Although it is very difficult to define corruption, some attempts have been
made at some descriptions, which would communicate the meaning of the
concept. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) defined corruption as “
abuse of authority or trust for private benefit: and is a temptation indulged
in not only by public officials but also by those in positions of trust or
authority in private enterprises or non-profit organizations” (IMF, 2000).
To the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC), however,
in 2002, the only option open in attempting to define corruption was to
mention specific acts of corruption. This is the approach adopted in the
ICPC Act where it merely states that “Corruption includes bribery, fraud
and other related offences”. According to Justice Emmanuel Olayinka
Ayoola, Chairman ICPC, “the commonest form of corruption in Nigeria
used to be bribery but in recent years this has been overtaken in level of
prevalence by embezzlement and theft from public funds, extortion, abuse
of discretion, abuse of public power for private gain, favouritism and
nepotism, conflict of interest, extortion and illegal political party financing”.
Virtually every sector of the economy is corrupt,one of the most corrupt sector in Nigeria is Power. Given the false starts and failed
promises and the dashed hopes that have routinely characterised
programmes of the power sector in Nigeria, it is debatable whether the
federal government indeed has a consistent policy on it. While this
probably may be the case, the cost to the country in terms of resources
and social deprivations is not in doubt.
The financial burden of this sad state of affairs was brought home to
Nigerians in a vivid account presented recently by the former chairman
of the Revenue Mobilisation, Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC),
Malam Hamman Tukur.
The numbers are dizzying. For Nigerians
desensitized to shocking revelations about government expenditure
purportedly in their name and on their behalf, Tukur’s observations
should prod some questions to be asked of their leaders.
According to Tukur, the federal
government alone has spent over two trillion naira since 2000 in the
nation’s power sector. The Olusegun Obasanjo administration alone spent
1.5 trillion naira of that amount in the eight years it held office,
between 1999 and 2007.
Speaking at the 6th Engineer Urwatu
Mahmud Armiya’u Foundation annual lecture and presentation of awards
ceremony organised by the Kaduna chapter of the Nigeria Society of
Engineers (NSE), Tukur identified ‘unnecessary political interference’
in policymaking as one of the factors that have bedevilled the power
sector, hindering the realising of its huge potentials. Another factor,
he said, was the ‘corrupt tendencies’ of Nigeria’s leaders. If anything,
Engineer Tukur has understated the problems that have bedevilled the
power sector in Nigeria. Compared with its developing peers like South
Africa and Brazil, Nigeria is light years behind in harnessing its vast
resources and building infrastructure upon which it can make realistic
projections for the future.
In 2009, South Africa’s principal power
supplier Eskom was generating 40,500 megawatts of electricity, supplying
the country’s 95 percent of demand. At about the same time, top
officials of the Nigerian government were mouthing some incoherent
‘apology’ to citizens for an unfulfilled pledge to generate 6,000
megawatts for the entire country of over 140 million people.
Eskom plans to spend some 130 billion
dollars to double its generating capacity by 2025to 80,000 megawatts to
supply the South African population of just below 50 million people. At
current levels, Eskom’s power generation is about 40 percent of the
entire generating capacity of the continent. Nigeria spent just about
that amount in eleven years and has not added more than a thousand
megawatts from the baseline supply potential of the public utility,
Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).
Like Nigeria, Brazil’s power supply is
chiefly from hydro sources, one of which produces a massive 14 Gigawatts
, meeting about 25 percent demand of the country’s population of about
191 million people. But Brazil has also diversified its energy sources,
spending huge sums of money in alternatives energy like ethanol and
invested heavily in nuclear plants. Although it is wildly susceptible to
power cuts due to natural conditions like mudslides and others, the
country is self-sufficient in electricity generation and has achieved
total-coverage distribution, including in difficult terrains as in the
Amazon. Clearly, the Nigerian situation is as a result of the failure of
leadership and corruption. In the twilight of the administration in
2007, former President Olusegun Obasanjo was questioned over the
government’s huge expenditure and the little results from it. His
response was that the turbines that the government placed orders for had
not been fabricated from abroad. ‘You don’t order a turbine off the
shelf’, he famously said.
It is four years since those remarks,
and the last time any word was said about electricity generation was
that it had fallen to below 4,000 megawatts. The new excuse is that the
newly built power plants have no gas to power them as either the wrong
pipe gauge was laid to link them to gas sources or in some cases no such
pipelines exist. In the last dispensation, the House of Representatives
got considerable applause when it appointed a committee to probe
expenditures in the power sector. That applause turned to public odium
when committee members, including its chairman, Ndudi Elumelu, were
themselves caught in the vortex of corruption that kept the country down
for this long. The committee’s report is yet to see the light of day.
There is therefore something seriously
amiss in the management of the power sector that the new Minister of
Power must deal with. Part of that is the need to explain to the nation
why so much money spent in the power sector since 1999 has produced so
little electricity.
few days ago President announced the hike in electricity tariff COME JUNE 01.the questions that most Nigerian readily asks is why PAY MORE WHEN THE POWER SUPPLY IS STILL EPILEPTIC?
WHATS YOUR VIEW ON THE NEW TARIFF PLANS?
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