Nigeria’s national grid collapsed twice in four days in January. Generation crashed from 3,825 megawatts to 39 megawatts in minutes — a country of over 200 million people, plunged into darkness, again. If this happened in any serious country, someone would resign. In Nigeria, the Nigerian Independent System Operator called it a “system-wide disturbance” and moved on. Nobody was fired. Nobody was fined. Nothing changed.
This is not an accident. It is a choice, repeated for decades.
Since 2010, Nigeria has recorded at least 222 partial and total grid collapses. Add a dozen more from 2024 and 2025 alone. Electricity was first generated in this country in 1896. That is 130 years of practice, and we still cannot keep the lights on for a full week. Ageing transformers, some over 50 years old, sit rotting on the network. There is no spinning reserve — no cushion to absorb a shock without the whole system crashing. Gas shortages cripple our power plants routinely, and when saboteurs cut a transmission line, as they did on the 330kV Shiroro–Mando corridor, the response is a shrug.
Meanwhile, the people who could actually fund a stable grid are running from it. More than six in ten manufacturing firms have abandoned the national grid entirely. They are not doing this because they hate Nigeria’s electricity. They are doing it because it does not work. Manufacturers now spend over ₦45 trillion a year — trillion, not billion — on diesel, petrol and captive generators just to keep their factories running. That is money that should be strengthening the grid. Instead, it is being burned, literally, in generators, while ordinary households are left holding the bag for a grid built to serve industry, not families.
The result? Nearly 19,000 manufacturing jobs lost in the first half of 2025 alone. An estimated ₦10.1 trillion lost every single year to a power sector that cannot deliver power. Ask yourself: how many factories, how many jobs, how many small businesses have to die before this becomes an emergency in Abuja the way it already is in every home that just spent the night in darkness?
And let’s be honest about who is failing here. It is not “the sector.” It is not “legacy issues.” It is a government that keeps announcing new agencies — GAMCO is the latest — instead of fixing the basics: paying gas suppliers on time, holding DisCos accountable for rejecting load, giving NISO the independence the Electricity Act actually promised it. It is a policy establishment that spent the Obasanjo years chasing gas as the silver bullet, and is now chasing solar as the new silver bullet, while the transmission backbone that has to carry either one remains a relic.
