Former MD: How contractors used TCN’s fibre network for 12 years despite owing $74.5m

Usman Gur Mohammed, former managing director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria, says Nigeria has not been able to have a functional supervisory control and data acquisition system in the power sector because of mismanagement by some contractors.

In an interview with TheSignature50 magazine, Mohammed said the contractors signed agreements on three different occasions for the outsourcing of the TCN’s fibre infrastructure without any success.

A SCADA system is used to control and gather information about a plant and transfer the information to a central unit. It gathers information such as where a fault has occurred and the fatality of the fault.

“I want to tell you that Transmission Company of Nigeria is made up of two companies – Transmission Service provider and System Operation. The two companies are eventually going to be separated. But one of the key conditions’ precedents for the separation the two companies is having a functional SCADA.

“I want to tell you that Nigeria has attempted to have a functional SCADA thrice and it was not successful. And on those three times, we attempted having a functional SCADA in the past, three times we had the same contractor.

“What we did when we came newly was to set up a committee to find out the reason why we have not had a functional SCADA, despite the fact that we signed three contracts in the past that was not successful. And some of the findings in that report was that the communication backbone was weak.

“Meaning the communication of TCN, we have fibre on our network and were outsourced to two companies and those two companies were supposed to pay $40 million each – one paid $3.5 million and the other paid $2 million. And they ran the assets for 12 out of 15 years.”

Mohammed said neither of the companies paid 2.5 percent of their turnover as royalty as stated in the contracts.

“They are supposed to invest in the network because when they took over the asset, the fibre has a life-span. They took an undertaking that they are going to invest and upgrade the network. But what happens is that they are supposed to use half of the fibre for their business and give half to TCN.

“What happened is that they did not invest in the network and in areas where their half spoilt, they took the half of the TCN, and they use it for their business. We have since cancelled those contracts.”

The MD explained that the national grid cannot be expanded to 10,000MW without having a function SCADA.