The Chairman of Geregu Power Plc, Femi OtedolaHe has said that Nigeria’s perennial energy shortages are a product of previous governments’ lack of determination to prioritize and address energy challenges.
The businessman made this known while speaking at the closing event of the Nigerian Stock Exchange on Tuesday.
“Aliko (Dangote), an individual, has built 2,000 megawatts of power for his cement plant, his fertilizer plant, his refinery and a country, since I was born, only 5,000 megawatts,” Mr. Otedola said.
“So it is terrible, discouraging that all successive governments have failed in this regard. But I think we are now at a stage where the electricity sector will receive a lot of attention and priority.”
Mr. Otedola stated that the Nigerian government still has idle power plants that were built around ten years ago, noting that transmission is a major issue in the energy value chain. He added that any government seeking to transform the sector must take the transmission aspect of the value chain seriously.
This month, President Muhammadu Buhari approved a constitutional amendment bill allowing Nigeria’s 36 states to generate, transmit and distribute electricity in areas covered by the national grid.
Amperion, the power distribution subsidiary of Geregu Power, paid $132 million in 2013 to purchase from the Nigerian government the first of the company’s power plants acquired under the leadership of Mr. Otedola.
Geregu Power went public last October, trading 2.5 billion shares on the Nigerian Stock Exchange, 100 naira per unit, and is now trading at 323 naira per share.
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The firm proposed in February a dividend payout of N20 billion by 2022, which translates to N8 per share despite a drop of more than half in net profit.
That same month, the African Export Development Fund, a unit of Afreximbank, acquired a 5 per cent stake in the company equivalent to 125 million common shares. That makes it the second largest shareholder after Otedola.