Just before the delegates to the National Conference, convened by President Goodluck Jonathan, had time to settle down to work, a discordant tune on the oneness of this House, Nigeria, is already stiltly being brought into the front burner of the discourse.
The threat at the Wednesday’s sitting of the Conference, by a highly respected traditional ruler from the North Eastern part of the country, the
Lamido of Adamawa, Dr. Muhammed Barkindo Mustapha, to pull Adamawa from Nigeria, as in secession, might appear like a royal joke, but make no mistake about it, it may be signaling the beginning of a different and dangerous tune being set, on what actually the country is heading to.
As a matter of fact, I have heard people said shortly before the inauguration of the conference that there was an agenda that was carefully hidden in the setting up of the National Conference which, with time, would unfold.
In deed, many people had before the Conference began in Abuja, made it public that the purpose of the Conference is to divide Nigeria. But, it appears too early in the day for Nigerians to begin to be seeing the handwriting on the wall, as represented by Lamido’s hasty move.
Of course, when inaugurating the conference on Monday 17 March, 2014, President Goodluck Jonathan was unambiguous in his inauguration speech that the issue of unity, indivisibility and oneness of the country is un-negotiable, even as he admitted that some delegates had come to the Conference with preconceived idea of dividing the country.
The President expressed his worry to hear people say that some delegates to National Conference have come to defend and promote ethnic or clannish agenda, adding that it is very regrettable that there are persons who believe that we cannot undertake any collective task in our country without the hindrance of ethnic rivalry even after 100 years of nationhood.
“This conference gives us an opportunity to prove such persons wrong and I believe it will… There should be no room for divisive cleavages and ethnic jingoism. There should be no room for selfish considerations that defeat the purpose of national progress. There should be room only for the national interest.”
The President’s speech remains one of the best since he became President; it is laden with both warnings and pleadings, but short of provision to halt people whose ambition is to divide the country, especially those who have championed Sovereign National Conference and those who would argue to the point of death that Nigeria is a marriage of inconvenience.
In this category of campaign to divide the country are, in deed, a large number of people from Niger Delta Region, the remnants of Igbo Biafran activists and recently, the Yoruba people from the South West who actually made a reference to “secession” in their collective position paper to the Conference, now ongoing.
As it were, Lamido of Adamawa’s comment about taking Adamawa from Nigeria may turn out to be a grand design to provide not only a leeway to the real agitators for the balkernisation of Nigeria to come into the open with such agitation, but a soft landing for them.
We may not have known yet, the main urge, other than anger, that propelled Lamido to burst out the way he did, but fact is that he has opened a new vista in the discourse at the National Conference, even before all the rules of business are put in place. Jokes apart!

I am of the generation of Nigerians who cut their teeth on candle lights and rechargeable lamps and given the way things are going, from bad to worse, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the vision of 24-hour, seven-day-a-week electric power supply is unreachable in my lifetime. Toyosi Akerele, an inspiring youth leader recently announced in a fanciful pun, that the present generation of leaders had handed nothing but generators to this generation of Nigerians.
At home in Kano last weekend, neighbours said they hadn’t seen light for five days in my part of the GRA. In normal times, you got more power supply here than those who lived in slum sections of the outer city. I met someone from there who said for fifteen days, they hadn’t seen a blink. In Abuja and the other cities, power continues to deteriorate, with just a few cities and towns enjoying very little supplies.
On one of those days last week in Kano, radio news announced the allocation of 12 megawatts to the Kano distribution company with Kano, a megacity by all standard, getting six megawatts, Katsina four, Dutse two and Azare zero.
In February 2013, soon after the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) executed share sale agreements which saw the “historic” hand-over of the 14 out of the successor companies carved out of the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria, (PHCN), the federal, government with a fixed eye on propaganda, proclaimed 2013 the “year of power.” Much hope was raised that the take-over of the generation, transmission and distribution by private investors–someone called them asset strippers–will see the new owners revamping the sector and impacting positively on the nation’s power supply. Last year, most Nigerians celebrated Christmas in darkness. Wherever a new leadership takes over a political or even a business entity, there are changes that often come with that. The new leaders start with a zeal to score quick runs, in this case, improve the level of service to make an immediate good impression. When the new owners of the power companies took over, what Nigerians have experienced is a slip-up. Apart from introducing quite a few faces, nothing, by way of improvement, has come to the consumers.
In a hot season as we are now in, with temperatures hovering above 30o Celsius in a majority of cities, and 40 oC and above in the fringe cities of the North, this is a period where there is usually an increase in the demand for power for cooling the environment as well as storage. An increase in demand and declining supply make for a very bad combination. With a population of 170 million, Nigeria requires an average of 40,000 megawatts of electricity. As it is, less than 4,000 or 10 percent is available for both industry and domestic consumption.
After surrendering to the deteriorating situation for many years, those citizens who believed in the government that things would get better and delayed such investment decisions as the purchase of generating set, are now the wiser. They are bringing out money from savings to buy their own units. For those who can’t afford to do that, there is a booming electricity supply underground by retailers who wire up shops and houses in neighbourhoods, selling power per minute and hour. Without this, women can no longer prepare soup and store it inside refrigerators. They will also have to buy beef and poultry on a day-to-day basis. Government offices that cannot power a whole establishment now buy 2-5 KVA generators, exclusively to power the office of Permanent Secretary or even Minister.
As a television reporter covering the Ministry of Power said, this was how bad things were in the final days of the Shagari administration. At that time, overall national output had dropped to a miserable 900 megawatts. The only difference is that you had the power sector under a state monopoly. You could then by right, hold the Minister and his government responsible for the situation. But state control of the power sector, as argued by many, was counter-productive and eventually was dismantled. With this so-called “significant milestone” by which generation, transmission and distribution are driven by the private sector, government officials are already pointing at the new owners as those responsible for the terrible situation. But government can’t run away from the public. With 80 percent of power plants which are gas-fired deprived of regular gas supply amidst increasing sabotage of gas and oil pipelines in the Delta region, as illustrated by the recent bombing of the gas supply pipeline between Excravos and Warri, it is hard for the government to play ostrich on this matter even if that is their wish. They can’t run away from responsibility by abandoning consumers to the antics of “asset strippers” exploiting the ordinary citizens to their marrow. You wonder why you have a minister of power, with the addition of a junior minister if all they have to do is to drink tea at the Council of Ministers and draw fat salaries and allowances, if they have no power and will to regulate the sector. Why the hell do you have a huge government agency, the National Electricity Regulatory Commission if they cannot ensure market and operating rules in the power sector? Who is there to right the wrongs in the power sector? It doesn’t sound like we have a government in place. If we had one, someone should start worrying about the sliding power supply, insisting on performance and righting the wrongs that are right therefore before everyone’s eyes. Should government be running from its responsibility?