Power
SAM Amadi, former Executive Chairman of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) has called for strong regulations to drive the power sector for effective service delivery.
Amadi spoke on Wednesday in Abuja at the 3rd quarter Participants and Stakeholders Interactive forum for 2019.
The forum has as its theme “Rules Compliance for Nigerian Electricity Market (NEM) Development and Sustainability”.¹
`We need to strengthen the regulations in the sector, government is trying with some policies intervention but policies cannot drive a regulated market. It is policy plus regulation.
“What TCN is doing by focusing on smart rules that can force these entities to perform is in the right direction.
“We should not think that the investors are coming to do the people well but they are coming to exploit the market.
“Our focus should be to create regulations that can put incentive and reassess capacity of the investors by setting a bench mark,” he said.
Amadi said that the critical issue in the market was funding, adding that market participant know what to do to improve the sector
According to him, the assumption is that it will be easy for private investors to raise capital to finance short term recovery of capacity and long time improvement of that.
“The wrong assumption was that tariff will provide the finance but its not possible even if you increase tariff by 1000 per-cent.
“The people cannot pay enough and the DisCos do not have good revenue management procedure to recover their money
“Primarily, we need to have a sector that can finance in the long term and recover the long term.
“We need to go back to reassess the capacity of the investors, if they cannot do the job, you find a way to divide their franchise in a way that it does not amount to risk. (NAN)
– Aug. 22, 2019 @ 9:19 GMT |
Tags: Former NERC boss wants strong regulations to boost power sector
