The Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) is at a crossroads, one reached after not a little turmoil. A point with no clear indication of direction or sequencing – capacity or distribution? mini grid or collection? gas supply or transmission? sustainability or generation?
In a country where certain projects are conceived solely for implementation (financial gains) rather than impact, we continue to wallow in an endless cycle of power projects, probes, policies, and system interventions where accountability is optional, value is incidental, shame is conspicuously absent, and legacy is alien.
The Endless Cycle
Over the last two decades, the power sector policy has expanded, and the number of stakeholders has increased by multiple folds. The federal government’s CAPEX exceeds $20 billion, but overall generation barely moved the needle (ok… marginally). While our population balloons to 200 million, we unquietly continue to slip into the abyss, becoming the world’s energy poverty capital.
Every year brings a new jamboree – a grand display of rhetoric and spectacle in the name of power. Electricity has “eternally” been the centre of political campaigns. Every year, a new slogan – Siemens project, mobile transmission stations, National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) 2004, privatisation (2013), the Electricity Act 2023, etc, which have all been heralded with fanfare (self included), but few have delivered in perpetuity.
The NESI has become a cesspool of “players, ballers, callers, jobbers, jokers, fixers, and rent-seekers.” They ideate, conjure, cajole, and devise methods to exploit the system while developing and implementing projects that neither see the light of day nor are functional past 24 hours after their demobilisation.
The power sector has become the carrion, which these system vultures prey on – consultants, advisors, contractors, civil society, etc. Their format is always the same. They propose novel ideas with grandstanding PowerPoint decks with bold graphics to sway the unknowing politicians and less-technical civil servants.
Lost in the whirlpool of this misfortune are the Nigerian consumers. Households are living in darkness, hospitals without energy to run life-critical equipment, students who cannot study past sunset, job losses as factories shut down due to energy costs, and energy-induced inflation pushing people further below the poverty line. Billing and collection failures are not technical gaps but broken social contracts eroding systemic trust. These failures are not speculative; they are the reality every Nigerian lives with daily.
The Call for Change
Nigeria’s electricity crisis is not complex. Beyond time and execution, at the current state of electricity in Nigeria, the only three things needed are better billing, stronger collection, and optimisation of existing capacity. Not additional capacity, new plant announcement, new “one thing one thing” transmission project, at least not for now.
The inability to focus on these three points is the missing foundation for NESI development. At this time, the NESI requires reinforcement of its bases by building resilience. Resilience building will primarily focus on improving the efficiency of existing resources. Nigeria does not need another round of policy development, while decades-old policies have failed, and the new ones have yet to be implemented or mature.
My position is that the NESI currently requires an incremental value chain developmental approach rather than the predominant selective deep-dive approach over the last two decades. An incremental transformation explores relatively small, equal, but continuous improvements across the value chain and allows for a steady, linear progression of the whole system. Strategically, incremental transformation helps unlock value more quickly and cost-effectively, and allows for early verification of assumptions with less sunk cost.
Misplaced Priorities
There is an ongoing effort on energy transition in Nigeria, but these sustainability programmes should not be centrally motivated by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, but by availability. Sustainability must be contextualised around local nuances and realities. There is no sustainability without availability, because one can only sustain what exists. After availability, reliability, affordability, and later environmental sustainability should come. As my research into deep decarbonisation in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has shown, climate change mitigation in SSA is primarily co-motivated by the need for infrastructure development, with the environmental piece secondary. Nigeria’s energy sustainability must therefore be about the energy 4As: Availability, Affordability, Accessibility, and Acceptability.
The rush to leapfrog fundamentals is evident but ill-advised, and selfish, in my opinion. The neglect of the simple problem of time-series electricity generation data to focus on an AI-powered power system for Nigeria only indicates misplaced priorities. These are only white elephant projects with no commensurate value to common end users, given the current physical, governance, and economic state of the system. Which data and MLL will the AI be trained on? Automating disorder does not create intelligence; it only scales dysfunction.
There are ongoing “engagements” on virtual power plants (VPP)–aggregation of distributed resources into a unified energy source–in a NESI that lacks a Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) system and can hardly implement Automatic Generation Control (AGC) in the generation facilities. In fact, Nigeria lacks the ancillary service market, which is a crux of the VPP business model. Highly theoretical in the Nigerian context, VPP requires advanced metering, unmatched IoT integration, and an enforceable contract in a value chain with robust N-X reliability contingency, all of which are lacking in the NESI. These conversations are only distractions which will lengthen our “days in darkness”. Today’s central and immediate challenge for the NESI is not an aggregation platform for VPP but value chain basics such as network visibility, metering, controllability, security, and reliability. How about engagement to improve the performance factor of NIPP power plants from the current 17% to at least 35%?
More telling is that people are pitching hydrogen-powered generation when the “simple” natural gas, readily available in Nigeria, cannot be harnessed to power our generation assets. We skip the relatively simple natural gas system for the complexity of hydrogen, which is hard to process, transport, and store, not to mention the large, high-quality energy input required, which Nigeria does not have, and the relative losses in the process.
The Consequences of Inaction
It is saddening that the NESI daily sinks further into perpetual reliance on the government, even after privatisation, for liquidity and perhaps solvency. From paying gas debt to issuing bonds to pay generation companies (GENCOs) to metering programmes, the federal government has become the default “moneybag” rather than a temporary solution. When will the NESI be weaned off government largesse?
If these endless loops do not cease, the outcome is not uncertain. The outcome will be a Nigerian energy transition that is not to clean energy, but to 100% self-generation – the dieselisation of energy. Public confidence will dwindle beyond recovery, assets will be stranded, skills will be lost, and electricity and health costs will increase. Until the NESI chooses genuineness over frivolities, discipline over spectacle, functionality over novelty, and availability over ambition, this crossroad will remain an illusion. There will continue to be constant motion without progress – a system trapped in perpetual darkness.
Nigeria needs to crawl before walking, instead of attempting to fly before crawling.
Bayo Akomolafe writes from Stoney Creek, ON, Canada. He is an independent Power system analyst and Professional Engineer with global hands-on experience in the power sector.