National Union of Electricity Employees, NUEE, has berated the National Assembly over the Electricity Bill 2022, which among others, tends to monopolise, the generation, transmission and distribution of electricity supply in the country.
Speaking against the backdrop of the state governors’ rejection of the Bill through the Nigeria Governors’ Forum, NGF, NUEE’s President, Martins Uzoegwu, said: “We are stakeholders in the sector; a major stakeholder as a matter of fact, as workers in the sector. We were not informed or invited to the public hearing.
This is why a lot of things are going wrong in the country today. Even when they do not have the capacity; the government wants to appropriate everything. Just like when some people are pushing to remove Labour from the exclusive list to concurrent list, when the norm and practice everywhere is that Labour is on the exclusive list. In this case, power cannot and should not be on the exclusive list. We should avoid propagating what should undermine our economy and wellbeing.
“We are clamouring for local government autonomy, legislative autonomy and judiciary autonomy. We are on the side of the governors on this one. We are on the same page with the governors because we know what happens in other climes across the globe. In some countries, it is purely commercial; people buy shares and get involved in the ownership structure. We are of the opinion that the bill is dead on arrival.
We are not going to support any monopoly in the electricity sector because we all know what monopoly has done to us today. The privatization in the sector is merely a transfer of public monopoly to private monopoly today.”
