Nigeria: Fashola Answers Question About His Achievements Since He Became Power Minister

Nigeria's Minister for Work, Power and Housing, Babatunde Fashola, in an interview published by Vanguard was quizzed about how many achievements he's achieved since he assumed office as Power Minister. 



Here's his reply: 

"For me it is premature to talk about achievements; this is a journey that hopefully will take us to 2019 when the government’s scorecard will be assessed. So, I don’t think perhaps it is the best time to measure events. Rather we should measure trends. One of the trends is increased power production and that is important. But there is still a problem as I have said. I don’t want to talk about energy in terms of megawatts but in terms of access; how many more people have access to more reliable electricity? That is what is important to me. The amount of electricity produced is meaningless if people can’t tell me that they are getting it. 

"But there are problems along the line. One of the things we have succeeded in doing is building the team to begin to interrelate, that’s why we hold those monthly meetings now because as a ministry we can’t deliver power on our own. 

"We can regulate the GenCos, DisCos and the transmission company (TCN) however we don’t have power over the gas companies as they are regulated by another ministry, the Ministry of Petroleum Resources as well as NNPC. So we need to work with them. So these are the partnerships that we have forged together. At those monthly meetings now there are very senior representatives of those gas companies sitting down with us and taking instrucjtions.