Vandalisation Of Pipelines As Made Nigeria Lose 3000mw Of Electricity - Fashola

The Minister of Power, Works and Housing, Babatunde Raji Fashola, has attributed a colossal loss of 3000 megawatts in the last six months (between April and September) to consistent vandalisation and sabotage of the country’s pipelines and assets.

Fashola who gave this disclosure at the Wilson Centre, Washington DC, USA on the sidelines of the just concluded United Nation’s meeting, said, “over 3000 megawatt of power had been lost over the last six months due to consistent vandalism and sabotage of oil and gas pipelines and assets.”

He added that “the generating cap acity of the hydro plants was enhanced as their turbines, abandoned and not maintained for over three decades, received due attention pointing out that the increase in rainfall would not have meant much if the turbines were not repaired.”

According to him, “In the last one year, we have done a lot of repairs and maintenance work so that every year, of course, there is increased circle of rainfall and water levels, but if you have three turbines and only one is working, you can only depend on one. So where we had one working, we now have two, where we had two, we now have three.

”The hydros are giving us almost 400MW of power and that is a lot of power given our situation. And we have added about 1MW of Solar and there is more on the way.”