By Austin Tam-George, Ph.D.

According to a new power distribution plan approved by the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), certain segments of the Nigerian population will henceforth have regular electricity and pay more, while the rest of society will see far less electricity supply and pay a lower tariff.

If this Orwellian electricity plan is followed through, the Nigerian middle class as well as urban and rural poor, who constitute the majority of the country, will most likely retreat into medieval darkness.

From a policy standpoint, below are 3 downsides to the new electricity plan:

1. IT PROMOTES SOCIAL INEQUITY:

Electricity is much more than cables, light bulbs, and switches. In developmental terms, electricity is a crucial thermometer by which we measure the quality of modern life. In fact, no definition of modernity can be complete without a people’s access to electricity.

This is why governments all over the world see the provision of electricity to their citizens as an important responsibility.

Therefore, any policy that segregates access to such a basic and essential service strictly on the basis of economic and social stratification of citizens is a short-sighted
policy and needs to be reviewed.

The new electricity supply regime will deepen social inequity in the country and reduce the quality of life of the majority of Nigerians who are set to see far less access to electricity simply because of where they live.

This is social apartheid à la carte.

Rather than reduce supply to most citizens, the government and its private sector partners should increase, prioritize, and guarantee regular electricity supply to all citizens.

When Brazil faced an unprecedented economic and social regression in the late 1990s, the government of President Lula Da Silva (2003-2011) rolled out the most audacious and inclusive economic recovery plan that pulled millions of people out of poverty. The resulting economic recovery propelled Brazil ahead of Britain as the fifth largest economy in the world for the first time.

Nigeria needs an inclusive and robust economic and job creation plan that can increase people’s capacity to pay for social services and live a meaningful life.

2. NEW TARIFF REGIME WILL DEEPEN ECONOMIC WOES.

All over the world, reliable and uninterrupted electricity supply is seen as the ultimate tonic that spurs economic growth.

Nigeria has the largest informal sector in Africa, with micro, small, and medium-sized businesses accounting for over 40% of the country’s GDP and 70% of employment. These businesses range from subsistent fish farms in rural communities to vibrant, youth-led innovation hubs in informal urban settlements across the country.

A segregationist electricity supply policy that excludes this productive swathe of Nigeria’s population will spell disaster for an already beleaguered Nigerian economy.

In an age when Finland has made Internet access a constitutional right with a stipulated bandwidth guaranteed to every citizen, Nigeria can not afford to pursue an energy policy that is guaranteed to sentence majority of its citizens to live in darkness.

3. WHERE ARE THE METERS?

Nigeria generates an average of 5000 megawatts of electricity for a population of over 200 million people. This is grossly inadequate when compared to South Africa, which generates over 50,000 megawatts for its 60 million citizens.

Yet, Nigeria has perhaps the most unpredictable energy consumption audit systems in the world.

According to a recent report by NERC, only 44% of electricity consumers in Nigeria have metered connections. This means that 56% – a vast majority of energy consumers, are subjected to an opaque and extortionate “estimated billing” system that leaves consumers feeling duped.

The new electricity tariff regime does not address the important problem of inadequate metering and the systemic corruption that it breeds.

To address the crisis, the government and its private sector partners should keep the focus on generating sufficient and uninterrupted power supply to all citizens.

This can be done through a power consumption audit system that is universally metered, fair, accountable, and transparent.

• Dr Austin Tam-George is a former Senior Executive Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

By Tony Eluemunor

It happened exactly 24 years ago. On 31 March 2000, the then Delta state Governor, His Excellency Chief James Onanefe Ibori, unfurled his true colours. The Fourth Republic was all of 10 months old and here
and there, its main actors were still settling down, learning the ropes. But Ibori was of a different sort; he had convened a summit of South-South Governors, Legislators and leaders, with the challenging theme; “We Must Not Fail Our People.”

Ibori, Delta state Governor, 1997-2007, had had enough of the duplicitousness of the PDP Federal Government led by President Olusegun Obasanjo, a party Governor Ibori also belonged, but which
refused to activate the minimum 13 percent derivation principle enshrined in the Constitution. Instead the Federal Government was paying the one percent bequeathed to it by the outgone Military Administration. Also the onshore and offshore dichotomy of natural gas and oil production was still being debated and the South-South was being denied its divine right.

So, Ibori argued in his welcome address: “Section 162(2) then enacts the principles of allocation which include population density, equality of states, internal revenue generation, land mass and terrain, subject to an overriding proviso which states in part: ‘Provided that the principle of derivation shall be constantly reflected in any approved formula as being not less 13 percent of the revenue accruing to the Federation account directly from any natural resource. It is unfortunate that this well-intended provision has been subjected to all manner of interpretations and administrative manipulations and needless politicization to unjustly deny the States of the South-South zone their respective constitutional dues from the federation revenue”.

He continued: “Your Excellencies and Distinguished Legislators, the people and government of Delta State are unequivocally unable to accept the view that the implementation of Section 162 (2) of the
Constitution is a condition precedent to giving effect to the payment of the minimum 13 percent principle of derivation in the interim system of revenue allocation enshrined in section 313 of the
Constitution for the allocation Federation Account until an Act of the National Assembly is passed. The section states that as from the commencement of the Constitution on the 26th of May, 1999, the system
of revenue allocation in existence for the financial year, beginning from 1st January, 1998 and ending 31st December, 1998, shall be the approved revenue allocation formula subject to the provisions of this
Constitution. This percentage is not Subject to any administrative or legislative change, except upward review of the percentage or through a Constitutional amendment.

Our call is justified even by the history of the principle of derivation, which is not a new factor in our fiscal federalism. In the 60s and early 70s the principle was fully recognized and in use. During the period the percentage weight of the principle was as high as 60 percent. Our nation was not less federal or poorer for it”.

Ibori then attacked the onshore/offshore dichotomy of oil and gas production: “The time has come for us, of the South-South zone, to have a dream. A dream to translate our patriotism, energy, talents,
democratic wits and indeed all that is in us to free our people from every legislative shackle which is not in the socio-economic interest and aspirations of our people. We must speak and must act. The dichotomy between onshore and offshore oil and gas deposits is artificial and not in the best interest of our people. It is artificial because it is unnatural and not unconnected with the expropriation intention behind the Exclusive Economic Zone Act, as we all may recall, the Act was passed in 1978, delimiting the Exclusive Economic zone of our country and extended it up to 200 nautical miles
seawards from the coasts”.

Dear reader, Ibori enlisted in that battle on behalf of the Niger Delta when he summoned that summit. It is a question for debate if he knew, by then, the extent of the backlash. What is not debatable is the danger, the strings and arrows, the lies and innuendos, media attacks, international conspiracies and the persecutions painted as legal prosecutions that were heaped against him. He was even accused of coup-plotting and a Nigerian President declared him wanted – “dead or alive”; a death sentence.

Many people today, including even the leaders and intellectuals of the Niger Delta do not remember that summit. Nigeria has forgotten how Niger Delta won the 13 percent derivation principle war and banished the Onshore and Offshore dichotomy, whereby oil revenue from the seas was said to belong entirely to Nigeria and with nothing going to the given littoral states. Forgotten, too, is that Ibori started the fight for the gains, and remained in it till victory was achieved.

Yet, present commentators who wax magisterial in condemning the Governors of the Niger Delta state for not turning each of their states into an Eldorado, has not asked why Nigeria remains a veritable
backwater despite all she has earned from crude oil sales. Worse still, the commentators usually tell one lie; that the 13 percent derivative principle kicked in from May 1999. They never mention that the 13 percent derivation principle was not paid by the Obasanjo administration until it had spent about a year in office. They also forget that someone fought for that payment to be made and that all sorts of persecutions were visited on that person; James Onanefe Ibori.

Perhaps, enough noticed was served that that the summit of 31 March 2000 which took place in Asaba was not only viewed as brazen, impudent and impertinent by those in authority and who had power over life and death (let alone the law courts), when Ibori organized the second of such summits in the first week of March, four years later (in 2004) very many Governors and legislators of the Niger Delta states were commanded to stay away from Ibori and his summit.

One of such men so commanded was the then National Vice President (South-South) of the PDP, the late Chief A. K. Dikibo. That no nonsense man who could never have been accused of having the soul of a slave, told any and everyone who raised the matter with him that he would attend the Asaba summit that Ibori was organizing because it would benefit the Niger Delta.

Attempting to attend that summit was Dikibo’s second “grave sin”. The first one was that Dikibo had already set in motion his campaign to become the PDP National Chairman come 2007. The meaning was clear to the top members of the Obasanjo administration; by that time those at the commanding heights of both the PDP and the administration knew that a tenure elongation bid was on – to change the Constitution to give Obasanjo a third shot at the presidency instead of just two terms. But if Dikibo was already preparing for his campaign to be PDP national Chairman, it means he did not support the third term bid.

Why? Oh, the answer is simply this; Nigeria’s political balancing act requires that both the National Chairman of the PDP and the presidential candidate will not come from the same geographical half
of the country. One will be from either the South or the North. So, if Dikibo, from the South South geopolitical zone had his sights on the PDP chairmanship, it became obvious that he was not among the third term tenure elongation supporters.

And he was a Niger Delta rights adherent to boot; just like Ibori. On the 4th of March 2004, the day for the kick off of that second summit, Dikibo had just flown into Port Harcourt, and entered into a motor
vehicle to get to Asaba by road. Calls were flowing into his phone, attempting to stop him from attending that summit. When verbal reasoning couldn’t stop him, adequate force was applied. Someone came to him as he was sitting on the right hand side middle seat of the Toyota Land Cruiser. That devil’s agent placed a gun under Dikibo’s right side jaw, and squeezed the trigger. Both the bullet and the
Dikibo’s brain matter hit the roof of the SUV. It was murder most foul and murder most effective.

It was a bold statement sent to convince any doubting Thomas that a killer cell existed somewhere near the sit of power. So, when later the attempt to impeach and remove the then Anambra state Governor, Dr. Chris Ngige from office became protracted, the then PDP chairman, Audu Ogbeh wrote Obasanjo and open letter that a killer nest existed and that it should not be allowed to kill Ngige.

And when later Ogbeh himself was forced to relinquish the PDP Chairman’s office, he explained why he disregarded his teeming supporters who wanted him to disdain Obasanjo’s efforts to make him
resign as they fully supported him. His explanation of why he resigned: “If A.K. Dikibo had a choice to be killed or to resign, he would have resigned”.

Unfortunately, it just didn’t end there for Ibori. First, there was a concerted effort to stop him from being reelected as Governor of Delta state in 2003. Then the same case to get his 2003 election victory over-turned went to the Supreme Court two or three times. When he won them, his traducers didn’t take a break until he was rail-roaded into jail.

Unfortunately, when Nigerians discuss the Ibori affair, they do not remember that it all started from Ibori’s fight on behalf of the Niger Delta. A simple love affair is all his woe; the love of his very own
Niger Delta geopolitical region. Conversely, the President Obasanjo who headed the PDP Administration which willfully refused to pay the 13 percent derivation principle of mineral revenue to the deserving
Niger Delta states for about a year, remains a hero. And when he agreed to pay the 13 percent derivative, his administration introduced another bottle neck; the onshore/offshore dichotomy. Still, this man, who couldn’t hold on to the Nigeria he received on May 29, 1999 but lost a large chunk of the country, the Bakassi Peninsula, is still a hero.

In 1999 the political party that the late Dr. Alex Ekwueme and the 49 wise men founded to save Nigeria from the ravages of tribalism by founding a non-ethnic political party, made Obasanjo Nigeria’s President. Then the man destroyed the PDP. He took full control of the party, his Man Friday, Col Ahmadu Ali (retired), became the garrison commander and the party began to weed out members. Many Nigerians may not remember that Obasanjo once said that he did not know who would succeed him, but he knew those who would not succeed him. Well, he succeeded so well in that assignment that since 2015, he has spent the whole time since 2015 plotting to build up a coalition; and that is a big joke – only politicians build political parties. Obasanjo could not even make himself president; Generals Ibrahim Babangida, T. Y. Danjuma, Aliyu Gusua and Abdulsalami Abubakar made him President.

Ah, poor Nigeria!

Well, Ibori should take solace in the fact that he is still alive – after President Jonathan declared him “wanted; dead or alive”. That he is still alive is a miracle.

By Moses Okezie-Okafor

Re: Betty Akeredolu’s ‘Remarriage’: Such traditional practices are fuelers of GBV –Priscilla Usiobaifo, Braveheart Initiative

I may be wrong, but I searched carefully and I did not see one instance throughout Mrs. Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu’s highly publicized travails before, during and after the death of her husband when learned counsel or her Braveheart Initiative came to her defense against what must be the most extreme case of bullying of a woman based on her marital and domestic circumstances that Nigeria has seen in recent times.

She was publicly pilloried and grievously excoriated with nothing left sacred – from her looks, to her marriage to her children to her place of origin. She trended on X and other social media platforms as all sorts of characters, including popular influencers with massive reach joined in lynching her, tearing the dress from her body and then the flesh from her bones and left her, for a while, the most hated woman in Nigeria.

Her right to marry her husband and the validity of her marriage to him (never mind the decades that have passed under the bridge of the union), the true ethnicity of her children, even their paternity in some quarters, her alleged oppression of her in-laws and their alleged hatred of her, her so-called ‘power-hungriness’ in wanting to take over in Ondo from her dead husband (how that was expected to work out under our laws beats me hollow till this day) etc, nothing was off-limits.

She was thus well and thoroughly inducted by horrific ordeals into the exclusive club of Tura’i Yar’Adua and Hauwa Danbaba Suntai – women whose sin, it would appear, was being First Ladies whose husbands died in Office and left them defenceless before the wolves.

I did not hear Learned Counsel who authored this current denunciation, or her organization, come to Betty’s aid. Yet, hardly has she, supported whole-heartedly by the same in-laws who reportedly hate her, and with her eldest son by her side in solidarity, made a move to take back her personhood than I am reading, in print and in public, from a learned person no less, how she is the problem women face and an enabler of Gender Based Violence.

Is there to be no end to these weals, pray?

Yet, there was no traditional marriage, no payment of dowry, not even a demand to marry (or is it, remarry) Betty by the younger husband of her deceased husband, Prof. Wole Akeredolu. All there was, was just a formal notification to her people that our brother you entrusted her to is dead, but she still pleases us and we are here to tell you we still want, nay, need, her in our family and she will always be safe with us – and she becomes the subject of another round of denunciations?

There is a need to mull on who is really enabling GBV right now.

Whether you agree with me or not, I say, let Betty be. Don’t make her into a cause célèbre for VAW and subject her to another round of torture.

Let Betty mourn Aketi in peace.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

In January 2014, a coalition of advocates, including Femi Falana, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN); Jiti Ogunye and Tokunbo Mumuni, both senior lawyers; and I wrote to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), inviting it to “to investigate the allegations of fraud detailed by the two committees set up by President Goodluck Jonathan in the wake of the 2012 fuel subsidy crisis.” It failed to do so. 10 years later, the EFCC is now preoccupied with chasing after cross-dressers. How it got so derailed bears attention.

At the beginning of this past week, Nigerians woke up to the story that a demographic of energy users, described in the language of the industry as “Band A” and constituting roughly about 15% of the approximately 12 million official subscribers to electricity in the country, will have their energy tariffs raised by 230.8%. They claim the four other bands will be unaffected. That’s false.

Tariff regulation in the energy sector in Nigeria is the primary responsibility of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), a body created originally under the Electricity Power Sector Reform Act in 2005 which was repealed and replaced in 2023 by the Electricity Act.

For some time prior to last week, various news media had sought unsuccessfully to confirm from the NERC the veracity of information suggesting that it had reached a decision to upwardly review the electricity tariff or that it had plans to do so. When it broke the story on 2 April, Bloomberg, a private and foreign news agency, credited “people in the presidency with knowledge of the matter”, suggesting not only a decision with a long gestation period but also one that had the active authorization of the presidency. The implication is that when it initially denied to Nigerian news sources that it had such plans, the NERC had dissembled.

The day after the Bloomberg Story, on 3 April, NERC confirmed the accuracy of the report. On the same day, it released the text of the applicable statutory instrument, dated 28 March, which designated the commencement date as 3 April.

The energy minister, Adebayo Adelabu, chimed in, explaining that the decision was because Nigerians keep their deep freezers plugged even when absent from home. This energy minister is so out of touch, he doesn’t know that deep freezers need constant electricity. But how could he when all he does is prance about in private jets.

For context, the Energy Progress Report issued jointly by the International Energy Agency, the United Nations, the World Bank and the World Health Organization, among others, in 2022, conservatively assessed over 92 million Nigerians as without access to electricity. This is at the very bottom of the global energy league. The NERC claims that one of its reasons for the secret energy tax is to “attract more investment into Nigeria’s power sector.” This is what one of my old teachers called “future speculative tense.”

For starters, the new tariffs fosters undue discrimination contrary to Section 116(2)(e) of the Electricity Act of 2023 in setting tariffs to “avoid undue discrimination between consumers and consumer categories.”

The principal crisis with energy consumption currently is not generation but transmission. The country is unable to evacuate anything close to what it generates. To achieve an increase in energy supplied to or enjoyed by any band, therefore, the Transmission Company will have to create energy hunger in a band somewhere in the consumption ecosystem.

So, to increase the quantity of energy supply that it guarantees to the Band A customers, NERC has to ensure reduction in what is transmitted to those at the bottom end of the bands. In other words, the increase of transmission to Band A customers is achieved by eviscerating supply to the roadside vulcanizer, the neighbourhood Mama-Put restauranter, the welder, all of whom will suffer denial of energy.

This pricing strategy is also poorly reasoned. The Band A users whom it supposedly favours are mostly in a position to transfer the burdens of the higher tariffs to consumers, most of whom are in the lower bands. This hits lower band consumers with a double whammy. By imposing energy hunger on them, it threatens the livelihoods of  micro, mini and informal entrepreneurs and will put many of them out of business. At the same time, it will increase their costs of consumption. Unable to pay the new prices of goods and services, they will vote with their feet, which will hit revenues, profitability and viability of industry, leading to loss of jobs, loss of tax take and ultimately burdensome social costs.

What emerges is that the new tariffs are effectively a regressive energy tax on the poor. In a country already afflicted with prohibitive insecurity, even further rise in insecurity is foreseeable.

It became clear also during the week that NERC chose to adopt this most consequential of decisions for citizens, employers and consumers in utmost secrecy. To preclude predictable public furore about it, the NERC also garlanded the decision making with a bodyguard of lies. Not satisfied with this, the release of the statutory instrument coincided with a pattern of coordinated online behaviour which clearly suggested that the Commission had actively recruited a gang of digital influencers and bloggers in order to create maximum distraction from the measure.

One source of such distraction was the EFCC. As the NERC rolled out this prohibitive energy tax on 3 April, the EFCC procured the high profile arrest of Idris Okuneye, a transactional transvestite better known as Bobrisky, on impressive charges of “abuse of the Naira” and alleged money laundering. With unremitting alacrity, the Commission first paraded Bobrisky, a practice that has repeatedly been declared unlawful by courts in Nigeria. Thereafter, they arraigned him before the Federal High Court in Lagos.

The law that establishes the EFCC defines “economic and financial crimes” to mean “non-violent criminal and illicit activity committed with the objectives of earning wealth illegally either individually or in a group or organized manner thereby violating existing legislation governing the economic activities of government and its administration.” At the court, the EFCC dropped the two counts relating to money laundering, ultimately charging Bobrisky only with crimes connected with so-called “abuse of the Naira.”  

Having dropped the only charges that could remotely fall within the purview of economic or financial crime, the EFCC forfeited any claim to acting within law or in the public interest because abuse of the Naira, whatever that means, is outside the statutory scope of crimes that it can prosecute. Yet, in a mere 48 hours, the EFCC processed Bobrisky through the entire gamut of criminal justice from arrest to conviction, setting a Nigerian record in prosecutorial diligence.

It becomes evident, therefore, that the charges against Bobrisky were an artifice for persecuting a person whose life choices are a tad unusual. The EFCC lent itself to this despite the fact that Lagos, where Bobrisky lives, decriminalized the Victorian crimes of “unnatural offences” long ago in 2011. Nor does the leadership of the EFCC remember that over half a century ago, Uzoma Odimara freely promenaded as a cross-dresser and entertainer around the country under the name “Area Scatter”.

In the week in which the EFCC bungled and threw the biggest corruption case in the country in a quarter of a century, it takes unique institutional commitment to frippery to reduce its core business to chasing cross-dressers. In targeting Bobrisky as it has, the EFCC arguably sought to achieve the twin objectives of distracting Nigerians from the NERC’s steep and unlawful energy tax while at the same time pressing home a blinkered wedge advocacy.

In so doing, the leadership of the Commission clearly abused the sacred instrument of prosecutorial prerogative and showed itself as either idle or misguided, if not both. When this was brough to their attention, they descended into threats, bluster and cringe-worthy trade in mangled adjectives. One concerned citizen responded that “EFCC has gone rogue.” 10 years ago, citizens looked to them as part of the solution. Today the EFCC has become part of the problem.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]