By Ighomuaye Lucky. O
Chief Technical Adviser to Minister of Power, Adebayo Olowoniyi, said Nigerians would witness an improved electricity supply as maintenance work on a major gas pipeline has reached an advanced stage and is expected to be completed within 14 days.
Newstracktoday reports that in an appearance on Arise TV on Thursday, Olowoniyi also defended the Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu’s recent apology over epileptic power supply in the country.
On Tuesday, Adelabu tendered a public apology to Nigerians over the crippling and persistent outages witnessed in the last month.
Olowoniyi said the minister’s apology reflected strong leadership rather than an admission of personal culpability.
His words, “I think, first of all, I’d like to start with the apology from the Honourable Minister, which we believe is all about taking leadership in the sector.
“Not necessarily directly his fault for the challenges that we have, but as the Minister of Power, he just took—it was the right leadership step to say, okay, I take ownership of this issue, and I’m going to prefer a solution that would ensure power supply comes back in the shortest available time.”
He hinged the electricity supply crisis on disruptions to a key gas pipeline that supplies fuel to power plants, noting that about 75 per cent of Nigeria’s electricity generation is gas-dependent.
Olowoniyi said, “One of the major gas pipelines in Nigeria was undergoing maintenance, and gradually that process is being completed. We’re sure that within the next two weeks, full gas pressure will be back on the gas pipelines, and the power plants will be able to get enough gas at least to go back to their level of generation that they had in the last two to three months.”
He added, “I would already say that from yesterday, we would have gradually started to see some improvement as the pressure on the pipeline gradually starts to build up, and we will see continuous improvement over the next couple of weeks,”