National grid: Stop your pretence, Sowore knocks Atiku

The African Action Congress presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore, has knocked the Peoples Democratic Party presidential candidate, Atiku Abubakar, over what he described as his “pretense” over the national grid collapse.

The Nigeria’s power grid collapsed again on Wednesday, as it crashed from the 3,921.8 megawatts that was generated at 6am to as low as 50MW around 12.23pm, causing a widespread blackout across the country.

Industry figures obtained from the Federal Ministry of Power in Abuja showed that power generation on the grid had hit a peak of 4,091.6MW on Tuesday.

But this dropped to 3,921.8MW on Wednesday morning, before crashing to about 50MW, a development that led to the eventual collapse of the national electricity grid.

However, Atiku had while reacting to the news of the grid collapse, proposed what he described as “innovative financing” of infrastructure that would facilitate private sector investment in the power sector.

In a series of tweets on his Twitter handle on Wednesday, Atiku wrote, “I am reliably informed that there was a total National Grid Collapse at precisely 12:23pm today. This is one collapse too many. It is the 6th time this is happening this year alone.

“Due to the priority that I place on the power sector upon which the successes of other sectors are hinged, I am proposing innovative financing of infrastructure that will involve the facilitation of a review of the financial, legal, and regulatory environment to promote private investment in power, among other sectors.

“I’ll promote the incentivisation, with tax breaks, a consortium of private sector institutions to establish an Infrastructure Debt Fund (IDF) to primarily mobilise domestic and international private resources for the financing and delivery of large infrastructure projects across all the sectors of the economy. The IDF will have an initial investment capacity of approximately US$20 billion.

“In addition, I’ll cause the creation of an Infrastructure Development Credit Guarantee Agency to complement the operation of the IDF by de-risking investments in infrastructure to build investor confidence in taking risks and investing capital. -AA”

But reacting to Atiku’s intervention, Sowore alleged that the mismanagement of President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration under which Atiku served as Vice President was responsible for the recurrent grid collapse.

He wrote, “The National Electrical grid collapse started when you and Obasanjo invested $16 billion to procure darkness for Nigeria, the @MBuhari regime came to gazette grid collapse as a law. Alhaji @atiku, don’t pretend that you care about the National Grid! #WeCantContinueLikeThis”

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