A former President of the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC), Mr. Peter Esele, has queried the N6 trillion demanded by the Association of Power Generation Companies from the Presidency even as Nigerians have decried the poor electricity services they have been enduring for a long time.

The amount was said to have been outstanding obligations from bilateral commercial agreements the generation companies executed within the framework of the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry. Esele, a former President of the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) in an interview with Saturday Telegraph yesterday, contended that the privatization model of the power sector was not properly done.

According to him, if it was properly done, everything would have been clear from day one. He said: “How do you calculate that you owe GenCos N6trillion? What’s the process? How do you arrive at that? How transparent was that, how many percent of each of the Gencos that we’re talking about, Federal Government, to us in particular, is taking on order?

So you don’t ask me how did they arrive at that? And what is the investment they’re making? Because you need to also ask yourself, these Gencos, what are the investments they have made? And how has electricity in the country helped them?

So the whole thing, because when I arrived initially, was that the N6 trillion has been cut to, (after proper evaluation and forensic processing, you cut to literally about N2 trillion. “The GenCos need to let us know how they also arrived at all of that. There should also be room for arbitration to find a way around all of these, to be saying N6 trillion, N6 trillion how?

How much did they pay to acquire these assets? I think it becomes more worrisome considering that we are having poor power services. Like now they’ve declared low shedding. “Even if we are having poor power services, how much are you collecting?

How did you come about the debt? How much are you generating? So there are a lot of things. But at the end of the day, we are not saying businesses should close down.

There must be an arbiter such that we will now look at actual costs to verify so that the government will pay actual costs and not just coming and throwing figures.” Recall that the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) had described the GenCos’ N6 trillion demand as “a clandestine scheme” designed to siphon public funds under the guise of sectoral intervention.