 You know, Mr. Peter will be in his thump around the country, speaks very often about how other countries dealt with the power challenge. Very often he refers to Vietnam, and please that I, myself, had the privilege of traveling around Vietnam and looking at how that happened for the country that was capped, bombed during the war, and was able to ratchet up power production, such that the famous Enron badges that cost candle in Lagos actually came here from Vietnam after they provided temporary power to Vietnam. And we know what is happening. We talk about going from consumption to production, and we know how we have been outpaced significantly by Vietnam in production. Fundamental reason is power. He also talks about Egypt and what happened in Egypt. Glad I was there in Egypt with him when he went to visit the power program development initiatives of Egypt. I had gone for the Africa Exim Bank and no general meeting about that same time, and we met in Cairo. One man who clearly, clearly has been on top of these general developments around power, he's a power entrepreneur himself, is Jérôme Mokolo. And so Jérôme will lead off, and some will join us from Abuja, Samamadi, who for many years was the, if you will, regulator from the neck end. And Jérôme here, who is the entrepreneur. Jérôme, let's begin with how we managed to fall so far behind. And I put this in context. I used to have a power conference annually at the Lagos Business School some 20 years or so ago. And I invited the two main people in power at the time to come and speak at this power conference. It was really Moké, who before he became governor was a power advisor, as it were. And they now lead Joe Makuju, who ran NEPA for a bit. And I recall their statement that if Nigeria were to get a capital South Africa level, Nigeria would need 88,000 megawatts, I still remember, but this was nearly 20 years ago. And we stand here, still talking about 5,000 megawatts, maybe a little more, maybe a distribution, maybe that. South Africa itself, as Peter B. often says, is declared a state of emergency in power. Putting a number of things out to help. And we are still so far behind, and we have not even thought of this as an emergency. He's talking about the state of war. How did we get where we are with power? And what are the things that are in the manifesto that can move us forward on this challenge of power? Thank you very much, Prof. I completely agree with your analysis that this is fundamental to Nigeria's economic prospects. I think as a country, we should be outraged about where we are with power. To put it in context, the average Nigerian has less than 250 kilowatts of power per day. That's the equivalent of lighting one and a half bulbs. You can't run a country like this. You cannot produce the wealth that will lift our people from the poverty that we're suffering from. But for us to put in context where we are and where we've come from, let me take you back to around when I was a young man. I grew up in Enugu. My grandfather was one of the founders of the Nigerian Council of Coal Miners. He used to be a worker at the coal mines. The coal mines in Enugu produced coal 24-7. That coal was transported by cable car to Ojiribah Power Station 36 miles away. Ojiribah Power Station was commissioned by the late Queen of England in the late 50s. In 1956? Yes, in 1956. And it worked 24-7. That power was also used for the Nigerian Railways. The Nigerian Railways transported coal to Kapanchan, to Kano, to Lagos via the Railways. And Nigerian Coal Corporation exported coal to Ghana. In 1974, the second open heart operation in the world happened in Enugu. And the hospital did not have any generators. If power had gone off during that operation, the patients would have died. But they had no need for a generator. Because in those days, power did not blink. When we say we have a power problem in Nigeria, there are essentially two aspects to the power problem. One is the people who have no power at all, mostly in the rural areas. Sometimes they have a wire coming through the village. Oftentimes, especially in the north, there is no wire at all. They have never seen or used electricity. Now, in 2023, we should be outraged that there are citizens of this country, one of the richest countries in the world, who have no access to modern life. Essentially, if you have no power, you cannot live like a modern human being. Then the other aspect of the lack of power is the ridiculousness of industries in places like Lagos, in places like Agbara, in places like Kaduna, in places like Kano, in places like Abuja in Port Hacot, who are reliant on monstrous, polluting diesel generators. We should be outraged that as a country, the presidency has generators. If we are expecting a foreign head of state to go and turn on the generator, that should not happen in 2023. To illustrate how bad this is, I'll take you to Ukraine. Ukraine has suffered 160 rocket attacks in the past three days. Yet, power in war-torn Ukraine is more stable than in Nigeria. It shows you that the management of the power sector in Nigeria is worse than ourselves, declaring war. Man-made disaster. Man-made disaster. It's like the people who have run this country have so disorganized the country that it is worse than a country that has been bombed on a daily basis. If you remember, after the 2014 crisis in Ukraine, Ukrainian patriots cut off the power supply to Crimea. Crimea had about 3,000 megawatts of power. That's roughly what Nigeria generates in a day. And Mr Putin asked his people to put power back into Crimea. It took them 10 days to restore 800 megawatts of power into Crimea. 10 days. And within about two months, they had full power in Crimea. I'm not supporting the annexation of Crimea. I'm just using that as an illustration that a place like Lagos should not tolerate power inadequacy for more than two months. And we've tolerated it now for close to 40 years. And so what does the manifesto say that I find attractive? And by the way, the power situation is beyond politics. So both politics. As a citizen, all of us should be interested in why things are the way they are. The idea that power comes on and goes off and comes back on with no warning is something that any citizen of Nigeria should be absolutely outraged about. And what I like about the manifesto is that the manifesto first of all breaks down the problem. The problem is that we do not have enough power. So there's power inadequacy. The problem is that we do not have reliable power. So it's epileptic power supplies that go off and on that's not reliable. And then the other one is that we have a sector that is impossible to invest in. And so if you don't get investment into the sector, you will carry on with what we have. Let me, let me, obviously we'll come back in this conversation. But Sam, the environment for investing in power. Sam, you managed the regulator NERC neck for several years. And I recall that at some point during your time there, I was working with a certain group of consultants and firms started by two Harvard professors. And we tried to engage you on how you could create a seamless environment that would therefore make it attractive for investors to want to come in. From your perspective, what has held investors back from this sector that obviously has plenty to offer anybody who would like to make an investment and get a decent return on his or her investment? Okay, thank you, brother. I think usually in terms of who you ask, if you ask the operators, they will likely say, howdy, howdy, howdy. The truth is that if I truth can, because we are very, very good, but by today they are significantly better comparable to some of our most African countries or requires in the top of their most African environment. So it's not just about Italian, which is important. But I think the most important thing is the risks in the system. The risks, for example, by the time we were baptized, we didn't have a good customer base for the discourse. It was rushed for justice and then the level were structuralists. So they don't have good data in terms of customers. Again, risk with connection. If you look at the revenue, if you look at the revenue we have, you see that the risks, if you look at revenue, you see that the risks are high in terms of revenue. The revenue losses, collection is almost, in many cases, 20%, 30%, 40%. So that shows that the losses and level of connection is very high, which results from not paying bills. At the time, the federal power sector was always so much, and we had to force the government to issue the directives that they should take their budgetary and pay. So if you have a system where you sell power and in terms of recovering the money, it's very low, arising from inefficiencies in the network, arising from deliberate failure to pay by security and paracetam, then it tells you a story of even though, you know, potentially the demand supply gap means there's a market. But in reality, the inefficiencies mean that many things have to align before you can cash out on that profitability. Now, look at issue around network constructs. Today, we have an average of 2,000 megawatt that probably we can send to the grid because of transmission failures or gas supply. Now, what's the problem with gas supply? When we started, we had to pay of 213 billion of legacy debts we have paid off as a way of stimulating gas supply because gas supplies were moving towards more of the industry's power because power had, first, a bad gas price and gas transport. Secondly, very low precarity awareness. The debt codes were not paying because the debt codes were not paying them and that continued. We had to improve the gas price to a much more competitive level, improve gas transport costs. But today, that's caused us to mount. So gas supplies don't want to send gas to generators but they're not paying them because they're not receiving receivables alone from the discourse from customer end. So you hear about, oh, we don't have full capacity in generation because we don't have gas to fire the power plants. So in Russia, the system needed consistent leadership to keep on removing those risks, improving the environment of doing business and should the policy continue to last 20 years. Let me take a passage of that point. Sam, to ask you a question, and you are in a position to offer some counsel given the role you play. You know, oftentimes, I push the point that one of the biggest risks of doing business in Nigeria is not market risk, it's regulatory risk. How regulators behave. And I take this gas example so that you can give counsel on how we could perhaps manage things differently. Nearly 30 years ago, Noura Imam, a friend of mine who was an Air Force general, was minister responsible for mines against power that included the NEPA I was reporting to and all of that. Shell had a proposal that went through the Federal Executive Council in which private capital would pipe gas into a major industrial centers in Kano, Abuja, Lagos, all of this. All private sector, gas and how it's collected, everything was worked into this market. A friend of mine, Charles O'Sezwa, was actually advising on this project from the government end at the time, and Federal Executive Council passed it. Two or three meetings later, Noura Imam comes back to counsel and says, the people in NEPA are not happy with this thing. Boom! Nigeria has lost billions since then because of this one error of judgment of the Federal Executive Council. How are we going to prevent things like this from happening going forward? Very good point. Now, look at two things. First is misalignment. In the UK, you have the object which is office of gas in this market. So the regulator of the state regulates gas, which means the gas pipeline which makes it because most of the gas it leads to energy. In the US, this has to affect the gas transmission as well as the system transmission. So there is a handshake. They make the gas regulation in line with market conditions in the electricity. In Nigeria, because of the obvious role of NNPC as a cash cow, NNPC manages the gas. These are two institutions that are misaligned. Only about 90,000 are there for to align them through regular meetings. So what we see is the incentive for gas people does not align with the city for power people. So we try to close that by first liberalizing the gas pricing. So whatever they give us will become takers. Whatever the gas people give us as price, as cost, we factor it so that it pass through costs. So electricity did not have complete overpricing. But what has happened is, if you don't have a market oriented process where generators and gas people will buy a willing seller, and that price goes down through the value chain, which means at every time the gas supply doesn't care about power users and they cares that you pay, take a pay, you pay him, I have a long term agreement, I sense gas and there's no constraint. But if you ask him, please don't send me today, or please because there's a tension of failure, don't send gas. He feels more comfortable sending to those who do plastics, fertilizer plants that are giving him very reliable, long term contracts and with regular payments. So I agree with you about regulatory risk. But in this case, maybe even no regulation because effective regulation would mean that the power regulator ensures that money flows back to the power regulator and straight to the gas supplier. So misalignment is one aspect of it. The second aspect is that, look, the reason why we have problem with electricity is that unlike telecom, which is plug and play, electricity has so many values, value chains, and each of these value chain must operate at a certain level of efficiency. So if, for example, the discourse we have to today are very difficult to implement change management and therefore maybe meet their customers, recover all the revenue, you're going to see a short form of that money flow back to the operator and back to the gas supplier. So if the operator cannot pay and now says, you know, 300 MBTU, give me 200. Then he signals to the gas operator that this is not a reliable market for me to sell my product and the shift. So I think that the regulatory risk here is a failure of the regulator himself to create certainty, which is what the domestic supplier obligation tried to do, to assure gas producers that this is the price, regular price improvement so that they too will commit to regular supply increase at the point where we now have willing buy, willing sell, adequate supply, adequate pricing for everybody. Secondly, it's opposed to show regulatory certainty in insurance payments flow back. I think the real crisis with the gas sector is that the industry sector is not strongly being regulated to ensure that everybody meets a minimum of the payment. When we're there, we had a certain minimum of payment. All discourse must meet that minimum of payment. And then we have marked for the gas supplier, prioritize the gas supplier. So if there's a shortfall of revenue because of losses, then the gas sector receives full payment because it's a sector that is not part of the power sector and therefore has less incentive to get a haircut. They just want that payment. So I agree that we need to look at the regulatory process but at the same time, we need to make the electricity market real solvent if there's no cash flow. If there are no good payments for the supply because of weak distribution collection or if money is not where you use and you don't prioritize payment to gas suppliers and other service providers, then you are going to have less incentive for both investment in expanding supply, the molecules, the transport facility and also selling to power when they can sell it to overseas market or even sell it to competitive non-power industries like fertilizer plants and mignon, the Davgottes and other big commercial consumers who need regular supply of gas. So that's really the problem. Regulatory certainty, good commerciality and strong leadership in ensuring that all the value chains align and operate at a high level of efficiency. Thank you very much, Dr. Amadi. I think you will be very happy to hear that from my reading of the manifesto the Obidati manifesto actually exactly answers your prayers. So on the two points, the proposal from the manifesto is to consolidate the regulation of joules of the unit of energy within NERC. So NERC will also manage the gas code. That's what the manifesto clearly says. And therefore they disjoint between the production and sale of gas and then the production and sale of electricity will disappear because the regulator will, as you rightly said, in the UK where you have off-gen which manages both the gas contracts and the electricity contracts under the same table and is able to make sure that there are no obvious disconnect between the two sources of generation of power will be resolved. And that is one of those kind of innovative ideas that I see in the manifesto. And then the second part which is actually a master stroke is the key point why there's no investment. The return flow of cash through the system. So electricity flows in one direction to the customer and the cash doesn't flow back upstream to all the people who participated in creating the electricity. And again the manifesto is offering to redesign embed to be the efficient electricity market that takes charge of all the funds coming in and then therefore the distribution of money within the Nigeria electricity system will then be on a non-recost basis. It will not be dependent on the discourse sending money upstream to other participants but the money will come into a pool and based on the contracts that have already been signed by NERC. The money will go to the discourse for their work, the transmission company for sending the electricity around the country and then to the generators and then to the suppliers of feedstock like gas and then it also will be able to cope with the new generation coming in from the renewables. The solar power, the wind power, the wave power. When you have a system that ensures that once you put power into the system you will get money back without having to go to anybody's office, without having to go to anybody and without having to go to meetings. That is one of the fundamentals in regards to making sure that the investment comes into the system. Investors are very, very, very simple people. They ask very simple questions. They ask you, who owns this project? Who has developed this project? Who is providing equity? Equity means who is providing the first money that goes in and the first money that will be lost if this is a crazy idea. And so investors never give money to governments in governments, nobody owns the project. And the idea with the other manifestos when you see the idea, you know, they will say, okay, we'll add some more billions of Naira to the budget. Those things will keep us exactly where we've been. We will not make that leap forward into the new economy that we offer. A couple things to you, Jerome, in this regard. One, the idea that I talked about earlier when I was, you know, asking Sam's question on idiom that I was collaborating with back those years had tried to put together a seamless way of interfacing all the players in the system. And part of the reason was to protect the loans that Central Bank was giving to the systems that they had not lost. Central Bank loved the idea, but somehow one of those things we never got that in place. How besides these suggestions being made, can we ensure that all the actors can interface in a way that sees themselves as cooperating even if in cases they may be competing and therefore do not work at cross purposes? What happens currently is that there's a lot working at cross purposes that's preventing the system from being able to deliver power cheaply to the people and profitably to the investors. So if you deal with that on the one hand, the second question is just two comparative analysis of Nigeria, Egypt, engaging Siemens and why the outcomes seem so different. Thank you very much, Prof. The answer to the first question, in answer to the first question, is to describe what we have, which is not working, and what we should have, which is what will work. If you remember the book Anna Karenina, the first sentence says that all happy families are alike, they look alike, and all unhappy families are different in their own unhappiness. Nigeria, we're always getting trouble when we want to create something super specific, something that allows for people to play the system and has all the loopholes that allows people to essentially steal money. If we do what other countries do, then you make money by creating something and by working hard. And if you have no place around the table, you will not be called around the table. The problem we have in Nigeria is that people who have absolutely no business in power are called to sit around the table to talk about power. So let me explain the actors that we have in the room. Today we have TCN. TCN for all intents and purposes is NEPA. TCN is unreformed. It's not changed. It sits in the same building with the Ministry of Power. The same people who were there before were there during NEPA and they are still there today. They wait for the budget and their job is to essentially spend the money in the budget until the next budget. They have no consequences if the grid works well or no penalties if the grid doesn't work well. So that clearly is a zombie institution. That institution needs to be helped. There are some smart engineers there. Somebody needs to come there and create a condition where the smart guys work and people who have no use in the institution can ship out. Then the other part of this whole system are the gencos. The gencos are a very interesting lot. We go from a company like Azura, to a world-class engineering result. It's a Siemens factory that works like Clockwork. It generates power reliably. It can give you uninterrupted power if you want to take it. Then you have some companies like part of the Niger Data Power Holding Company, 11 generating companies. Some of them have no gas supplies. Some of them have no power evacuation. Some of them have their turbines already condemned. That's again another zombie sector that needs to be cleaned up. Then you have the distribution companies. Distribution companies come in different shapes and sizes, but ultimately they do not have today an incentive to give you uninterrupted power. So they give you power some of the time. They send you bills that sometimes have no connection to whether or not you receive power. They know they will always get money. They get some money from you as a consumer. Then they go to Abuja and get even more money. So that is what we have today. It's a whole network of people with different interests, different objectives that are not aligned to supplying power reliably, cheaply, and accessibly to the Nigerian populace. What we should have is we should have a system where if you want to play in this market as a power generator, like in the UK, you'll sign a contract. You have to deliver power at a certain time of a certain quality, of a certain quantity. If you do, you get paid. If you don't, you pay fines, big fines. So you set up a bank guarantee to the system that I would deliver 100 megawatts of power 24-7 every day of 2023. And any day you don't deliver power, you get fined. And any day that you deliver power, you are 100% sure you will be paid. Then on the other side, we need a transmission system where the operators of this system are incentivized to continue to improve on it. If you look at pictures of China, how the American, UK, and Germany, all the developed countries, you see men hanging off high-tension, thousands of volt wires working on live wires to make sure that that system works all the time. You go to places like Russia where you go from minus 50 to plus 50, they still make sure that the system works. You go to Canada, they have some weird weather events, and they still make sure that that system continues to work. So you need an operator of the transmission system who is paid to make sure that this system is up and running nearly 100% of the time, so 99.99% of the time. That is their only function, to make sure that the electrons can flow through the system in a way that they do not make the news. So no news, you get paid. If there's news, you lose a lot of money. So you need somebody who can give, again, another financial guarantee to the system and say, I will make sure the power flows through the system. And then you get paid for that. And so that is the kind of new economy which some people are not interested in. And I hear people say that P2OV is too transparent for Nigeria. But unfortunately, being transparent is what delivers this type of lifestyle. You know, on the first study found we had an American, an investor in the public sector speak to this manifesto and what they find attractive about it. And clearly one of the most important things in getting things done is sunlight. So transparency. We have an elite that has lived of, right, in Nigeria. Many policies fail in Nigeria because powerful Nigerians don't want Nigeria to work because their so-called money is from Nigeria not working. But interested parties all over the world do things that eventually lead to boundaries that prevent these kinds of things from happening. That's what institution building is about. What is it that has, and Sam and probably like for you to start out on this, what is it about the Nigerian experience that has been very disruptive of institution building, where we can have boundaries to conduct that ultimately we can say that there are certain settled habits of the community which is that this is reward for your work and this is behavior that you get heavily sanctioned for and so on and so forth, weak institutions. You have been in that power sector. What makes for these weak institutional arrangements in the power sector? Okay, very important question. Lately I've been reading on the failure of the Nigerian project. In fact, the last is like a diabolical book on class, ethnicity and so on and so forth. The private sector advocates forget that markets is embedded. You know, we used to have a tune in particular economy, you know very well called embedded markets. So markets are embedded in social relations and social conventions of a people. The power sector, when I came in, I observed that the power sector was unbalanced in the power sector plan. So much was focused on privatizing without thinking about reforming. So in a little piece I wrote as a privatizing without reforming. You talk about, sorry, there only talked about TCN for example. Like look at the part roadmap, look at the EPSR out and look at the NEP. There are stages first on bundle, second you corporate times, which means all these entities, GCN, Abuja did this school, they all have their own separate corporate management, board and management teams, set up differently. Then they were bred by corporate rules, code of conduct, run like companies. Then the next stage you commercialize, you commercialize. That means they're going to run as basically enterprises that the profitable, least cost, amount of service. But until we sold those assets, they were not able to fully corporatize them. TCN didn't have a board up to today. The disclos, even though they had been corporatized, they were still being run as part of the power. I recall several issues with the minister and up to the present. This is a regulated entity. The essence of regulation is that every cost must be regulatory oversight for students and for relevance. I remember one in the way the minister says, let's put, we need to put 5 billion on our farm. I said, Mr. President, there is no reports. There is no cost-benefit analysis. There is no cost, not all the things what this 5 billion is going to do and what value, because all costs in the power sector has to be recovered to the consumer. So you won't show it is relevant. You won't show it is prudently acquired. I had issues with NNPC. So what am I getting to, sir? Even though we say we are privatizing, even though we say we are going to do private sector electricity market, we are still running the underlying norms and values of those operations and not the market values of market transparency, of clarity, of regulation, which means you pass all the costs to regulator. Those who check, confirms that those are relevant and then approves the reverse. So these are some of the challenges we have. Okay, I was going to say something. Sorry, let me conclude. Okay. You are right, sir. The values, the norms and the regulatory framework we run and also the policy, the notion that this is a market, we are going to run by rules. I recall, for example, when you are supposed to have independent directors in each of those entities and then there are point persons who are part of the consulting as independent directors. You compromise on that oversight. The final example, we were supposed to hand over to these entities to the owners. I was in the advance process, I said, sir, they have not met up the requirement of the rules for handing over the certificate. Let's give them, they'll come back to you. So I think the lesson is, with a government like B2B, somebody who will first have lack of commitment, who is not particularly connected to transactions. If you are in government and you are part of those who are buying assets, then you already compromise. The level of policy neutrality will go through objectivity and strength. You need to drive the sector. It's compromise. Again, we claim to be running market-based operations. But essentially, we are basically running state capitalism, which is the element. The government is a true process to get involved in these operations and therefore compromise their capacity for fair objective on market enhancing regulation. So I think really that there is a cultural and value problem that is also making our transition to markets not efficient, and even sometimes worse than efficient public ownership. The facts you can have of state capture. I mean, you can see it play through in the power sector. The whole privatization process was perceived as an opportunity for friends to get something that would make them easy money. They saw how people who went into telecoms made so much money. So they took the same mindset, oh well, our friends can make so much money in the power sector. Forgetting that competence and capacity to actually build that sector were critical factors. And everybody is talking about the country suffering more. But okay consumes plenty of power. I don't know how much it is. I want to come in as the common man because I've been listening attentively and I put myself in the mode of the average power consumer who does not understand all this grammar. Like Peter B said in one of the sound bites that is only in Nigeria that people are forced to know Jynco, Disco and all manner of jagons that they are not supposed to know. What you want is turn on the switch to see power. All these jagons that we are saddled with as consumers, we don't want to know all this. We want a society where things are functioning. But having listened to all this what I take away from it is that the reason nothing is working the way I break it down in my head one is regulatory inefficiency inconsistency of policies with a bearing in fact of elite rent seekers who just or what we call cabal who just want to make sure that nothing works. Now in all this power play of the high and mighty is there anything in the whole power policy or power equation that empowers the people because what we say power belongs to the people. Power belongs to the people. Is there anything that the consumers can do on their own part to hold people accountable to make sure that if I have this meter and these people are going to be collecting bill there's also something that I can do if I don't get the services that I'm paying for. Absolutely. In a place like New York till today ConEd has to run public rates hearings where interested members of the public will come and ConEd will present its issues and propose rates and people say no we should not be able to interrogate and challenge the people to hold because in many ways power is a monopoly of sorts you know the competitiveness that you have in selling Homo is not there with power it's got to be some kind of you know a monopoly of sorts that plays in that sector because of it there is a necessary reason for the people to listen to you and question your rates at this excuse me just to join to answer the question about what the people have to what the people can do and how they get power into their hands in order to change things for the better I think it's important to actually point out that the powers that be the cabal as ok put it the people who own the country as well as other people put it they are being a little short-sighted and so I have good news for them the ideas contained in the Obidachi manifesto are actually ideas that will create bigger opportunities for people who already have the means but they have to do the right thing so I'll give you an example for example if you look at Brazil for example Brazil Electric has a market cap of 87 billion dollars now there is none of these companies in Nigeria that has a market cap of anything that's significant they are all in the tens of millions of dollars, nothing significant because of the system we've built I even have bad news for the owners of Nigeria the bad news is the way you have built Nigeria with money you are going to fail in the one fundamental thing which anybody who is successful wants to do you cannot pass this money to your children because the money is not standing on solid foundation the money has not been made in a way that you can transfer it to the next generation and therefore the vision that the Obidachi manifesto presents is a way where we start to do things and we start to build things in ways that can be transferred and we start to build things that are bigger and that makes sense for everybody and finally with regards to the common man the common man has an advantage I'll just say something which is solar power has fallen in price by 90% in 10 years in another 5 years nobody in nothing Nigeria will be forced to buy power from somebody who is not supplying power on a reliable basis and therefore this is a time for us to build a system that can continue to add good services to those common people to make them to want to sign on to power from big companies otherwise they will need you to return to a question that I raised just to get Nigerians to understand how differently our leaders think from leaders of other countries and why we are behind which is different let's compare Nigeria and Egypt and their agreement with one company called Siemens so the agreement with Siemens the way the Egyptians went about it and the way the Nigerian government went about it shows us two different ways of doing things in Egypt the government knew that the government is not a power company they can't design manage and run things like this so they invited companies in Egypt and said to them we want to strengthen the transmission system we want to build new generation and when all this are working together we want to build a high speed electrified railway system to connect all the Egyptian cities three things they wanted to do they had clear objectives and they made sure that the country understood these objectives they were not going to change and so two companies stepped forward elsewhere the electric companies provided the initial equity I think about 400 million dollars and then the Egyptian government then worked with Siemens to raise all the debt about 8 billion dollars from about 30 banks to finance the project so you had an owner who understood electricity who had tens of thousands of workers who had know-how who had engineers who knew what they were doing who had project management staff they were not going to change they were not here today and gone to moral people so in 27 months built brand new capacity of 12 gigawatts of electricity and now they finished the generation stage of the project they've done the strengthening of the transmission and right now they are building the high speed electricity network come to Nigeria we did it in our own way so we set up a government commission and then the chief of staff to the president traveled and signed some contracts and then we set up a government company and then we signed a contract with Siemens and then the Siemens project in Nigeria is being paid from the budget so the federal executive council will meet in January decide to issue money to Siemens the minister of finance will go looking for the money the money may or may not turn up after 3 or 4 months and when the money turns up Siemens starts working when the money runs out they stop working and so a case of two countries in Egypt done and dusted in Nigeria is waiting for the next federal executive council meeting I mean it is so painful for me I've been traveling to Egypt since 1986 very frequently and just seeing what has happened in a short period under LCC and what we are doing says what the meaning of our sense of leadership is we are talking about this power thing in Egypt a group of us just standing outside during the last Afriak Zimbabwe meeting it was the president of the AFC from Nigeria here who was in our group on work and then he said look just give you an example of what we are talking about they co-financed the project because time matters the Egypt one is all dusted 27 months when I made a statement on this matter some months ago federal government had to quickly begin to say the transmission they are going to start shipping from Italy because at that time I knew I heard that Siemens may be going to a kind of first measure because of the equipment from Nigeria which came from our budget which was now being and all of that but Egypt's own 27 months the power was in place our own first of all we took several months to work it through our executive council the minister of finance had to be gathering the money then we paid then they started building it in Ukraine they said the one from Italy will be shipped soon I have not seen them yet unless you have seen the equipment but they are still besides the fact that we lose so much time in all this pussy-footing, finagling that we are doing and that is cost time is money we are losing that advantage there is the fact that by the time we get this in place we lose our opportunity we will have gone past us and many times we don't get as... I gave the example of Noura Imam 30 years ago if we are going to catch up with that error take us under 20-something years maybe and somehow the Nigerian people need to understand these things because our people are not educated on policy and don't pay attention governments are killing the Nigerian people every day with wrong choices and this is what this program is about is what the elections process is about is what political parties are supposed to be about to articulate these things look, in South Africa ANC policy issues are at world level all the way back up and affect government policy we only discuss world when elections are coming we want to give people money to get we need to reinvent Nigeria because if we are not going to do that we are going to be fluffing and fluffing in the bush for a very long time I think that you know power is of such fundamental importance if we say going from consumption to production how can we produce when there is no power the average organizer has to find a better past my neighbor to do... do you know that world power is just generally available this economy the GDP ramp up from no you don't do anything else just that your power is available will be in multipliers and here we are talking about things that small countries have solved and I finish this with a it's not a joke but it sounds like a joke a friend of mine who was a minister in Nigeria in finance was on a flight but he was minister from somewhere west Africa into Lagos and the person said to the minister not knowing he was a minister this problem with power is it that you don't know where they sell these generators if you don't I can introduce you to them because Houston is a very simple matter life problem was solved a hundred years ago when the minister landed he thought the only thing that made sense was for him to call me well return to the morning first of all let me say thank you very much thank you very much to Mr. Jeum and Sam Amadi thank you very much what I might take away from all this is as complicated as this whole thing for you the lay person who was listening because we know that there are lots of young people who are tuned in who want to understand because this power thing affects them the most for all of you you have seen all the big players and the power equation all the big big grammar all the big policies which is why I ask that question where does the power masses come into the equation and I take away is your PVC last last because it's for you to elect people who have clear cut policy on how you are going to transform this whole thing and once you miss it at that point whatever you get you take it like that