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Vandalism and deliberate sabotage of power sector infrastructure have significantly increased in recent times. Assets such as transmission lines, gas pipelines, transformers have all come under heavy attacked across the country.

The minister of power, Prof. Chinedu Nebo, while decrying the menace recently, said the ELPS pipeline was out for over seven months with a loss of 200 million cubic feet of gas and generation capacity of about 800 mega watts (mws) due to vandalism.

Similarly, the Trans Forcados line was out with a loss of another 800mws, while the Alakiri Onne LBVS, which was attacked in March, adversely impacted on gas supply to industries. The Trans Niger line, he said, is vandalised at least twice every month, resulting in about 500mws loss, to mention a few.

Describing the challenge as another face of terrorism, the minister of state for power, Mohammed Wakil, harped on the need for citizens to be vigilant with a view to protecting the infrastructure in their immediate locality. According to him, infrastructure terrorism is an organised sabotage of government installations without economic motive, a development that has become rampant in the oil and power sector.

“We are battling terrorism of a different kind; a new form of terrorism targeting critical national infrastructures is worrisome. Attacking oil pipelines is normally linked with economic motivation. Now gas pipelines are being targeted and with gas stolen,” Wakil said.

“Some transmission lines are not spared. Attacks on gas pipelines and transmission lines are condemnable. It cannot be a coincidence that it is when the power sector is set to climb above the 4,000mws level that the so called sabotage intensifies to draw us back. This is no longer sabotage; it is infrastructure terrorism.”

Proffering possible solutions to the challenge, an industry analyst, Dan D. Kunle, said government needs to deploy digital surveillance to protect the strategic assets as physical surveillance cannot be very effective. He said, “Most of the strategic assets like the generation plants and transmission lines and all the big and small substations should be equipped with special cameras that can relay censors to the control room to indicate that there is an unwanted or unauthorised interference somewhere.”

He noted that transmission lines are so many, adding that leaving them under the surveillance of the police or civil defence officers may not be too effective as compared to digitalising it. He suggested that censor cameras should also be put on electric poles so that it can raise  the alarm when any pole they tampered with. He said each electric pole should have a beacon number so that when the alarm reaches the control room, it can easily indicate which pole is being tampered with.

“Following such alarm security to the point can quickly foil further attempts to completely vandalise the asset,” he added. Speaking further, Kunle, also advised the distribution companies to ensure the provision of digital surveillance for their assets which fall within their operating units. He stressed that without security for the assets, the Discos can hardly provide electricity to their customers or make any revenue.

Source-On Request