Tinubu’s new power policy validates my 21-year-old proposal – Atiku

Atiku Abubakar, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), has said President Bola Tinubu’s new electricity policy validates a decentralised power model he proposed more than two decades ago.

In a statement by Phrank Shaibu, his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Atiku said the federal government’s admission that Nigeria could no longer rely solely on large, centralised power plants vindicated his long-standing position on electricity generation.

“It should not take a government three years in office to discover what was obvious more than two decades ago,” Atiku said.

The former vice president faulted the administration for increasing electricity tariffs before carrying out structural reforms to improve power supply.

“A government that thinks before it acts would have fixed the system before asking citizens to pay more. Unfortunately, this administration has done the exact opposite, raising tariffs first and only now beginning to think about the reforms required to justify those increases,” he said.

Atiku recalled that while serving as vice president between 1999 and 2007, he consistently advocated a decentralised electricity system driven by hydro, solar, gas and other energy sources.

He said he declined to chair the Power Sector Reform Committee established by former President Olusegun Obasanjo because he disagreed with its gas-focused generation strategy.

“I believed then, as I do now, that Nigeria’s electricity future lay in a diversified and decentralised energy mix—not an overdependence on a single source,” he said.

According to him, the Tinubu administration was only now embracing ideas he had championed for over 21 years.

“The greatest tragedy is not that this government has finally embraced the right idea. The tragedy is that it took three years of policy drift, higher tariffs and prolonged darkness to discover what could have transformed Nigeria’s power sector more than two decades ago,” Atiku added.