of course, put out saying that the grid had collapsed and, of course, there were efforts made to revive it and bring it back into operation. We're going to be speaking this morning with a public affairs analyst, Mr. Nika Ghoule, to share his thoughts with us on this. Good morning, Mr. Ghoule. Good morning. Great to have you on the program this morning. I want us to start from, you know, understanding what it really means for a power grid to collapse. Okay. Just to take a step back, there are three phases in the power value chain. So you have the generating stations, which in Nigeria are thermal, which are gas powered, or hydro, which is water. Now, when these generating plants produce electricity, the electricity is put into the national grid. And the national grid is a system of wiring that takes electricity from the generating point to the point of usage. So as you can see on the screen, you see those high tension wires. That is the national grid. So these wires are taking electricity from the point of production to the point of usage. So when there is a system collapse, it means we no longer have power that is being transferred from the point of usage, I mean, from the point of production to the point of usage. So that is what it means. And what can cause that? And for consumers, the impact on the consumers is power outage. Yeah, obviously. You suddenly see that you don't have electricity in your home or in your office or your business premises. Yeah, so what you've described now is not failure to generate, but failure to transmit. And the statement yesterday was put about the transmission company of Nigeria. But what I'm trying to understand is what can cause that system failure? If power is still generated, but there's just no transmission, what can possibly cause that? Okay, so if we look at the cost of the system failure, the cost can actually be generation or transmission because the generation stations themselves can experience outage. For instance, if there is an issue with the pipeline that is taking gas to a power plant, that power plant is going to go out of outage, it's going to shut down in terms of production. So the outage can come from generation or it can come from transmission. And if it comes from transmission, it simply means that the system has stopped working. It's an electrical system. One thing with electricity is that you cannot store it. So once you produce it, it has to be used. There is no system to store electricity. So that system of taking electricity from the point of generation to usage, you know, it's just like the switches we have in our homes, you know, you can have the switch go off and that means electricity is gone. So that is the kind of thing that could happen, you know, that the switches and the stations, the substations, they can just go off. And then that means electricity is gone. All right. So we know that stats say that from 2013 to the year 2020, that the government-run national grid has failed 84 times and partially collapsed 43 times. And what does this really see about Nigeria where, you know, when you compare to places like Ghana, it seems, you know, it's quite the opposite. So one of the advantages of a national grid is that electricity generated from all the power plants or majority of power plants in the country are put into the same system such that if a generating plant goes down, it does not mean electricity for the entire country has gone down because, you know, other stations will be injecting into the national grid. Now Nigeria's problem is that we are not even generating enough electricity. Let's understand the statistics clearly. I mean, it is stated that for every one million people, the level of electricity generation and distribution that we adequate is 1000 megawatts. So if Nigeria's population is 200 million people, they were expected to be generating 200,000 megawatts. Now look at what we are doing. We are doing 4000. So just look at the difference between 200 and 4. We need 200,000 megawatts and we are doing 4000 megawatts. This is totally insufficient electricity. It's not going to be possible that we are going to experience the kind of power supply we see in the likes of Ghana that you have mentioned or elsewhere because you simply cannot give what you don't have. But does this also mean that even as inadequate as our power generation is, we still don't even have the power infrastructure that can carry 5000 megawatts without collapsing every two months? It's another issue and that kind of compounds our problem. Because even now, as you speak, Nigeria's installed generation capacity is about 12,000 megawatts. But we have a transmission capacity that is about 7,000 megawatts. So that alone stands 5000 megawatts of whatever we generate. So that bottleneck of having a transmission capacity of 7,000 megawatts, at the end of the day, what actually lands with the distribution companies to go into our homes and our businesses and our offices is about 3,000 to 4,000 megawatts. So you could see that even with the little generation that we are doing, we are still not taking that power to where it is needed. And the reason why the system collapses are happening is simply because these systems have been built for a long, long time. And what they need is upgrade. They need expansion. We have not heard of any substantial upgrade on Nigeria's transmission grid for the many years in the past. So who's to blame for that? The fact that we don't have the adequate infrastructure for power generation and transmission. The person to take the blame is clearly the federal government of Nigeria. And how do I mean? There are a number of issues involved. The first issue is that anything that the government does doesn't go well. We have examples and the clearest example we can think about is telecommunications. I don't know if you were old enough but our viewers who were old enough, they will remember that when telecommunications was under the control of the government, before you will make a phone call, you go to the nighter office and you queue up at the nighter office trying to make a phone call. People used to go to nighter office in the AM so that they will be able to push a call through. The entire country had 400,000 telephone lines and these telephone lines were made up of fixed lines and what we used to call not nine not and this way what you will say were mobile phones. Now what happened? The government decided that they were going to push this power telecom sector into the private sector. In 2001, MTN came in. That same year we got what's later today coming and then two other companies came in, Globe and Nine Mobile as they are called today. What is the result? Nigeria's tele-density is now 200 million lines. We are talking about 400,000 that we had to 200 million. Why? Because the private sector brought in their money, they invested, they expanded capacity and they were able to deliver telephone that Nigeria didn't have to Nigerians and that is exactly what we need in the electricity sector as well. We just need governments to move away and hand over the sector as they did to the private sector. So the private sector whose business it is to generate, transmit and distribute electricity will come in and just do the same transformation that we had in the telecom sector. I believe there's been some investments in electricity in the last couple of years with this current administration. They've made mention of power plants that have been paid for, partnerships with Siemens I believe. I'm not sure how far that is gone with regards also developing our power sector. So don't you think that those are steps in the right direction? That's the wrong direction. And how do I mean? The agreement with Siemens which was signed, I mean, the German Chancellor Angela Merkel, she came to Abuja in 2018 to meet with the President, President Wary and they agreed this deal. 2019 they had the implementation agreement signed and then last year they actually signed the pre-engineering contract. We haven't heard what has happened in 2021. That agreement said by 2021 Siemens was going to increase output to 7000 megawatts. And today we're talking about a system converse. And what is the reason for this? The reason for this is that I will play electricity sector with the telecom sector because we have a very good example with the telecom sector. So all through this interview, I'm going to be benchmarking what is happening in electricity to the telecoms. And the idea is to let the government just do what they did in telecoms to the electricity sector. If we invited MTN and instead of letting MTN as a business to invest their money, provide telephones to Nigerians and begin to reap their investment. Instead, we said MTN com, you have to enter a partnership with the government and you know how government processes are. Are we going to be having 200 lines of telephone today? The answer is absolutely no because number one, the government does not have the money. If you look at the 2021 budget, the entire capital allocation to the minister of power is 200 billion. 200 billion Naira is $22 million. What would $22 million do? The likes of MTN are investing trillions every year, trillions into the telecom sector. So that agreement with SEMS is not the way to go. The way to go is government needs to get out of the way. If they were inviting SEMS, they would have invited SEMS and given SEMS a free hand to bring their money, bring their technology and expertise and invest in the Nigerian power sector. And the Nigerian government will only be responsible for regulation because for the telecoms, what the Nigerian government did was the Nigerian government set up the Nigerian Communications Commission as the regulator. And they allowed MTN, just imagine, if we save MTN and coach you coming, but they must use night care masks because night care is a Nigerian government-owned telecom company. And we insisted that MTN must use night care masks to provide telephones to Nigerians. Are we going to be having 200 million today? The answer is no because night care would have created a bottleneck. And that is exactly what is happening today. When the Nigerian government privatized the electricity sector in 2013, they privatized the generation and they privatized the distribution, but they are holding onto the transmission. Now, the GECOs, when they produce, they are not able to carry it through because transmission is a bottleneck. And the distribution companies can only distribute what they have got. So the Nigerian government needs to leave the sector entirely, just leave. Set up a regulator, let them regulate the market, but let the private sector be responsible for generation, transmission and distribution. In the United Kingdom where I'm sitting now, as I speak to you, there are four sectors, not just three. You have generation, you have distribution, you then have wholesale and then you have retail. What that means is that at the retail end, which is where the customers actually receive electricity, there is competition. So I can take my phone now and switch my electricity supplier. It's not like in Nigeria now where people in Lagos, they are either with Ikeja Power Company or the ones in Ireland. And if Ikeja doesn't supply your electricity or the staff treats you anyhow, you have no way of changing them. All right, Nika Gule, we have to wrap up here. Thank you very much. There's also conspiracy theorists who say that there's people intentionally sabotaging the electricity sector for reasons I don't know. But thanks anyway for joining us this morning. It was a very refreshing conversation. We look forward to speaking with you again. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. Good morning Nigerians. Power, I believe, was restored to certain parts of Lagos yesterday. I'm not sure if everyone has gotten power now. We got power around past 5am this morning. Oh, I had electricity from I'm not sure what time I was in that home actually. But when I got my own tentacle there was electricity and it lasted till this morning. Stay with us. Fela Anikulakwa Kuti. Did it make it into the rock and roll hall of fame in Noctis for 2021? Do we know why? How disappointing is it for Nigerians across the country? And of course for the Kuti family, if anything like that is in their mindset. We'll talk about that next. We have an intellectual property lawyer joining us to have this very interesting conversation and celebrate the Afrobeat legend this morning here on the breakfast. Stay with us.