Buhari doesn’t need military approach to resolve N/Delta crises — Kemenanabo

Olice Kemenanabo is the special advser to Governor Henry Seriake Dickson on Energy. In this interview with JOY EMMANUEL, he speaks on fundamental issues surrounding the power sector both at the state and national levels.

Let’s talk about electricity particularly in Bayelsa State, you would have observed that there has not been regular power supply for long. How can you explain this?
Electricity generally has never been regular in the country so Bayelsa cannot be exceptional. Again, we have problem of not been able to meet our total bill invoices over a period.  As a matter of fact, our highest collection compared to total amount of bills is about 35% which is below the 40%NDR  of threshold even if there is a full power supply, we have to contend with how we’ll be able to account for the National grid and if we don’t account for it, the system operators have the right to disconnect it, and when we are ready to pay, payment will go with sanctions of interest and reconnection fee as well.

For Bayelsa state in particular, the reason why in most cases we have low amount of power coming in to the system is due to the general trouble in the generation and secondly we have only one transmission station, and we are not able to meet at least, 70%of the total bills in terms of collection, so there’s need to channel  electricity to where collection is heavy.
Why the difference in paying electricity bills, while some people are using prepaid, others are on postpaid and another people are on bulk billing, which is more appropriate, some people are feeling cheated.
Is both ways, sometimes either the operators feel cheated or the consumers feel cheated, but I can also tell you that we have experimented that people that are billed based on bulkbilling when meters are given to them they discovered they have been cheating the operators, so they went back to bulk billing.

Tell us about the gas turbine and why it is abandoned?
Yes, it has not been working for years now. It was not abandoned  we have what I refer to as technical issues that we need to contend with, that word abandoned is not the appropriate word, yes for awhile we have been out of service, in less than one week we will conmmence  our activities but that activities does not amount to generation, we have to clear all the technical issues because it is technical and economic driven and so if we have technical problems we need finances to solve it so the people, the stakeholders if they are not willing to accept electricity bill we go back to square one.

What is the stage of the National Integrated Power Plant in Bayelsa State
Well, I will be in Abuja soon to discuss with the Niger Delta Power Holding Company, the National Integrated Power Plant. NIPP at Gbarin they have started generating and recently they have done more than 120 hours and is very stable, unfortunately as a state we have only one transfusion station which has the capacity to will out only about 40 megabytes at peak load that transaction   so, we are constrain by that capacity.
Is the 40 megabytes only for Bayelsa state 40 megabytes can not be only within the state all the plants are integrated, that’s why they call them National Integrated Power Plant. Integrating into national grid.

What economic advantage will this plant bring to the state
It has, this one and the one in Omuku are  the two plants that can successfully run the 25 years life span that it has, in the sense that gas is run at the corridor of the plant, so this question of vandalism we don’t have gas supply is absolutely not there, and the site has the capacity to generate up to 1000 megabytes but right now we have 258 megabytes so the advantage is if we are able to grow that power station base on what we call low hanging fruits investment opportunities that will come out. It means that the plants will be able to generate, distribute and transmit into the system and then since we are the first port of call if we have transmission network we have reasonable flexibility in getting electricity.

With all these when will Nigerians expect regular power supply?
I think the Minister of Power Housing and Works should be able to answer that question, I will not be able to answer that question for the nation. .

Most communities in Bayelsa state are yet to be connected to electricity. What is wrong?
We have done all projects communities connecting one to another but if there’s no power available on the lines, the most significant thing is generating system which also needs the distributing system to survive. The system will collapse if there’s no mutual benefits between the distributing system and the generating system, enjoyment of electricity can only come when we begin to realize that is not a social activity that we use in campaigning. That is fundamental issue and of course I praise this current government in the sense that we have clearly stated that we never promised anybody free electricity.

The last time we were in a meeting with the governor he said he was going to use the government house as example by making sure they pay all their electricity bills and if they don’t pay they should disconnect them, because it is not a free commodity. Let me use the issue of fuel subsidy as an example, some of us felt that right from 2012 and even up till now it was completely nonsensical, but others felt that because we have our brother as the president it is a political tool against him, the same policies they said were wrong, they are operating now.
They told us that President Goodluck Jonathan administration was playing politics with the power sector and that any serious government should be able to fix the power sector in six months, one year after rather than fixing it they are destroying it, so therefore I don’t know where we start from, is only the Minister of Power, Housing and Works that will be able to tell us when he will be able to fix this power system. As far as I know the Jonathan administration we were having 5552.mega watt.

 Sir, a lot of ministries are running individual generating plants, in this secretariat, why is it so?
It would have been cheaper if all of us put resources together as staff working in this secretariat and pay our bills. Why most people don’t have electricity here is because they have been free electricity by the previous administration, when the state government was owning about N2 billion  electricity consumption, we have not been able to defray it and is pilling  on, everybody is still waiting for government to pay. But in my pay structure, the breakdown states utility cost and I was given overhead before even at that time we are not willing to spend our overhead for the running of our offices. The previous government tried to pay electricity bills after three months he couldn’t and it accumulated.

 Are the activities of the Niger Delta Avengers not affecting the power sector?
There was a time in this country when oil production went far lower from what we are having now, there was also a time in this country when somebody took the Bull by the horn by sending the folks of that communities to the creeks to negotiate with the militants on modalities on how to resolve these issues, so it is time for us to understand that leadership requires logic and not military approach.