Power: Use indigenous professionals to solve challenges, institute urges FG

The Chartered Institute of Power Engineers of Nigeria has advised the Federal Government to use the country’s professionals to tackle the challenges in the power sector.

Israel Abraham, the President, CIPEN made the call in an interview with Newsmen in Abuja on Sunday.

Abraham while speaking on the epileptic power supply being experienced in the country currently, said that there was the need for the government to trust its own power engineers to solve the problem.

“Government must trust its own. You must trust your own people. As it stands, government does not trust its own people.

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”You want to develop the power sector, who are your appointees? Do you call the professionals to sit down to say, this is it, gentlemen, what do we do?” he said.

Abraham said that when government wants to look into the issues in the power sector, they should look for the experts in the system, sit with them and discuss the way forward.

According to him, CIPEN has written a lot of memos, papers and even stated their position.

He said that most of the countries that were developed today trusted their professionals and believed in them.

“So, is the government trusting the power engineers to take over the power sector? If the government is doing that, then we will not say the responsibility is not on us.

”As it stands, we cannot take responsibility for what is not under our purview.

”We tell them this is what to do. They tell you they have their experts from other countries,” he said.

Abraham said that the only way to solve the problem in the power sector was to challenge the owners of the system who are the professionals in the country.

”You challenge them to say, we want answers. And then they give you their terms. then you take the terms and work with it, ”he said.

Abraham  also said  that to  address the issue of epileptic electricity supply, it was required that  power networks were domesticated locally in such a way that people could access them.

He said that there should be more local networks so that people could connect their electricity supply, adding that this was where energy access comes in.

”The is where renewable energy like  solar panels comes in as a way of stop gap measures where people can easily get that, especially in areas where  people do not have access to the public supply.

“In some villages where you have  solar system, most of them will never worry about  being connected to the grid, they continue with their lives as they already have access to power.

“So while working on the major ones to bring power supply, those ones can serve as energy access to the people,” he said.

Abraham said that CIPEN was also doing a lot by trying to collaborate with Ministries, Agencies and Departments (MDAs) to see how the power sector could be enhanced.