Darkness imminent as vandals down transmission lines in fresh attacks

Nigeria may face worse power outages given rising attacks on transmission infrastructure, a development the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) blamed for grid collapse.

At least four 330kv towers were, according to the government agency, vandalised on Monday along the Jos – Gombe 330kV transmission line.

The vandalism, which the spokesperson of the agency, Ndidi Mba, said occurred at about 3:32 pm, followed over 117 132kv/330kv electricity towers vandalised across the country between January 2022 and February this year. That has left the country with multiplier economic losses with about N110 million required to fix each of the vandalised assets.

The prevailing vandalism brings a snag to the over $7 billion loans taken by former President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration to overhaul the transmission segment of the electricity sector.

Coming on the backdrop of rising insecurity in the country, economic crisis and worsening power supply that has plagued to about 3,000MW, the rising vandalism is happening at a time when Nigeria is yet to pay back loans borrowed to fix transmission infrastructure.

TCN said in a release that when the 330kV transmission line tripped, its operators attempted to restore it to service, but it tripped again, prompting the dispatch of TCN lines men to trace the line to detect and rectify the fault.

While fault tracing, TCN’s engineering crew discovered that towers 288,289,290, and 291 were vandalised and that some tower members were carted away.

Also, the towers had equally collapsed as a result of the incident.

Currently, bulk power supply to Gombe, Yola, and Jalingo Substations has been disrupted, affecting bulk power supply to parts of Yola and Jos Electricity Distribution Companies’ franchise areas, Mba said.

She said to mitigate the effect of the incident on electricity consumers affected by the incident TCN was trying to first backfeed Gombe through its 132kV transmission line from Bauchi and subsequently Ashaka, Potiskum, Damaturu and Billiri/ Savannah.

“We will do everything possible to ensure that supply is restored to the affected areas, while efforts are made to reconstruct the four vandalised towers,” she said.