By Musa Adamu
Abuja
Minister of power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, has emphasised the imperative of inculcating capacity building into the Power Africa Initiative (PAI).
PAI is a programme initiated by President Barak Obama to aid Africa in the area of sustainably electricity.
The Minister, at a meeting with officials of the United States (US) who visited him at the ministry, was upbeat about the initiative, but expressed worry that without this critical component the initiative might be short-lived even when it eventually becomes successful.
The minister who explained that experts must be on ground to provide the necessary know-how to those that would operate the installations and the entire system to make the initiative sustainable, said although the role America had played in creating a robust power sector in Nigeria was encouraging, the country and indeed the entire West must up their game in this direction.
He said that whilst most of the big financial interventions in the sector had come from Asia, America and Europe had shown some form of foot-dragging in fully engaging the programme full blast in terms of investment, a situation which he said must change for them to benefit from the dividends of a full-grown electricity market.
He emphasised that investors should not be afraid to come to the power sector in Nigeria because protection for investment was guaranteed.
Expressing happiness that Nigeria was part of the initiative, he said the country would not only capitalise on it, but had indeed had a series of meetings also, one of the most successful in Addis Ababa, recently where some major decisions were reached on the roadmap to actualizing its goals.
He said Nigeria was ready to grab any chance at any American investment, such as it did in encouraging one of its companies that had presented a proposal for producing a 1,000 mw capacity plant for the production of solar power.
He said such investments would send the right signal for promoting the power sector initiative in the country.
Lamented the damage vandalism had caused in the speedy actualization of the goals of the power sector road map, he said the prevalence of vandalism of gas pipelines had dealt a heavy blow on production of electricity.
He said this was so because gas-fuelled plants accounted for a huge percentage of electricity production in the country.