Politically speaking, the nation woke up on Thursday 14/09/2023 to the sad news of a fire incident at the 330/132/33kV Birnin-Kebbi Transmission Station causing damages estimated to cost the nation about 4 million Dollars.

According to the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the inferno caused colossal damage to one 90MVA 330/132/33Kv and a 60MVA 132/33kV transformers and a control room and interrupted power supply to Kebbi and Sokoto states.

Although the transformer feeding Niamey (Niger Republic) was not affected as it is currently out of service due to political reasons, it is being considered to be used to supply electricity to Birnin Kebbi and environs. Equally, steps are on the way to restore power supply back to other affected areas as cable trenches are being opened and plan to back-feed Sokoto from Talata Mafara in Zamfara state is underway.

During his visit the following day for an on-the-spot assessment, the Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer, TCN, Dr. Sule Abdulazeez who was in company of other officials, gave assurances that an investigation committee comprising professionals and specialist would be established with a view to finding out the main cause of the unfortunate incident.

It must be said that thankfully, there was no human casualty but given the fact that this is almost an unprecedented event in recent times and coming at the same period that the grid experienced immense instability as a result of system collapse, it becomes necessary to unravel the remote and immediate causes of the incident with a view to stemming future reoccurrence.

The nation expects the committee set up to investigate the matter to do a  thorough job and proffer far-reaching solutions on how to prevent such from happening again because this incident is not desirable considering the very poor state of power infrastructure in Nigeria in terms of both availability and accessibility.