Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, has lamented the incessant collapse of the National Grid, saying it is the sixth time such is happening under President Muhammadu Buhari’s Government in 2022.
It could be recalled that the national electricity grid suffered a system collapse on Wednesday, causing power blackout in states across the country.
The system failure, which is the sixth in the last 7 months, dipped the entire power supply nationwide to 40 mega watts.
Describing the latest collapse as one too many, the former Vice President in a tweet on his Twitter handle @atiku
on Wednesday, outlined his plans for the power sector if elected president in the 2023 general elections.
He wrote, “I am reliably informed that there was a total National Grid Collapse at precisely 12:23 pm today. This is one collapse too many. It is the 6th time this is happening this year alone.
“Due to the priority that I place on the power sector upon which the successes of other sectors are hinged, I am proposing innovative financing of infrastructure that will involve the facilitation of a review of the financial, legal, and regulatory environment to promote private investment in power, among other sectors.
“I’ll promote the incentivisation, with tax breaks, a consortium of private sector institutions to establish an Infrastructure Debt Fund (IDF) to primarily mobilise domestic and international private resources for the financing and delivery of large infrastructure projects across all the sectors of the economy.
“The IDF will have an initial investment capacity of approximately US$20 billion. In addition, I’ll cause the creation of an Infrastructure Development Credit Guarantee Agency to complement the operation of the IDF by de-risking investments in infrastructure to build investor confidence in taking risks and investing capital.”
