National Secretary of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ajibola Bashiru, has said Nigeria is not running a socialist system, where production, transmission and distribution of electricity are carried out for the free use of citizens rather than for profit.

“Energy is not cheap anywhere in the world. Nigeria is not running a socialist society. Let us get it very right. We are in a globalised economy,” the former Senate spokesman said on Channels Television’s programme, Political Paradigm, yesterday.

Bashiru, who represented Osun Central Senatorial District in the Ninth Senate from 2019 to 2023, was responding to a claim made by the Lagos State Deputy Governor, Obafemi Hamzat, who lamented the astronomical increase in the electricity bill slammed on his house by a distribution company.

At a meeting with the Rural Electricity Agency (REA) in Lagos on Monday, Hamzat, also a member of the ruling APC, complained that the DISCO raised the electricity bill to his quarters from N2.7m in March to N29m in April.

Bashiru, however, said the APC administration had been making efforts to address this age-long infrastructure deficit in the energy sector.

The APC scribe argued that the claim of the Lagos deputy governor could not be used as a representative sampling of what ordinary Nigerians were going through.