Nigeria's Collapsed National Grid Restored — Power Minister

The Federal Government of Nigeria has announced that the collapsed national power grid has been restored.

Nigeria's Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu while addressing journalists on Wednesday at the State House in Abuja said the power grid is now back to normal.

The country has been thrown into a blackout in most states since last week, causing a drop in the water levels of dams, leading to water shortage in some parts.

The minister however said the collapse was caused by scheduled maintenance of facilities, vandalisation of pipelines, and issues regarding gas availability and contracts between gas companies and power generating companies amongst other reasons.

“The more reason we are facing the situation now is as a result of the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go to maintenance.

“It is scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalisation of pipelines, which the NNPC (Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation) has addressed as you can see everywhere, aviation fuel, and petrol in the filling stations.

"It is a combination of many factors that compounded the problem we are having on the grid.

“We have recovered the grid now. The grid is back and we are trying to get more megawatts to push on the grid.

"We have set up small committees all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid. The problem is around gas.

"You need to have a gas contract between generating companies and gas suppliers- some are form contracts, some are not.

"We are looking into this and have proffered some solutions in a few days to mature."

He noted that the grid has now been restored, adding that Federal Executive Council has also approved the provision of N5 billion to open up and expand Lagos/Ogun, to reinforce power supply to the region.