KEMI ADEOSUN: HOW WESTERN POWERS ARE BLOCKING OUR PROGRESS IN POWER

The minister who was speaking in Washington at a World Bank forum on addressing infrastructure gaps in developing countries said improving power supply remains the corner stone of the current administration but that it is finding it difficult to get support from western community.

“We want to build a coal power plant because we are a country blessed with coal, yet we have power problem. So it doesn’t take a genius to work out that it will make sense to build a coal power plant. However, we are being blocked from doing so, because it is not green. This is not fair because they have an entire western industralisation that was built on coal fired energy”, the minister said.

She said coal was used to develop Europe, yet now that Nigeria wants to do it, “they say it’s not green, so we cannot. They suggest that we use solar and wind, which is the more expensive”, she said.

According to her, while investment in infrastructure is not negotiable, there must however be a level playing field.
She said Nigeria’s debt to GDP remained very low but that the cost of servicing those loans was high.

“Right now, we are being very conservative about our debt and we are trying to get the cheapest money possible from multilateral agencies. We are working very hard to make sure that we get multilateral funds first before we go to the euro bond market, which is a little bit more expensive,” she said.

The Minister noted that Nigeria’s strategy was to get public private investments because even if Nigeria dedicated five years’ full budget to bridging infrastructure gap, it would still be insufficient.