Power minister,Adelabu justifies ‘Band A’ tariff increase, says govt cannot afford to spend 3trn naira ….

The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has justified the federal government’s decision to remove electricity from ‘Band A’ customers.

Defending the government’s decision to effect a 200 per cent electricity tariff increase for the Band A customers while speaking on Channels TV’s Politics Today on Thursday, Adelabu disclosed that the government would be spending three trillion to subsidize electricity if it had not taken the decision to hike the electricity tariff.

The minister explained that the government cannot afford to spend that huge amount to subsidise electricity.

“Let me say that since I resumed and we have diagnosed and one of the issues we found is the lack of liquidity in the sector and the lack of appropriate pricing for power, which the government has been subsidizing for a while, and we look at the subsidy requirements for the year 2024 if we must continue the same subsidy regime and we found out that it was going to cost the government over three trillion naira to sustain the subsidy for the current year ad we said, let us try to be reasonable government cannot afford to pay three trillion naira in subsidy for power sector alone when federal government total budget is 28 trillion naira,” he said.

KemiFilani recalls that the National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) had last week announced an increase in the price of electricity tariff from N66 to N225 per kwh.

However, the electricity regulatory body clarified that the increase affected customers under the Band A category who enjoy about 20 hours of electricity supply daily.