The Minister of Power, Mr Adebayo Adelabu, on Tuesday said that his desire was to prioritise national assignment over personal interest.
Mr Bolaji Tunji, Special Adviser, Strategic Communication and Public Relations to the minister made this known in a statement in on Tuesday Abuja .
Tunji said that Adelabu said this while speaking on the incident on Friday in which an aircraft operated by Flint Aero crash-landed at the Samuel Ladoke Akintola Airport, Ibadan, Oyo State on his resumption of duty.
He said that he left Abuja on Friday because he had an appointment to visit the soon-to-be-inaugurated 2 X 60 Megavolt Ampere 132/33 Kilovolt Ampere (KVA) transmissionsStation in Ogbomoso, on Saturday.
”And to also join the Lagos State Governor, Babajide Sanwoolu to inaugurate the Oyingbo overpass of the Lagos Rail Mass Transit (LRMT) route on Sunday.
”You will recall that we had a ministerial retreat with Mr president till late Friday evening.
”However, due to the prior appointment in Ogbomoso. i had to personally pay for a private jet to convey us to Ibadan from the villa where the retreat was held in order to meet the Saturday and Sunday’s appointments,”he said.
Adelabu commended all those who showed concern over the incident, adding that he has put the incident behind him.
He said, “ We thank the Almighty God that the incident was not more than that, however, we have a mandate from the president to boost power supply in the country, we should not let anything deter us from that objective.
”You can all see that I am in the office to resume work. That is what matters and in the next few weeks, Nigerians will see further improvements in power supply.”
According to Adelabu, since his appointment, he had used the opportunity to engage the various stakeholders in the power sector from generation to distribution companies and other related organisations in the value chain to identify the issues.
Adelabu said that he engaged the stakeholders to know the reason why there had not been any improvement in the sector in spite of the government’s huge investment in the sector.
“You all know that I am not the first minister to be appointed in this ministry, we have had a lot of prominent Nigerians holding forth here. the question to then ask is ; why have we not had any significant improvement in the sector?
”We do not want to go the same way, we want to know what the challenges are and these have been identified.
”We are interested in delivery – focussed strategy to boost power supply”, he said.
Adelabu said that a retreat for all the various stakeholders would be held before the end of the year.
He said that some of the stakeholders would be the major operators in the industry, adding, ”it is important that we are all on the same page on the steps that must be taken to boost power supply in the country.”
