SAN FRANCISCO, May 26, (THEWILL) – Former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo has revealed how international oil companies, IOCs, operating in the country contributed to the deteriorated state of electricity in the country by ignoring his call on them to generate electricity from the gas they were flaring.
Speaking at a high-level session on “Africa’s, Energy: What’s the New Deal?” at the ongoing 2016 annual meetings of African Development Bank, AfDB, in Lusaka, Zambia, he regretted that rather than building power plants for Nigerians to benefit, the IOCs preferred to burn the gas because such projects did not add to their profitability.
“When I was president, I asked all the international oil companies producing crude oil in Nigeria not to burn gas and use it for electricity, only Agip responded and build a power plant of only three megawatts, the others ignored my call,” he said.
Obasanjo went on to state that there was no reason why Africa should be in darkness given the resources and potentials that the continent has to generate power.
He stated that African governments should not deprive their citizens the benefit of electricity power in a bid to have an environment devoid of pollution due to power generation.
“I’m an environmentalist, I will not keep environment clean at the expense of power in Africa. Without coal, industrialisation would not have been possible in Europe and other developed world. We may not use coal like in the past, but let use a mixture of what we have We have coal, gas, oil, sun, wind, fossil; let use them to get what we want,” Obasanjo added.
Also speaking at the session, the AfDB President, Akinwunmi Adesina declared that Africa has no business not having power because all the potential in all aspects of power generation, even as he called for the exploitation of the potentials inherent on the continent.
The AfDB boss revealed that there was a new deal on energy for Africa to add 160 gigawatts of electricity to the system.
