By Nick Tattersall

LAGOS (Reuters) - Nigeria's President Umaru Yar'Adua faced up to criticism that he had achieved little in his first year of office on Thursday by repeating promises to resolve a crippling power crisis and hinting at changes to his cabinet.

In a live interview broadcast on state television, Yar'Adua rejected charges that the pace of reform had ground to a halt since he took power a year ago, saying he had spent the last 12 months setting Africa's most populous nation in order.

"Without respect for the rule of law, what will happen is that you will continue to have a national culture which is ad hoc and arbitrary rather than orderly and rational," he said.

"All of our plans are coming to fruition in almost all of the critical sectors," he added, citing electricity and infrastructure as two top priorities.

Many Nigerians, for whom the absence of electricity is the number one complaint, might have found his words hard to swallow had they been able to watch the interview.

But the power crisis has become so severe that much of the country has been without mains electricity for weeks, plunging neighbourhoods without private generators into darkness every night and heightening frustration among its 140 million people.

The softly-spoken leader took office promising to declare a national emergency on power but has yet to do so, saying he is waiting for two committees he set up to report back first.

"The emergency period will last until we are able to generate about 10,000 megawatts of electricity ... because that will be the time when Nigerians begin to experience electricity supply," he said, adding that was likely to take until 2011.

Nigeria, the world's eighth biggest oil producer, currently has a generation capacity of about 3,000 MW. South Africa, with a third of the population, has more than 10 times that capacity.

PLODDING OR METHODICAL?

Decades of mismanagement under corrupt military dictators left a legacy of poverty, crime and collapsed infrastructure in the chaotic West African country.

Yar'Adua's election marked the first switch from one civilian president to another since 1960, and although the polls were widely condemned as flawed, he was seen as a breath of fresh air after his domineering predecessor Olusegun Obasanjo.

Yar'Adua's critics say his cabinet contains uninspiring technocrats who lack the reformist zeal of the later stages of Obasanjo's administration, which pushed through free-market reforms and won the respect of foreign investors.

Yar'Adua urged Nigerians to be patient.

"(The late 1970s) was the last time we had a national development plan," he said.

"You cannot build a nation, you cannot develop an economy that way. We must take time to produce good plans."

Asked if he would reshuffle his cabinet, Yar'Adua said:

"Both in the structure and in the personnel there is a probability (of change)," without giving details.

Some Nigerians hope change comes sooner rather than later.

"Nigerians ask Yar'Adua to wake up" said the front-page headline of The Guardian newspaper on Thursday. Another respected daily, the Vanguard, carried a front-page cartoon showing Yar'Adua's head sticking out from a tortoise shell.