President Goodluck Jonathan, Vice President Muhammed Namadi Sambo and wife

By Daniel Idonor
ABUJA—THE Federal Government Monday warned consultants and contractors handling different power projects under the National Independent Power Project, NIPP, to quicken their pace of works as the government was in a hurry to power supply to Nigerians in a shortest possible time.

Vice President Muhammed Namadi Sambo gave these directives at a meeting with consultants and contractors handling the entire NIPP project,.

Sambo who stated that the contractors and consultants had no reason to delay the works said the Federal Government will not hesitate to sack any consultant and contractor who tries to sabotage government’s desires to deliver power to Nigerians in the shortest possible time.

“I want to personally review each contract, look at the issues, progress and if there are problems we will discuss them and solve them and make sure we do not have any obstacle in ensuring that we deliver power to the people.

You have a very important responsibility, I can say with all confidence that funding is not a problem. The money is in the accounts of the companies to pay for the work. So it is our responsibility to manage your contracts and ensure you deliver these projects on schedules.

This is very important to us. We will not accept any company to create any delay and if we found you want to create problems in delivering, we assure you we will get an alternative,” Sambo said.

The vice president, who took time to listen to the problems and constraints from each of the contractors and consultants, maintained that government was in haste to deliver power to Nigerians because of the urgency to meet the government’s Vision 2020 target.

The Federal Government, state and local government under the joint funding agreement for the NIPP voted about $5 billion for the NIPP for the execution of the project designed to generate additional 6000 mega watts of power by the end of 2010.

Under the NIPP framework, several power stations which were expected to be built and some others rehabilitated the include; Ihovbor Power Station Benin, Edo State, with the capacity of 4 x 125MW, Calabar Power Station, Cross River State, with the capacity of 5 x 125MW, Egbema Power Station, Imo State, with the capacity of 3 x 125MW, Gbarain Power Station, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State with the capacity of 2 x 125MW, and Sapele Power Station, Delta State, with the capacity of 4 x 125MW.
Expert’s investigations showed that Nigeria need at least one billion standard cubic feet of gas supply per day to be able to deliver the 6000 mega watts targets but were unable to deliver on target because of the insufficiency of dry gas to power the turbines.

The power plants only got between 400 to 500 standard cubic feet of gas per day from the Nigerian Gas Company (NGC) which affects its output distributions and generations.