Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency (REA), has indicated its willingness to change course and turn away from untidy projects’ implementation and delivery system, to now develop a masterplan to guide its work going forward.

Damilola Ogunbiyi, the new executive director of the agency which has a poor history of project management, disclosed this new change of direction to journalists in Abuja shortly after her inauguration alongside other members of her team by the country’s power minister, Mr. Babatunde Fashola.

Ogunbiyi, stated that the new board would take time to identify all of the agency’s ongoing projects, and subsequently focus on completing them alongside select new projects of the government.

“What we are going to do from next week (May 9) is to have the whole project team, led by the executive director technical, to go out and identify the status of all these projects and come up with the proper master plan of how we are to tackle existing projects while also focusing on the new projects that were mentioned by the minister, the university projects, hydro projects and small scale solar projects,” said Ogunbiyi.

She added: “So, we really see ourselves as an access agency to get power to people who don’t have it regardless of where they are whether in the rural or urban centres. And we are going to do it using a whole different variety of renewable energy technology and some off-grid solutions as well.”

Though cheered as a smart move, industry experts also asked the new board to consider a thorough evaluation of renewable energy projects the agency procured in the past with the intention of weeding out quack operators from its clientele database. They alleged REA had in the past taken to patronising renewable energy quacks with no consideration for efficiency.