By the early 2020s Nigerians had quietly built — without policy, without subsidy, without a single ministerial announcement — the largest private off-grid electricity system on the continent. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimated in 2022 that captive generation in Nigeria exceeded 40 GW of installed capacity, against a grid that struggled to transmit 4–5 GW (Power story). What sat behind that 40 GW was an electronics market: petrol and diesel generators (the 'I-Pass-My-Neighbour' 0.65kVA Tiger / Sumec / Elepaq tier, the 5kVA Mikano / Lutian / Senci tier, the 100kVA-plus Cummins / Perkins industrial tier), inverters, batteries, charge controllers and — increasingly — solar panels.
The inverter-and-battery layer is now its own category. A typical Lagos middle-class installation in 2024 — 3.5kVA hybrid inverter (Felicity, Must, or Luminous), four 220Ah tubular gel batteries, four 450W mono-PERC panels — costs ₦2.8–3.6m installed, runs essentials (fridge, fans, lights, TV, decoders, internet router) through a full day-and-night cycle, and pays back against generator petrol in 18–28 months at 2024 PMS prices (subsidy story). The next tier up — 7.5–10kVA hybrid systems with lithium iron phosphate banks — runs air-conditioning. SME installations of 20–60kVA cover bank branches, fintech offices, hospitals, schools. The hardware is almost entirely Chinese (Act III); the design, installation and aftercare is a domestic engineering trade now employing tens of thousands across the country.
A second category sits below that one: rechargeable everything. Rechargeable LED lanterns, rechargeable standing fans, rechargeable hair-clippers, rechargeable kettles, rechargeable blenders, rechargeable mosquito killers. These are products that existed nowhere else in the world as mass-market categories because nowhere else in the world is the grid this unreliable. The Sumec Firman rechargeable fan and the Eco-Brand rechargeable lantern became, in the 2015–2024 period, what the National refrigerator and the Sanyo television had been in Act I — the appliance every household owned.
At the very bottom of the income distribution, the pay-as-you-go solar home system — Lumos, d.light, Sun King, Easy Solar, Greenlight Planet — became the route by which an estimated 8–10 million Nigerians got their first reliable electricity service. Sold on mobile-money instalments of ₦300–₦1,200 a week, the kits typically provide a 50–100W panel, an 18–30Ah lithium battery, four to six LED bulbs, a radio, phone charging, and on the larger units a small fan and a 19-inch DC television. The PAYGO sector raised over $300m in equity and debt for Nigerian operations between 2016 and 2023 (GOGLA), and is the largest line of off-grid solar deployment anywhere in Africa outside Kenya.
The meta-pattern across all five acts of this electronics story is the same. The Nigerian state has not built an electronics industry; the Nigerian state has not even reliably delivered the electricity to use one. What the country has done — through Lagos traders, Aba technicians, Igbo importers, Lebanese distributors, Chinese factories, and tens of millions of households making rational decisions about Hisense versus LG and inverter versus generator — is build a mass-market consumer electronics economy on top of a failed industrial policy and a broken grid. The shelves are full. The factories are abroad. The repairmen are local. The lights, for those who can afford the inverter, are on.
Figure 1
Nigerian consumer-electronics market share, 1972–2024 (% by units sold)
Three waves: Japanese assembly, Korean retail dominance, then a Chinese flood out of Alaba and Computer Village. Local assembly never rose above one fifth.