By Farooq A. Kperogi
Wherever Nigerians congregate in the diaspora, conversations about our country almost invariably gravitate toward electricity. That was what happened after I delivered a keynote address at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley on October 1. The Nigerians I met there agreed with me that perhaps the greatest incubator of poverty and underdevelopment in our country is the absence of stable, reliable electricity.
Two Nigerian professionals at the university, an engineering professor and a pharmacist, urged me to devote a column to the subject and help make it a defining issue in the 2027 elections. I told them I had written several columns about Nigeria’s electricity woes. They knew. They wanted me to write another one. One of them later sent me a scholarly study of how India, which is several times Nigeria’s size, and which often competes with Nigeria for the dubious distinction of being the poverty capital of the world, has brought electricity to nearly all its households.
I have often wondered why Nigeria’s political class treats electricity as an irritating inconvenience that can be managed with occasional sterile speeches, ministerial reshuffles and grandiose promises. The power crisis has arrested our development, strangled innumerable talents and made the ordinary business of living needlessly expensive. It ought to be the defining issue of every election.
During the 2023 presidential campaign, Bola Ahmed Tinubu told a Nigerian Economic Summit Group audience that “a common screwdriver can create a path to fortune if electricity is taken care of.” One of my compatriots in Texas told me the remark impressed him enough to support Tinubu.
I can understand why. The screwdriver was an unusually evocative trope. Think of the mechanic, the machinist, the carpenter, the barber and the hairdresser who have skills, energy and enterprise but whose work is perpetually interrupted by darkness. Give such people dependable electricity and their modest tools can become instruments of prosperity. Take it away and you force them to spend much of their earnings buying fuel to power their own little electricity companies.
At the groundbreaking of the Gwagwalada power plant in August 2023, Tinubu described electricity as “the greatest human invention of the last 1,000 years” and said Nigeria could never become an industrial powerhouse without it. He understood the problem well enough to speak movingly about it. So, what happened to the electricity he promised?
His choice of Adebayo Adelabu as minister of power offered an early clue. Adelabu had been a deputy governor of the Central Bank, but his consuming political ambition was to govern Oyo State. He saw his ministerial appointment no more than a pathway to the realization of his ambition.
In April this year, he resigned to pursue that ambition. The power sector he left behind remained as benighted as he met it. His successor, Joseph Tegbe, inherited the same chronic crisis. Nigerians are entitled to judge the president by the electricity delivered to their homes and businesses, whatever names appear on the ministerial door.
A 2024 National Bureau of Statistics survey of nine states found that grid-connected households received an average of just 6.61 hours of electricity a day. Households outside the grid had no such six hours to count. As recently as August 2026, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission recorded average grid generation of only about 4,102 megawatts. For a country of Nigeria’s size and possibilities, this is a monumental embarrassment.
In a May 18, 2024 column titled “Nigeria’s Economic Apartheid in Electricity Consumption,” I called the government’s stratification of electricity consumers into bands a form of economic apartheid. The official categories promise Band A consumers at least 20 hours of electricity a day and Band E consumers just four. Our government has bureaucratized chronic darkness and given its degrees impressive alphabetic names. Its ambition should be Band A electricity for everybody.
Compare our circumstances with India’s. A 2022 scholarly study by Debajit Palit and Atul Kumar reported that about 400 million Indians lacked electricity in 2011. By 2019, India had achieved near-universal household electrification. The country then worked to make those connections useful. Its government reports that average rural electricity supply rose from 12.5 hours a day in 2014 to 22.6 hours in 2025. Urban residents now receive an average of more than 23 hours.
India accomplished this through determined government investment in the prosaic infrastructure politicians rarely find glamorous: substations, transformers, feeders and distribution lines. Its Saubhagya program connected roughly 28.6 million households. It strengthened distribution companies, attacked losses and used public financing to get electricity to people whom the market alone had little incentive to serve. The scholarly study identified enabling government policies and financial support among the most important drivers of electrification.
South Africa, which I visited in May 2024, supplies another instructive example. Only a few years ago, its rolling blackouts had become a national torment. The government made room for independent electricity producers, removed licensing obstacles and encouraged private investment in generation. Meanwhile, Eskom repaired and improved its existing plants. On October 2 this year, Eskom reported more than 500 consecutive days without nationwide load shedding. Nigeria should find that achievement particularly humiliating.
Our electricity crisis has consequences that go well beyond the inconvenience of sitting in darkness. It shrinks our imagination of what is possible. Hospitals spend fortunes generating their own power. Businesses that should be expanding spend their capital on diesel. Digital work, automation, refrigeration, precision manufacturing and countless conveniences of modern existence are made prohibitively costly or impossible. Nigerians are compelled to pay a private tax to subsidize government incompetence every time they start a generator.
The engineering professor I met in Texas gave me an illustration that has stayed with me. A computer-controlled Haas vertical milling machine, the sort used to produce sophisticated automobile components, can cost around $100,000. He estimated that running such a machine in Nigeria for 12 hours daily on diesel-generated electricity could consume about ₦155,400 in fuel each working day. Over 25 days, that is nearly ₦3.9 million in diesel alone. That is money a manufacturer elsewhere might spend hiring employees, buying materials or expanding production.
Imagine how many Nigerian inventions die before they are born because the inventors cannot afford the electricity required to make them real. Imagine the jobs that never materialize, the workshops that never open and the economic possibilities that evaporate with every blackout. We have normalized a gigantic national tragedy.
The 2023 Electricity Act has already given states wider powers to establish and regulate electricity markets. Governors, now flush with more money stolen from the poor in the name of subsidy removal, can no longer hide behind Abuja as if electricity were exclusively a federal affliction. They should be required to show what they intend to do with their new financial and jurisdictional powers.
I would like every governor and every aspirant to publish a credible plan to add, as an ambitious starting benchmark, 200 megawatts of generation capacity within four years, subject to each state’s resources and a serious feasibility study.
Tell us whether it will come from gas, solar, hydro or some combination. Tell us where the plants, substations and distribution networks will be built, who will finance them and how electricity will reach the people who need it. A promise to “attract investors” is political noise until someone shows us the financing, the agreements and the timetable.
Tinubu also told Nigerians during the 2023 campaign not to vote for him for a second term if he failed to keep his electricity promise. His spokesman, Bayo Onanuga, has since reminded us of a caveat in the original statement: “unless I give you adequate reasons why I couldn’t deliver.” Well, Nigerians deserve those reasons now. They also deserve explanations from every politician who wants their votes in 2027.
Whoever finally liberates Nigeria from the tyranny of darkness will have struck perhaps the greatest blow against poverty in our modern history. Tinubu’s common screwdriver is still waiting for the electricity that will turn it into a path to fortune.
Farooq Adamu Kperogi is a Nigerian-American professor, author, media scholar, newspaper columnist, blogger and activist. He was a reporter and news editor at many Nigerian newspapers including the Daily Trust, Daily Triumph and the now defunct New Nigerian.
