Rotimi Amaechi, minister of transportation and former governor of Rivers state, made false claims about Nigeria generating 7,000MW of electricity under President Muhammadu Buhari, TheCable can confirm.
In an interview with Osasu Igbinedion, after the launch of the Kaduna-Abuja railway line, Amaechi said Nigeria was generating 7,000MW of electricity before the resumption of militant activities in the Niger Delta region.
He blamed the militants – Niger Delta Avengers – for poor power generation in Africa’s largest economy.
“Don’t forget that until these so-called Avengers began to bomb, we had got to 7,000 megawatts, and what he promised was ten at the end of the first term,” Amaechi had said.
“By the time the avengers, or whatever they call them started bombing, the minister of power, had driven the thing to 7,000 megawatts. Unfortunately, they began to hit the gas facilities, so what would you do?”
FACT: Nigeria, in its 55-year history, has never generated 7,000MW
Contrary to Amaechi’s claim, TheCable can confirm that Nigeria has never generated as much as 7,000MW in its entire existence.
Electricity generation in Nigeria is said to have begun under the British colonial government back in 1896, while the Nigerian Electricity Supply Corporation (NESCO) came on board in the late 1920s.
Ignoring the above, and tracing our records to 1960, when Nigeria got her independence, the government said, in a memorandum of understanding signed with the United States government, that it had built power plants to generate about 6,000 MW of electricity by 2014.
NERC data shows the government fell short of its projection.
According to Wall Street Journal, which quoted the World Bank and Energy Information Administration, Nigeria produces less than half as much electricity as North Dakota for 249 times more people.
FACT: Nigeria was not in recession under Jonathan
The minister, who also served as speaker of the Rivers state house of assembly for eight years, also claimed that there was economic recession, under the administration of former president Goodluck Jonathan.
“If you remember as governor, I said we’re broke. The minister for finance (Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) came to my office in Abuja here and pleaded with me that I shouldn’t say it again,” Amaechi said on The Osasu Show.
“So I knew as chairman of governors’ forum, that we had gone into recession under Goodluck (Jonathan).”
First: What is recession?
The International Monetary Fund (IMF), CNNMoney, New York Times and leading economic bodies agree that a recession can be easily identified by “two consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real (inflation adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP)”.
They, however, add that on a global scale, one may need more than this metric to call a recession. IMF particularly says “it is often better to consider a wider set of measures of economic activity to determine whether a country is indeed suffering a recession”.
TheCable
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