Vandalisation Won’t Improve Electricity – Fashola

The Minister of Power, works and housing, Babatunde Fashola, has said that when he promised to improve power generation in the country, he did not factor in vandalisation.

Fashola, who spoke in an interview with Channels television, said it is senseless for people to expect electricity generation to improve and still destroy the equipment that will produce electricity.

“Let us be careful when you claim that I made promises because I am ever so conscious of the things that I say and I believe that if I recollect correctly, it was when I was unveiling my ministries, probably sometime late December last year, and it is unlike me to make promises on things I don’t control,” he said.

“If you check the words I used, I shared with you our plans if it worked and where we will be. Those promises don’t factor in vandalisation. You know when they teach you how to generate power in school, they don’t teach you how to deal with vandalisation.

“When they teach you how to do banking, they don’t teach you about round-tripping so those are the assumptions that things would remain normal. There is no nation in the world that wants electricity that vandalizes the assets that produce electricity; it doesn’t make any sense.

“I can control what my team does, I can promise you what my team efforts will produce but I can’t control behaviour that is counterproductive. Those pipelines are national assets; they were built with our common wealth, the people whose territories it passes are custodians of it.

“Let us assume that the people who are also custodians of Jebba, Kainji and Shiroro dams go to break them down because they are angry, then who gets power?”

The Minister also said that his ministry’s short-term objective is to increase production to enable better power supply, adding that energy will be sourced from gas, solar, hydro from nuclear and biomass.