By Omeiza Ajayi
ABUJA: The Youth Wing of the ruling All Progressives Congress APC has declared that the era of “Up NEPA” — the popular Nigerian expression marking the sudden, unpredictable return of electricity after outages — must become a thing of the past, pledging its commitment to President Bola Tinubu’s renewable energy agenda and unveiling a N17.5 million grant for participants of a new energy leadership fellowship.
National Youth Leader of the APC, Dayo Israel, made the pledge on Monday in ABUJA at the opening ceremony of the Dr Mustapha Abdullahi Energy Leadership Fellowship MAELF.
“There is going to be a lot of opportunities for the young people, in particular, for them to be able to meet with regulators and government agencies that they can partner with to achieve their energy enterprise ideas and goals. The focus is on renewable energy, biogas, and all of that. We want the issue of ‘Up NEPA’ to be a thing of the past. We want to support the president, his vision for power generation in Nigerian power distribution, and so we want to also bring in new players,” Israel said.
The seven-day residential fellowship is designed to develop young professionals in Nigeria’s energy sector, with a focus on renewable energy, energy transition policies, climate action, leadership and governance.
Israel admitted that poor energy generation and distribution remained the major challenge affecting almost every sector of the economy, and said the youth wing of the ruling party was committed to collaborating with the government to address the challenge.
“We know that energy has been a major challenge in Nigeria, and as a party, we feel that we must support the president in achieving his energy vision. He has invested a lot in renewable energy in Nigeria, in transforming the energy ecosystem, and all of that,” he said.
He said the fellowship was created to support the president’s renewable agenda and to ensure young Nigerians in the energy ecosystem could engage with policymakers and decision makers, adding that participants would interact with the Energy Commission of Nigeria, the Renewable Energy Agency and other government energy agencies to build partnerships towards solving the country’s energy challenges.
He announced the N17.5 million grant, supported by Dr Mustapha Abdullahi and the Governor of Lagos State, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, for the fellows, among other opportunities.
According to him, the goal was to make Nigeria a better place and a country that Nigerians in the diaspora would be proud of and want to return to, noting that this required better infrastructure such as the Lagos Coastal Road, the Badagry Expressway and the Sokoto-Badagry road, all of which the President is building.
“When you build roads, you build industries. You need power at the heart of all of these things. We want to contribute our own little quota to what the President is doing to make Nigeria a better place,” he added.
Also speaking, one of the fellows and co-founder of Fosun Solar Energy Nigeria Limited, Nafisat Ovurevu, said energy remained the nation’s biggest challenge, particularly in food production, and that programmes like the fellowship could proffer lasting solutions to the crisis.
She said; “In Nigeria, the biggest challenge we have is not in the availability of resources. We have abundant energy resources, but those resources do not automatically translate to reliability”.
Ovurevu added that the real problem lay in how the country’s energy is generated, distributed, transmitted and financed.
