The Southerner — OPEN EYES
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Somewhere in Abuja, a mother is fanning her feverish infant in sweltering darkness, the ceiling fan above her as lifeless as the government’s promises. Somewhere in Onitsha, a tailor has folded away his sewing machine for the third consecutive week, his customers gone, his rent overdue. Somewhere in Kaduna, a pharmacy owner watches helplessly as a chest freezer full of insulin and vaccines creeps toward room temperature because the generator ran out of fuel and the national grid has not blinked alive in days.
These are not hypothetical scenes. They are the daily, grinding reality of over 220 million Nigerians who have endured what can only be described as near-total national blackout for nearly two months, a humanitarian and economic catastrophe that is hiding in plain sight, normalised by years of broken promises and institutional failure.
It did not have to be this way or at least, that is what Nigerians were told. During the fevered campaign season that preceded the current administration, electricity was waved like a magic wand on every political stage. The promise was seductive in its simplicity; stable power, industrial-grade supply, a Nigeria that would finally outgrow its addiction to generators and diesel fumes. Citizens, exhausted by decades of darkness, voted with (and perhaps for) ‘hope’.
They believed because they needed to believe. Yet here we are, years into that administration, staring into the same abyss. The generators still roar. The solar inverters still strain. And the ordinary Nigerian who cannot afford either sits in silence, quite literally, wondering what exactly their vote purchased. The President’s pre-election pledge of stable electricity has aged into a bitter joke whispered at street corners, an irony too painful to laugh at.
On March 26th, 2026, Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu stepped before cameras in Abuja and did something Nigerian officials rarely do; he apologised. He acknowledged the outages, the hardship, the disruption to businesses, schools, and industries. And then he made a promise; one that would come with an implicit deadline. He assured Nigerians that within two weeks, power generation would improve and the nation would begin its climb back toward the trajectory of 2025, a year he described as one in which the ministry had been ‘praised and commended.’
I had just finished writing my opinion on the perennial issues of epileptic power supply across the country, ready for publication on my column with The Southerner when that apology came on air. Acknowledging that his decision to apologise was rare among Nigerian public servants and politicians, I decided to be rational and withhold the opinion piece. To me, trusting the words of a Minister who has boldly apologised and promised the nation improved power supply was the right thing I could do.
Behold, the two-week window has since closed. The lights, for millions of Nigerians, have not come back on. Government data does show a modest rise in generation output from roughly 3,951 megawatts on March 28th 2026 to just above 4,300 megawatts by April 10th 2026, a figure the minister’s office presented with considerable fanfare. But for a country of Nigeria’s size and population, 4,300 megawatts is not progress. It is a persistent insult.
A perennial deceit woven with the subtle words of politicians! South Africa, with roughly a quarter of Nigeria’s population, generates over 40,000 megawatts. The numbers do not lie, even when the official narrative tries to dress them up. So, why should anyone celebrate 4,300 megawatts for a population of over 220million people?
To understand why Nigeria perpetually fails at electricity, one must follow a chain of catastrophic decisions, systemic neglect, and institutionalised corruption that stretches back decades. The country relies overwhelmingly on thermal power plants fired by natural gas, a resource Nigeria possesses in enormous abundance and yet cannot reliably channel to its own turbines.
The gas-to-power value chain is riddled with dysfunction courtesy of vandalism of gas pipelines, unpaid debts owed by electricity distribution companies (DisCos) to generating companies (GenCos), and GenCos in turn unable to pay gas suppliers. It is a circular firing squad, and Nigerians are the ones getting shot. The national transmission infrastructure is antiquated, creaking under load factors it was never designed to sustain.
Distribution networks, many of them privatised in the failed 2013 reforms, have seen little meaningful investment. Metering deficits are staggering, millions of consumers remain unmetered and are billed on estimated consumption, destroying trust and discouraging payment. Hydroelectric capacity suffers seasonal variation, and climate change is making the dry seasons drier and the floods more destructive. Every link in the chain is broken, and patching one while ignoring the others has been Nigeria’s defining electricity strategy for thirty years.
The damage this darkness has inflicted on the Nigerian economy is not merely inconvenient, it is existential. The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria has, in various reports over the years, estimated that poor electricity costs its members hundreds of billions of naira annually in alternative energy costs alone. Small and medium enterprises, the true engine of economic growth and employment, are decimated.
A welding workshop in Aba, a printing press in Ibadan, a cold room storage business in Port Harcourt, all of them are paying double and tripple for diesel while their competitors in Ghana, Rwanda, and Morocco operate on reliable grid power. Nigeria’s industrial capacity is being hollowed out in real time. The healthcare sector is on life support; primary health centres without generators go dark during surgeries; vaccines are lost; patients die from conditions that reliable electricity would have made survivable. Students in boarding schools study by candlelight or phone torchlight, absorbing knowledge under conditions that no serious nation would accept for its children.
The World Bank has estimated that power outages cost Nigeria approximately $29 billion annually, nearly a third of the federal budget, a sum so staggering it should constitute a national emergency.
Beyond structural failures, there are human hands actively strangling Nigeria’s electricity sector. Pipeline vandals, many of them reportedly sponsored by criminal networks with political protection, regularly blow up gas supply infrastructure, triggering cascades of generation collapse. Officials within the sector collude to perpetuate meter scarcity so that estimated billing, a cash cow for distribution companies can continue unchecked. Contracts for power infrastructure projects are awarded, money disbursed, and projects abandoned or never commenced, with no prosecution to follow. The newly inaugurated gas-to-power monitoring committee announced by Minister Adelabu is a welcome idea on paper, but Nigerians have seen committees before.
They have seen task forces and emmergency interventions and technical working groups. The question is never whether such bodies are formed, it is whether anyone faces consequences when they fail. So far, the answer has been a resounding NO! Those who vandalise pipelines, those who pocket transformation funds, those who certify fake meters, they walk free and enjoy their loots. Their actions are, in effect, subsidised by the suffering of ordinary Nigerians. Blood money indeed.
There is a concept that Nigerian governance has treated as optional for far too long, the concept of ‘accountability’. In functioning democracies, a minister who makes a two-week promise to the public on national television and fails to deliver faces consequences. Such consequences could be in the form of voluntary resignation, parliamentary scrutiny, public censure, resignation calls, or at minimum, a credible explanation.
In Nigeria, the same minister simply schedules another press conference and issues another statement through a Special Adviser on Strategic Communications. The cycle continues, buffered by bureaucratic insulation and political loyalty. This must change. The National Assembly must move beyond reactive posturing and institute binding performance benchmarks for sector ministers, with independent verification mechanisms. The Bureau of Public Procurement must enforce contract sanctions against power infrastructure defaulters.
Anti-corruption agencies must treat electricity fraud, the diversion of capital meant for transmission upgrades, the phantom contracts for gas pipeline repairs with the same urgency they would treat a bank robbery and bandit attacks. Because that is exactly what it is.
Nigeria does not lack the blueprint for electricity recovery, it lacks the political will and institutional discipline to execute one. The path forward requires a simultaneous, unflinching assault on every broken link in the chain. Gas pipeline security must be treated as a national security matter, with military-grade protection and community engagement to dry up vandalism networks.
The electricity sector’s debt spiral where DisCos owe GenCos owe gas suppliers must be resolved through a government-guaranteed structured settlement, not endless deferral. Electricity tariff reform, painful as it is, must proceed with adequate protection for the poorest consumers, because the current regime of subsidised darkness serves no one. Investment in renewable energy, particularly solar mini-grids for underserved communities, must be fast-tracked, because waiting for the national grid to reach every village is a generational death sentence.
And above all, every official who fails to meet published, public targets must face consequences, real ones, not reshuffles and redeployments. Nigeria cannot afford another decade of apologies.
The lights must come on. And if those entrusted with flipping the switch will not do it, they must be removed and replaced by those who will. The darkness has lasted long enough. As I conclude this piece, I could hear the roars of my neighbours cursing AEDC for blinking the “light” after two days of darkness in Abuja! If Aso Rock could not trust the national grid, what is the hope of ordinary Nigerians? May the sun shine tomorrow…
