Dar Es Salaam Declaration and President Tinubu’s Relentless Quest to Give All Nigeria’s Stable Electricity By Dada Olusegun

Nigeria’s President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu left Abuja for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on January 26th to attend the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit.

His mission to Tanzania was straightforward – to further galvanise efforts, multilateral support and investments aimed at increasing electricity access to Nigerians.

The Misson 300 initiative itself is aimed at expanding electricity access to 300 million people throughout Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030

.*Why is the Mission 300 Initiative important to Nigeria?*To start with, Africa currently has over 600 million people who lack access to electricity, which is close to half of the population in the continent.

Alarmingly, this figure represents 83% of the global electricity access deficit. Nigeria on its own has around 86 million people without access to electricity, making it the country with the highest number of people in the world without electricity access, followed closely by DR Congo.

Therefore, any initiative whether global or regional with the objective to increase access to electricity to those without access needs to feature Nigeria.

That Nigeria has this huge number of people without access to electricity is down to several systemic challenges bedevilling the power sector in Nigeria which revolve around grossly inadequate investment in the sector over several decades.

However, President Bola Tinubu since his assumption of office in 2023 has stepped up efforts to ensure that the barriers holding down the power sector are gradually dismantled to pave the way for increased investments into the electricity value chain.

Today, the federal government has put in place a legal framework known as the Electricity Act 2023 which has paved the way for the decentralisation of the power sector, allowing subnational governments to participate more in the electricity market regulation.

Also, cost reflective tariffs have been applied to targeted consumers, which has made it more attractive for the private sector to invest more in the sector. The immediate result has been a drastic improvement in power supply to major load centres across the country.

The Tinubu administration is also accelerating the implementation of the Siemens deal with phase 1 of the deal about to commence following the completion of the pilot phase. Both the pilot phase and phase 1 of the Siemens deal revolve around improving the wheeling capacity of the TCN and ensuring grid stability.

This is essential for increased access to electricity by Nigerians. However, only the Siemens deal cannot in itself expand electricity access to unelectrified communities across the country. This is where the Mission 300 Initiative becomes very crucial to Nigeria’s power solution mix.What does Mission 300 offer Nigeria’s power sector?

The Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit was not just a gathering of leaders of the participating countries but a critical platform for collaboration and commitment to unite efforts of countries and development partners to confront one of Africa’s most pressing challenges – access to energy. Heads of State from 12 African countries were part of the Dar es Salaam declaration which include Nigeria, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia.