Summary:
Full Report:
On Thursday, November 8, 2018, Lai Mohammed was featured on the network service of the Federal Radio Corporation of Nigeria during one of her early morning programmes.
As the norm goes with pubic service holders, the Minister of Information and Culture also emphasised the achievements of the Buhari Administration. He stated that electricity has significantly improved under this government.
In his words via the Twitter handle of the Federal Ministry of Information and Culture:
“When we came in 2015, only 4000MW was generated, today 7000MW is being generated”
Another tweet in the thread was: “From 5000Mwatts, the DISCOs and GENCOs now have a total capacity of 7125Mwatts via the Distribution Expansion Program put in place by this govt.”
“HMIC responding to a comment: Wht (what) we met was a generating capacity of 4000megawatts, whc (which) we hv (have) increased to 7000megawatts bcos (because) we put in place a N701billion Payment Assurance Guarantee to ensure gas suppliers & GENCOs produce,” the thread ends.
Lai Mohammed’s claim vs Official data
While awaiting the reply of the Minister of Information and Culture as well as the Agency on the source of this figures, we checked official documents.
According to the Nigeria Electricity System Operator (NESO), the power generated in Nigeria (different from generating capacity) has remained approximately 4,000 MW from 2015 to date, which is the time under review. In fact, on the day former President Goodluck Jonathan left office (May 29, 2015), the peak power generated was 3155MW and the lowest generated was 2741MW, while the peak power generated for that same year was 4517MW.
On the day Mr Mohammed made the statement (November 8), peak power generated was actually 4964.2MW and the lowest power generated was 3437.1MW as shown by the daily operational report of NESO.
Further, the average power generated for the year 2018 is 3,777MW and peak energy generated stood at 5162MW (January 1 – November 8, 2018). So that makes his claim FALSE; 7000MW is just not being generated by this administration, unfortunately!
Even if, perhaps, Mr Mohammed had claimed to use the figures for the previous day, he would still have been wrong as the peak power generated for November 7 was 4773.2MW.
(This report will be updated once Mr Mohammed can confirm where his statistics were obtained from.)
Source: Power Sector Daily Report V1.0
NBS Report
Data obtained from the official data agency of the nation, Nigeria Bureau of Statistics also proves that the power generated by this administration is not up to 7000MW as reported by Mr Mohammed.
Generating Capacity has remained at approximately 7000MW since 2015
Mr Lai Mohammed also stated that DISCOS and GENCOS now have a generating capacity of 7125MW, from the 2015 figure of 5000MW. Well, this turned out to be FALSE as well!
Documents show that generating capacity has been about 7000MW from 2015 to date. In 2015, generating capacity – which includes both installed and available capacity – was set at 11,165.40 MW and 7,139.60 MW respectively. For 2018, the installed capacity and available capacity remained the same as 2015! This draws to question whether the number of power projects going on across the country has yielded significant results.
Supply of gas has been a constraint to power generation
The daily briefing on Nigeria’s power sector maintained by the office of the Vice President shows that the major constraint to electricity generation has been the supply of gas to the generating plants, which to an extent explains the total blackout experienced on January 2 and June 16 of this year.
