04 August 2014, Ibadan – The Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company says at least 15 hours of electricity will soon be made available to its customers per day as it is currently intensifying efforts to achieve the target.
The Managing Director of the company, Mr. Fortunato Leynes, said this at a knowledge sharing event where a paper titled, ‘Strategic transformation imperatives: From public to private enterprise’, was delivered by the Executive Director of the Institute of Workforce Development, Tayo Aduloju.
According to Leynes, there is an urgent need to improve power generation capacity to 5,000 megawatts in order to provide stable electricity in Nigeria.
He stressed that efforts were being made to achieve the target.
He said, “One of the major challenges confronting the sector is the absence of enough power generating capacity to distribute to our customers. We cannot generate enough revenue if we cannot do this.
The other challenge is that we met dilapidated electrical facilities when we took over. A lot of money is required to reconstruct the electrical distribution network. If we do not generate enough revenue, then we cannot do that.”
Leynes also said, “The estimated generating capacity should be at the level of 5,000MW but what we have now is just around 4,000MW. Sometimes it went down to 3,000MW. Right now, what we have is around 3,600MW. The activities of vandals are another major hindrance to the improvement in power distribution.
“We are working hard to provide more that 15 hours of electricity per day to our customers once power generation improves. We have more that 1.1 million customers but there are many others who steal our product because they connected light illegally. We will make them legitimate customers soon.”
He added that the company had started buying distribution materials that would aid its work.
– The Punch