Nigeria is better off without NITEL, Nigerian Airways –Waziri

What are the issues that were brought to your committee about the economy and how did you tackle them?Ab initio, we believe that the economy at the end of the day is what will drive the polity, what will sustain the welfare of Nigerians. So, we tried to look at the fundamentals of the economy. […]

What are the issues that were brought to your committee about the economy and how did you tackle them?
Ab initio, we believe that the economy at the end of the day is what will drive the polity, what will sustain the welfare of Nigerians. So, we tried to look at the fundamentals of the economy. How can we improve the economy, what will be the guiding philosophy of the economy?  We have been trying several things for decades and probably we are not where we wish to be, there must be some other things we need to look at, so we examined critically the role of government in the economy, the role of the private sector in the economy, how to empower Nigerians and generally making the citizens the focal point of our economy. Every policy that we have should revolve around how to make us better off than where we are economically.
If we happen to build a robust, strong and liberalized economy that is able to take care of everybody including also putting safe guards for those who may fall on the way or sidelines we believe we will have a stable polity. That has been our focus and that has been our recommendations generally.
What exactly is the problem with the economy? It seems the problem with economy is not policy but the inability of the leadership to implement those policies for the betterment of the country and now you have made a recommendation which is still paper work. What about the implementation aspect?
Exactly it is not policy. If you are driving a rickety vehicle regardless of who the driver is, it is the same problem we have been witnessing leadership after leadership, government after government. What we have been trying to do all these years is fixing a broken system, the system simply doesn’t work. We have been talking about corruption, yes corruption is an issue but you have to look at the underlying issue which makes our system prone to corruption.
The whole thing is to reexamine the role of government to empower individuals, to empower the private sector. Look at the privatization for example you tried for so many years to make your aviation work it didn’t work. Yes there is still a long way to go but certainly we have moved a long way from when one company was the industry, Nigerian Airways used to be everything. This is exactly the direction of our committee to look at fundamental building blocks of our economy and by and large we have settled on a liberalized private sector driven economy where the role of government will shrink and shrink basically to make sure the weak within the society are looked after. Overall government’s role in the economy has to be examined.
The resource at the disposal of leaders and those in government has to be redirected towards productive sectors.
Our industries have collapsed because of power. You are the chairman of TCN, what is exactly happening in the power sector?
The power sector in a nutshell has suffered from significant underinvestment over the years. It came to a point where the generated power for a population of over 170 million was in the region of less than 2000MW per day. So, this has been an issue but small by small we have been investing in this and it takes time. I believe our leaders are not attuned to the fact that these things take time.
However, having joined the power sector myself I was at a loss but when I joined I discovered the terms of investment on ground, how much attention is devoted to the sector from policy direction, from investment, from physical infrastructure, things are happening it just takes time.
There are so many organs both in government and outside government including our development partners who are focusing on the power sector. For me, with the information at my disposal, things will definitely go up definitely.
Billions of dollars have been spent since 1999 till date on power without commiserate improvement in power generation. Just recently stakeholders said despite the privatization, both the generation and distribution owners are broke; they don’t even have the money to take up the ownership. As the chairman of TCN how do you see that?
I think objectively speaking there has been improvement in power generation.  The improvement is gradually coming but this takes time.
At TCN, what I know for sure, even the tariff that you are supposed to get and run the system because of poor collections from consumers, we are not getting it. We barely get over 45 percent of tariff that is due to us and that is not good enough to run the system.
You and I have to pay higher. We tried to put the issue of tariff review on the card but certainly the government conscious of the general populace feeling and in terms of capacity we rather first let’s see these improvements and they have been funding these from multilateral loans, budget allocations but certainly there are many issues.
The important thing is that certainly progress is being made. We are generating more; we are distributing more than we have been doing. The Discos have to repay for some of their loans, remember they are financed by banks and outsiders but you and I have to pay our bills. There is a lot of loss of energy in terms of unmetered collections.
So, they are yet to put their feet on the ground in terms of collecting revenue. The collection is very poor but certainly I have no doubt that this situation is going to go up.
One area that affects power generation is that Nigeria is solely on gas based generation system.  We have abandoned the Mambila Hydro which is one of the biggest.
We don’t have the Mambila yet, these are potentials. Certainly yes when we have hydro it is good. Remember we also have coal. Coal is fairly distributed around the country. You can generate using coal.
Lest even talk about the fundamental technology that we are using, the gas itself our installed capacity we are not getting sufficient gas to run it. Recently federal government allocated special allocation for gas