FasholaFashola institutes monthly meeting with Discos, GencosIN a renewed effort aimed at resolving the gas to power constraints and other challenges plaguing the power sector, thePresidency has given its nod for relevant stakeholders to converge on a monthly basis to develop quick wins.Gas supply has remained Nigeria’s greatest challenge to electricity supply, with many of the nation’s generation capacities, especially the new plans underthe National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) idle because of poor gas supply.Yesterday, the Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Raji Fashola, his counterpartin the Petroleum Ministry, Dr.Ibe Kachikwu, distribution companies, generation companies, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and all the stakeholders in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI)converged on Abuja to review the sector, identify pressing challenges and find solutions to such problems.Speaking at the forum, Fashola assured the new year would be better for the industry, especially for consumers.He noted: “The idea behind this meeting is to listen to as many of the operators of the sector as possible to understand the unique and general problems they have and to develop solutions to align with the Ministry of Power, Works and Housing and with other agencies of government.We hope also that we will be able to host this meeting across the country, in the different distribution and generation companies. Our intention is to also do peer review and experience sharing for other Discos to see what other Discos aredoing, where they are doing well, and where they are not doing so well, and to learn from one another. We want to set agenda for future meetings.“We have decided that this meeting will happen every second Monday of the month. So, it is a fixed calendar, subject of course to any public holiday that falls on a Monday so that we can all plan our activities around it.”He went on: “By the time we finish each meeting, we should hopefully agree to thehosts of next ones. We are hoping that wewould have a reliable secretariat after each meeting to issue communiqué of all interested parties, so that this will become a one stop shop centre for all theinformation that is coming in and going out from all the power players.”Fashola said he had briefed the Presidentand the Vice President about the meeting and has their approval.“At the end of each meeting, we should be able to allocate tasks to differentstakeholders, based on what we discussed. We hope to be able to solve problems and we hope to also to be able to provide the platform that will be” he said.
