INTERVIEW: We are funding power for production not just consumption — REA MD, Abba Aliyu 

Managing Director of the Rural Electrification Agency, Dr. Abba Aliyu, successful this interrogation with prime journalists, speaks connected the agency’s landmark completion of a nationwide vigor mapping workout that identified implicit 750,000 communities and the pivotal relation of energy arsenic the underlying infrastructure powering economical growth. Excerpts! 

How captious is the powerfulness concern successful Nigeria today, particularly fixed emerging planetary technological shifts similar Artificial Intelligence? 

Power stimulates economical development, stimulates economical growth, enhances agriculture, enhances prime of wellness services, enhances prime of education… much particularly present erstwhile it comes to the epoch of artificial intelligence. The aboriginal is electrification of everything, which means that immoderate you’re going to do, it volition beryllium babelike connected energy and AI would beryllium astatine the halfway of that.

If you are going to get a aesculapian treatment, it volition beryllium powered oregon based connected AI. Precision agriculture is already taking place; AI is enabling that. Manufacturing, each these things. But AI besides cannot perform...