PHCN: N24bn fraud uncovered during equipment inventory

Minister of State for Power, Hajia Zainab Ibrahim Kuchi, yesterday disclosed that a cartel in the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) had fooled the Permanent Secretary in the ministry to raise a memo for the payment of N24 billion for equipment that were already available in the company.
The minister made the disclosure when power distribution equipment, worth billions of naira, for which request for fund had been made, were found to be already available and rusting away at the premises of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Ojo, Lagos.
The minister was in Lagos as part of her tour of PHCN facilities in the state. A mild drama played out when the minister’s entourage entered the premises, and she found the equipment that a memo was raised for its purchase, available.
Two trucks fully loaded with various sizes of cables and other power distribution equipment were about leaving the premises and were ordered to stop for verification of the materials loaded and the papers ordering the release of the consignment.
The minister and her entourage were shocked to discover that the materials ordered to be loaded into the vehicles were different from the ones on them.
The enraged minister immediately ordered that proper inventory of equipment in the facility be taken. She also ordered the seal-off of the facility and armed soldiers were immediately drafted to keep watch over it.
Speaking with journalist after the tour round the facility, Hajia Kuchi claimed that a powerful cartel in the ministry and PHCN were behind the precarious electricity situation in the country. She however promised that the present administration was ready to confront the menace head on. Her words: “It is appalling what we have seen here.
A certain cartel in PHCN is behind this monumental fraud. Just last week, the Permanent Secretary processed documents with respect to a lot of things that are lying here running into N24 billion, by the same people who knew that these things were there. This is ridiculous and we talk of government not doing enough to give the people stable power.”
The minister also told journalists that on a similar tour the previous day, a PHCN inventory official was drugged by people she described as saboteurs apparently to cart away equipment when they discovered that the official was a cog in their wheel.
In his reactions to the large multi-billion dollar equipment rusting away at the facility, Chairman, Presidential Task Force on Power, Mr. Reynold Dagogo- Jack, said that the challenge of power in Nigeria today is not that of generation, but of distribution.
His words: “The challenge of power today in the country is that we currently grow electricity at the generation level. We have sizeable electricity, but for it to move down to homes, these people (PHCN officials) must do the right thing. The transmission must be good. Transmission is turning out to be a weak link,” he said.