President Muhammadu Buhari’s regime on Wednesday attributed the current power situation in the country to a shortage of gas.

Minister of Power, Abubakar Aliyu, spoke while briefing journalists after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) on Wednesday in Abuja.

Mr Aliyu, who had earlier blamed low water level at the nation’s hydropower stations, said power generators were not supplying due to gas shortage.

“The more reason we are facing the situation now is due to the shortage of gas and some of the generators have to go into maintenance,” he said.

Mr Aliyu added, “It is a scheduled maintenance and it is supposed to be scheduled outage, but we had not envisaged that we will have issues around vandalism of pipelines.”

Mr Aliyu stressed that Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was already addressing the situation, noting that Nigeria had the capacity of 8,000 megawatts on the national grid.

He said that the meeting, which involved the adviser to the president on infrastructure, lasted for the whole day trying to proffer a solution.

“I challenged all of them; I said this is like a war situation; we need to find solutions; we need to come out with answers—quick ones, emergency solutions because the power on the grid has dropped due to those things that affected it—lack of gas, the maintenance that some of the generators are undergoing.”

He noted that committees had been set up all geared towards getting more megawatts to put on the grid as basically, the problem was around gas.

(NAN)