The Federal Ministry of Power is proposing to spend ₦8 billion to orientate Nigerians on prompt payment of electricity bills in 2025.
Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, who disclosed this on Monday, while defending the ministry’s budget before the National Assembly joint committee on power, said the advocacy would be done through social, digital and print mediums in order to reach all Nigerians.
According to him, “We are a people of over 200 million strength. So we need to go through all the loopholes, through social media, through digital media, through the print media, to actually orientate and do this advocacy. So, we have ₦8 billion”.
Adelabu explained that many Nigerians need orientation to realise that the power sector is a national asset that needs protection.
He also identified the need to avoid power theft as another reason for the advocacy. “In terms of advocacy, we believe that our people need to be re-educated. They need to be re-orientated to know that the power assets are national assets, and we should all jointly own it”, he stressed.
The Minister also stated that the Federal Government had not found the antidote to the frequent collapse of the National Grid, a development that shut down power supply to the whole country many times in 2024.
He told the senators that there was no guarantee yet that the system would not continue to crash in 2025, so long as insecurity, vandalism and poor infrastructure remained the major threats to the grid.
Adelabu also disputed the widely quoted figure that the country’s national grid collapsed 12 times in 2024, representing at least one collapse in each of the 12 months of the year.
Faulting the figure, the Minister said the grid collapsed “only eight times and not 12 as always reported”. “There is no guarantee that there will be no more grid collapse. What we can do is to make sure that it is minimal and that after a collapse, we rectify it as quickly as possible”, Adelabu stressed.
He told the committee that the ministry was working assiduously with security agencies to manage the situation and restore the system back to work as soon as another collapse occurred.
However, on power generation, he said from 4,100 megawatts in 2023, it increased to 5,528MWs in 2024, explaining that this came about by some improvement in infrastructure courtesy of the current administration.
As part of plans to tackle insecurity, Adelabu spoke of a proposal to provide solar lights and Closed-Circuit Television (CCTV) cameras on highways in the country to monitor the movements of vandals and other criminal elements, among other projects, with a sub-head of ₦200 billion in the Budget.
He said the power sector would need about ₦1.8 trillion in 2025 alone to fix projects, though he admitted before the committee that it would be a mirage to hope to get such an amount of money.
