Nigeria/Siemens power deal boosted as Kyri, Power Minister visit Germany

By Ezurike Ugochukwu

The six-year power generation contract recently signed by the Nigerian government and the German electri giants Siemens, got strengthened as the
Chief of Staff to President Muhammadu Buhari, Mallam Abba Kyari, and the Minister of Power, Mr. Saleh Mamman, visited Garmany.

At a meeting with Siemens  management in Germany led by the Global Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr. Joe Kaeser that also had the Nigerian Ambassador to Germany, Mr. Yusuf Tuggar in attendance.

the minister who left the country along with Kyari on Sunday said they were in Germany to find ways of proffering solutions to the current power problems in Nigeria.

The process leading to the agreement was sequel to the meeting that took place in 2018  between  Buhari and the German Chancellor, Angela.

According to the minister’s Twitter handle, he hosted as thus, “The Chief of Staff to the President, Mallam Abba Kyari and I are in Munich right now meeting with executive members of @Siemens to discuss issues relating to the Nigerian power sector. The Nigerian Ambassador to Germany H.E @YusufTuggar has joined us for this meeting.

“It will be recalled that the Nigerian government @NigeriaGov recently signed a six-year deal with the German company, which will result in the effective generation, transmission and distribution of at least 25,000 megawatts of electricity by the year 2025,” Mamman said.

At the inception of the agreement signing , President  Buhari tasked Siemens and other stakeholders in the power sector to work hard to achieve 7,000 megawatts of reliable power supply by 2021 and 11,000 megawatts by 2023, insisting that the agreement would be a strictly government-to-government arrangement to avoid the problem of going through middlemen.

“My challenge to Siemens, our partner investors in the distribution companies, the Transmission Company of Nigeria and the electricity regulator is to work hard to achieve 7,000 megawatts of reliable power supply by 2021 and 11,000 megawatts by 2023 in phases 1 and 2 respectively.

“After these transmission and distribution system bottlenecks have been fixed, we will seek in the third and final phase to drive generation capacity and overall grid capacity to 25,000 megawatts,’’ he had said.