The report that the Nigerian Government and the French Development Agency, on Thursday, signed a grant agreement of €25m for the Northern Corridor Project, an electricity scheme jointly funded by the European Union, AFD and the Transmission Company of Nigeria is one of the trending stories in Nigerian newspapers on Thursday.
The Punch reports that the Federal Government and the French Development Agency, on Thursday, signed a grant agreement of €25m for the Northern Corridor Project, an electricity scheme jointly funded by the European Union, AFD and the Transmission Company of Nigeria.
It was gathered that the €25m grant agreement of Thursday was the contribution of the EU to the €238m (N103.76bn at the official exchange rate of N435.97/€) required for the project.
Speaking at the signing ceremony in Abuja, the Managing Director, TCN, Sule Abdulaziz, stated that the project was not just critical to the Northern corridor but would also improve the country’s power transmission in general.
“This will surely give a boost to power transmission in general because it is very critical to not just the Northern corridor but to the entire system,” he stated.
The Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Clem Agba, and the AFD Country Director in Nigeria, Xavier Muron, signed the agreement in the presence of the Ambassador of France to Nigeria, Emmanuelle Blatmann, and the Head of Cooperation at the European Union Delegation to Nigeria and ECOWAS, Ms. Cecile Tassin-Pelzer.
The Northern Corridor Project, being implemented by the Transmission Company of Nigeria, is meant to strengthen a low-carbon economic growth in West Africa by improving the quality of the electricity network in Nigeria and supporting the development of a regional electricity market under the West African Power Pool.
The grant agreement that was signed Thursday represented the EU’s contribution to the project as the AFD contribution of €202m had been signed in December 2020. The total cost of the project is around €238m, including €12m from TCN.
The newspaper says that Nigeria’s exports in the second quarter of 2022 were dominated by crude oil, accounting for 80 per cent of total export revenue despite the huge oil theft recorded in recent times.
Data sourced from the National Bureau of Statistics latest report on Merchandise Trade showed that crude oil exports valued at N5.9bn accounted for 80 per cent of total exports undertaken by Nigeria in the period under review.
The country had in recent times recorded an increase in the activities of pipeline vandals, resulting in a rise in crude oil theft, according to the Group Chief Executive Officer, Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, Mele Kyari.
Kyari had stated in an interview late last month, that the country’s low crude oil output was due to theft resulting from pipeline vandalism in the Niger Delta.
According to him, 295 illegal connections had been located around the pipelines, which led to the shutdown of production.
“When you say we are losing 700,000 barrels of crude oil per day, we mean it. There is no company that will produce and lose 80 per cent of its crude oil that will continue to produce.
“So we deliberately shut down the pipeline whenever we see these infractions getting to a limit we cannot control. That means as we speak today, we know that there are at least 700,000 lock-ins that we could have produced that we can’t do because we can’t guarantee the safety of the pipelines.
“While we agree that some of the oil losses are due to technical issues, a larger percentage of it is due to theft. It is impossible for any oil company to continue to operate in such an environment.
“None produces oil for the next person to continue to steal it. If you produce and someone continues to take it, the wise thing is for you to stop the production. This is why we can’t produce.”
The Guardian reports that with no end in sight to the lingering strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), seven months after, the fate of students seeking admission into the nation’s universities remains unknown as two new sets await the resumption of academic activities.
The first set of students, whose admission processes were concluded last year, are unable to resume, while another set of students sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) this year.
With the development, two sets of new students, 2021 and 2022 are waiting to resume.
A lecturer at the University of Lagos (UNILAG) who spoke with The Guardian said most universities have two sets of students ready to resume the academic session. Those admitted in 2021 were meant to resume after the second-semester examination early this year but were halted due to the strike. Now, another set of students sat for UTME this year, waiting for admission processes.
“You know universities have been trying hard to recover from the COVID-19 lockdown, during which schools were shut, and now we have this prolonged ASUU strike. I really don’t know how this would be handled,” the lecturer, who pleaded anonymity, said.
ASUU has been on strike since February 14, over the Federal Government’s inability to meet the 2009 agreement it reached with the union.
In the agreement, ASUU is asking for funds for revitalisation of public universities and payment of salary arrears.
Amid the breakdown in negotiation, the Federal Government invoked the no-work-no-pay rule against ASUU members and later dragged the university teachers to industrial court over their refusal to return to the classroom.
The newspaper says that pressures from the global energy crisis and compounding situation at home may be costing Nigeria’s 43 million households nothing less than N8.9 trillion yearly, The Guardian has gathered.
Apart from the over N6 trillion being spent by the Federal Government to subsidise Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), on average, households in Nigeria, faced with rising inflation and high cost of food items, are now spending about N4,000 weekly on electricity, Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) and petrol for power generating sets.
National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had pegged households in Nigeria at 43.0 million as of 2020 from 15.7 million in 1990. The average number per household was put at five. By implication, the 43 million households in the country would be spending N172 billion weekly and N8.9 trillion in the 52 weeks that make up the year.
Between August last year and last month, the cost of one kilogramme of LPG has gone up by over 100 per cent from N400 to about N900. The cost of electricity, with the implementation of the Service Based Tariff (SBT), has also doubled per kilowatt, as consumers are left with generating sets, which cost N185 per litre on the average, depending on the city of residence, as an alternative to the epileptic state of public power supply.
By implication, federal civil servants, who earn a minimum wage of N30,000, would have spent about 55 per cent of their salary, expending about N16,000 on household energy use alone.
Sadly, before the Russian-Ukrainian War, which started on February 24, 2022, Nigeria had been facing energy crisis despite being a leading producer of hydrocarbon deposits and production in Africa.
From poor storage facilities, inadequate seaports, dilapidated refineries, lack of reliable pipeline networks and bad road/rail networks, to subsidy challenges and pricing issues, the ongoing energy crisis, according to most stakeholders, may remain a serious concern in the backdrop of uncontrollable population explosion.
Although most stakeholders have insisted that households in Nigeria are paying for inefficiencies of the electricity sector as the state of power remains a mirage, President Muhammadu Buhari had, in September 2019, vigorously defended the hike in electricity tariff, tagged, Service Based Tariff (SBT), stressing that it was the only gateway to improving power supply to the masses.
Speaking at the First Year Ministerial Performance Review Retreat for Ministers, Permanent Secretary and top government functionaries at the State House Conference Centre in Aso Villa, President Buhari, represented by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, said: “The other painful adjustment we have had to make in recent days is a review of the electricity tariff regime.
GIK/APA