Power outage: Ikeja Electric, EKEDC blames it on grid collapse

Some parts of Nigeria on Thursday, January 16, 2020, experienced power outage.

Giving reasons to why power consumers in the country were denied electricity supply, the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) disclosed that a system disturbance occurred at about 12.34 pm yesterday, which affected some parts of the country.

“As at 1:10 pm, supply was restored to Abuja and most parts of the affected areas. The TCN is still working to completely restore and stabilise the nation’s grid,” TCN announced.

Similarly, Ikeja Electric and Eko Electricity Distribution Company (EKEDC), two of the nation’s distribution companies, informed their customers about the cause of the outage in Lagos.

“Dear customer, the outage you’re experiencing is due to a system collapse of the grid which occurred this afternoon at 12.36hrs. All parts of IE’s network are affected. Efforts are ongoing to restore the grid. Kindly bear with us,” Ikeja Electric stated on Twitter.

Just two hours after the first statement, Ikeja Electric, in another tweet, stated that another system collapse was recorded at 2.15 pm, adding that restoration efforts were ongoing.

What you should know

This is however the first time the nation's grid will collapse this year.

Last year (2019) alone, Nigerians were thrown into darkness not less than 11 times due to the collapse of the nation's grid.

Unarguably, erratic power supply has been a lingering issue Nigerians are familiar with.

Over the past years, the state of the country's economy has been blamed on lack of reliable power supply.

Despite the fact that President Muhammadu Buhari rode to power in 2015, partly on the back of a promise to improve power supply to homes and businesses, erratic power supply has remained a recurring issue across Africa's most populous nation.

In defence of the incumbent administration, former Power Minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, often tells Nigerians that since the power sector has been privatized, there is very little the government can do to fix the sector.