Templars hosts key stakeholders in the Nigerian Power Sector in an interactive session to explore appropriate and effective solutions to the liquidity challenges facing the sector.

The session was led by a 6-man panel, which included Oge Peters ( Commercial Manager, Power, Seven Energy International ), Wesley Odion Omonfoman (MD/CEO, New Hampshire Investment Capital Ltd.), Dafe Akpeneye ( Commissioner, Legal, Licensing & Compliance, NERC ), Olubunmi Olukoju ( CFO, Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company ), Tonna Ejiofor (SVP, Debt Solutions, FBN Merchant Bank ) and our very own in-house host panelist and Partner, Desmond Ogba who has a great deal of expertise working on landmark transactions in the Nigerian power sector among which are the ground-breaking AZURA- EDO 459MW IPP project and more recently, the World bank PRG to Seven Energy International, which was the first World Bank PRG to be issued in relation to the exclusive support of gas supply for a power project in Nigeria. The session was moderated by Finance Partner, Chike Obianwu.

The session began by setting the context for the reasons behind the liquidity challenges across the value chain, with each panelist giving their views of what the fundamental issues were as well as what could be done to address them. A particular topic of interest was the eligible customer regulation which was recently introduced by NERC while other aspects of the discourse revolved around customer enumeration, the embedded generation regulation and the inevitable risk of disruption by new, innovative and alternative sources of power.

At the end of the session all panelists agreed that (i) government support and political will was very important to drive the process, (ii) metering needs to be fast-tracked to aid collections at the end of the value chain and (iii) the final draft of PSRP as proposed by the federal government provides a renewed optimism for adequate solutions to the identified bottle necks in the sector.

Templars routinely organizes interactive sessions on topical issues in various sectors with relevant stakeholders in a bid to understand the fundamental challenges faced by clients in these sectors and with a view to proffering practical solutions to them. The firm which recently retained the award for Power, Energy & Natural Resources Team of the Year for the third consecutive time at the Law Digest Africa Awards continues to drive thought leadership initiatives which will assist in delivering excellent and unwavering service to clients and providing effective solutions to their complex legal challenges.