By NOEL ONOJA

The federal government has activated and commenced access to a $500 million African Development Bank (AfDB) loan with the setting up of a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) committee in Abuja. The loan aimed solely as intervention for the power sector is to be released in tranches of $100 million. The setting up of the committee is one of the pre-conditions for drawing on the loan.

According to a statement released by government, The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), one of the successor companies of the now unbundled Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) charged with the responsibility of evacuating and transmitting generated power, has been asked to access the funds as it works towards bridging the enormous gap in the sub-sector.

It will be recalled that minister of power Chinedu Nebo has said that about $3.4 billion is needed to help upgrade the transmission network to the standard that it would evacuate the expected generation capacity coming on stream.

“We have been challenged by the problem of not being able to evacuate power beyond 4,500 MW. From what the TCN gave us, if we have appropriate funding in the next one year we will be able to double our transmission capacity. The technical committee is critical as it is required by AfDB to access the loan,” said Nebo, represented by the ministry’s permanent secretary Godknows Igali.

The committee is made up of representatives from the federal ministry of finance, ministry of power, Bureau of Public Enterprise (BPE) and TCN. The inauguration ceremony was performed at the power ministry’s head quarters, Abuja.

The minister, while challenging the members of the committee, said that the federal government expects much from the members as their efforts would help fast track the disbursement of this initial $500 million loan and the possibility of accessing even more funds.

Haruna Mohammed Chairman of the Committee and ministry of finance director for international economic relations department, speaking on-behalf of the group noted that the members were all well informed on the problems in the sector and promised that all projects would be properly tracked and assessed to ensure successful execution.

“We need to leverage on execution of these initial projects to be able to access other available funding moving forward,” Mohammed said.