Why Nigeria Has No Power — From the Marina Power House to the DisCos

Nigeria generates, on a good day, between 4,000 and 4,500 megawatts of grid-delivered electricity for a population of 230 million — roughly 18 watts per person, less than the standby draw of a single mid-range refrigerator. South Africa, half Nigeria's population, dispatches 40,000–48,000 MW. Vietnam, comparable population, 78,000 MW. Egypt, half Nigeria's population, 59,000 MW. The shortfall is not a recent failure; it is the cumulative result of seven discrete policy regimes, each of which inherited a smaller grid (in per-capita terms) than the one before, and each of which left a smaller grid (in per-capita terms) than the one it inherited. The story is not technological. It is constitutional, fiscal, and contractual, and it begins long before NEPA.

Phase I — Native Authority generation, 1896–1950. Lagos got its first generator in 1896 (Marina Power House, Public Works Department) — Africa's third electrified city, after Cape Town and Kimberley. By 1950 the colonial Public Works Department ran roughly 65 MW across seventeen township stations (Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kaduna, Enugu, Ibadan, Jos, Calabar, Zaria, Onitsha, Sapele, Warri, Aba, Maiduguri, Sokoto, Yola, Makurdi, Ilorin). Each was a stand-alone diesel plant serving a single town within an eight-kilometre radius. There was no national grid. Every Northern emirate paid for, ran and metered its own supply, with no interconnection. By independence in 1960 the cumulative installed capacity was 132 MW for a country of 45 million — about three watts per head.

Phase II — ECN and NDA, 1950–1972. The Electricity Corporation of Nigeria Ordinance 1950 consolidated the Lagos and Western Region plants into a single corporation. The Niger Dams Authority (1962) was created to build Kainji (the World Bank's largest single African project at the time), which came online in 1968 at 760 MW. By 1972, total installed capacity reached 805 MW — still less than 13 W per person. The Kainji project succeeded technically; the 330 kV transmission corridor required to carry its power south was funded for only one of the two planned circuits, a 'temporary measure' that became permanent and is still, in 2026, the single largest reason a Kainji breakdown takes 20 % of the national grid offline.

Phase III — NEPA monopoly, 1972–2005. The merger of ECN and NDA into the National Electric Power Authority on 1 April 1972 created the institution whose nickname — 'Never Expect Power Always' — defined the next thirty-three years. Between 1972 and 1999, Egbin (1,320 MW, opened 1985) and Shiroro (600 MW, 1990) were the only new major plants built; routine maintenance was deferred from the 1980s onward, and by 1999 dispatched generation hovered between 1,800 and 2,200 MW against installed capacity of roughly 6,000 MW. The structural cause was tariff: the Electricity Tariff Order 1976 had fixed industrial tariffs below the cost of fuel, on the oil-boom assumption that NEPA's losses could be cross-subsidised forever from federation account allocations. When oil collapsed in 1986, the cross-subsidy collapsed with it. NEPA could not afford diesel, could not afford spares, could not pay engineers. Routine outages reached 1,200 hours/year by 1995.

Phase IV — Obasanjo NIPP, 2005–2010. President Obasanjo announced the National Integrated Power Project in 2004 — ten new gas-fired stations along the Niger Delta gas corridor, totalling 5,453 MW, financed at $8.26 billion from the excess crude account. Construction began in 2005. Of the ten NIPP plants, only one (Geregu I) reached its full nameplate capacity on the originally planned schedule. The others were delayed by between 4 and 12 years, and the EFCC Power Probe of 2008 under Hon. Ndudi Elumelu found that $13.3 billion had been spent across the NEPA/NIPP system between 1999 and 2007 with no proportionate addition to grid output — the largest single line-item fraud finding in the Republic's history at that point.

Phase V — Unbundling and Privatisation, 2010–2013. The Electric Power Sector Reform Act 2005 had legislated the break-up of NEPA into 18 successor companies: 6 generation companies (Gencos), 11 distribution companies (Discos) and 1 transmission company (TCN). The Yar'Adua government delayed implementation; the Jonathan government executed it. On 30 September 2013, the Discos and Gencos were handed over to private investor consortia at a combined sale price of $3.2 billion. The transmission company stayed in federal hands. Three structural errors were baked into the privatisation that have never been undone: (1) the tariff was set by MYTO (Multi-Year Tariff Order) at a level deliberately too low to recover cost, on the political view that voters would not accept cost-reflective tariffs, leaving every Disco loss-making from day one; (2) the gas-to-power chain was not privatised together with generation, leaving the Gencos dependent on the same Nigerian Gas Company they had relied on under NEPA, with the same un-honoured supply contracts and the same domestic gas pricing dispute that has, every year since 2014, capped national generation at well under installed capacity; (3) the Discos inherited 50–70 % aggregate technical, commercial and collection losses, and the privatisation contracts gave them five years to reach 25 % — none did, and the renegotiation has never been completed.

Phase VI — Buhari, Siemens and the Power Sector Recovery Programme, 2015–2023. The Buhari administration inherited the privatised but loss-making sector and responded with four signature interventions, each underwhelming in delivery. (a) The Power Sector Recovery Programme (PSRP), approved by FEC in March 2017 and co-financed with a $750m World Bank Development Policy Operation, was a 2017–2021 roadmap to close the sector's revenue shortfall via tariff cost-recovery, metering, and Disco recapitalisation; none of its three financial milestones were hit on schedule, and the World Bank operation was restructured twice. (b) The Meter Asset Provider (MAP) Regulation 2018 — under which licensed third parties were to install 6 million prepaid meters in 3 years to end estimated billing — installed roughly 1.4 million by end-2020 before being effectively superseded by the National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP) launched October 2020, financed by a ₦120bn CBN intervention loan; the NMMP installed a further ~1.5m meters in its first phase, against an installed customer base of ~12m. As of 2023, over 50 % of grid customers were still on estimated bills. (c) The Siemens Presidential Power Initiative, signed by Buhari and Chancellor Merkel in August 2018 and formalised July 2019, was a three-phase German-government-backed plan to lift end-to-end grid capacity to 7 GW by 2021, 11 GW by 2023 and 25 GW by 2025, focused on transmission and distribution upgrades to relieve the constraint that had repeatedly stranded generation. By the end of Buhari's second term in May 2023 the pilot phase had delivered 10 mobile substations and 10 power transformers — useful, but not even the first of the three capacity milestones. (d) The Service-Reflective (Service-Based) Tariff of November 2020 segmented customers into Bands A–E by hours-of-supply guarantee; Band A and B (those receiving 20+ and 16+ hours) paid cost-reflective tariffs while Bands C–E remained heavily subsidised. The reform was the conceptual precursor to the April 2024 Band A hike, and the first acknowledgment in tariff design that the political settlement could not deliver a uniform cost-reflective price. None of the four reforms changed the headline number: dispatched generation in May 2023, the month Buhari left office, was 4,100 MW — within 200 MW of where he found it in 2015.

Phase VII — the franchise that does not work, 2013–present. What followed privatisation is the longest-running, most expensive and most documented failure in Nigerian regulatory history. Grid collapse events: 8 in 2017, 7 in 2018, 11 in 2019, 4 in 2020, 4 in 2021, 7 in 2022 (including the 25 March 2022 nationwide blackout that lasted 11 hours), 4 in 2023, 12 in 2024, 6 in the first six months of 2025. Average daily generation, 2013–2025: a flat line between 3,500 and 4,500 MW. Disco AT&C losses, 2024: still 45–55 % sector-wide. Federal subsidy to keep the sector solvent at uncost-reflective tariffs, 2015–2023: ₦3.1 trillion cumulative, with a further ₦1.6 trillion in 2024 alone after the April 2024 Band A tariff hike was reversed in part by political pressure. The CBN has, since 2015, run a Power and Aviation Intervention Fund that has disbursed ₦701 billion at concessionary rates to a sector that still cannot pay its gas bills.

The household and firm response has been the most expensive in the world. Nigerian households and businesses own an estimated 22 million backup generators (Access to Energy Institute, 2024), with installed self-generation capacity variously estimated at 20,000 to 40,000 MW — between five and ten times the grid. The effective per-kWh cost of generator electricity (diesel-fuelled, after capital, maintenance and downtime) is $0.22–0.28, the highest peer-set rate in Africa (Energy for Growth Hub, 2024). For the listed companies surveyed in The Fifty-Year Wage Squeeze, generator fuel and maintenance is the second-largest cost line after raw materials and consistently larger than total staff costs — the BUA Foods 2024 audited accounts disclose diesel costs of ₦41 billion against staff costs of ₦14 billion.

Why has none of this been fixed? Three structural answers. First, the constitutional allocation: electricity sits on the Concurrent Legislative List, but until the 2023 Electricity Act amendment the federal government held de facto exclusivity through the Discos' franchise areas, leaving states unable to license generation or run state grids without federal acquiescence. The 2023 Electricity Act (signed by Tinubu, June 2023) finally devolved licensing power; by 2026 only Lagos, Ondo, Edo, Enugu, Ekiti, Imo, Oyo, Plateau, Niger and Kogi had passed enabling state electricity laws, and only Lagos and Enugu had functioning state regulators. Second, the tariff–subsidy trap: every politically acceptable Disco tariff is below cost; every cost-reflective tariff is politically unacceptable; the gap is closed by federal subsidy that crowds out everything else in the budget. The April 2024 Band A reform was an attempt to ring-fence cost-reflective tariffs to the wealthiest 15 % of customers and is the first reform that has survived more than 18 months. Third, the gas dispute: domestic gas is priced in dollars to the Gencos under a regulated formula that incentivises producers to export rather than supply Nigerian power plants. Until the gas pricing dispute is resolved, no amount of new generation capacity will dispatch.

Phase VIII — Aso Rock secedes from the grid, 2024–2026. The clearest single illustration of the sector's collapse is that the federal government itself stopped using it. The electricity subsidy bill reached ₦1.98 trillion over the twelve months to mid-2025, even after the April 2024 Band A hike. The largest single class of defaulters was the government. In 2024 the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) issued a Notice of Disconnection to 86 federal ministries, departments and agencies owing a combined ₦47.1 billion, with the Presidential Villa alone owing ₦923.87 million (NigerianEye, 2024). The Villa's backup generators were installed under General Ibrahim Babangida when the complex was built in the late 1980s and early 1990s and had been running, alongside intermittent AEDC supply, for over thirty years (Platform Times, 2025) — the seat of government had never trusted its own grid. In 2025 the Tinubu administration approved a ₦10 billion solar-plus-storage installation at Aso Rock, citing the Villa's annual electricity bill as 'unsustainable' (The Africa Report, 2025). The State House Medical Centre went solar in May 2025 and, by its own disclosure, ran for months on roughly 97 per cent solar-and-battery with only 3 per cent from AEDC and the diesel generator not switched on once (Platform Times, 2025). In February 2026 the State House announced that the Villa would fully disconnect from the national grid in March 2026, the solar build having been completed in late 2025 and tested through December (Vanguard, 2026). The political signal is unambiguous: the government has spent thirty years on generators, accumulated nearly a billion naira in unpaid bills to a regulated utility, and then spent ₦17 billion of public money to exit the grid altogether — while telling the public to wait for fixes that have not arrived. The retaliation when a Disco tries to collect from the state is sharper still: in March 2025 personnel of the Nigerian Air Force attacked Ikeja Electric staff, abducted the company's chief executive and ransacked its offices after the utility disconnected an NAF facility over a ₦4 billion debt (Vanguard; Punch, 2025). The federal centre will neither pay for power nor permit a private licensee to collect for it; it has now opted out of the grid it controls.

The distributional consequence is what readers can feel. The wealthiest 1 % runs full off-grid solar-plus-storage (₦40–80m installed cost). The next 15 % runs Band A grid plus inverter backup. The next 25 % runs grid-when-available plus petrol generator (₦3,000–8,000/day in fuel). The bottom 60 % has either no connection, an unmetered estimated bill, or a connection so unreliable it is functionally absent — and pays, per kWh actually consumed, the highest electricity rate of any income decile in the country, through kerosene, candles, charcoal, and the labour cost of charging phones at neighbourhood kiosks. The grid is the most regressive utility in the Republic. 130 years after the Marina Power House lit Lagos, the median Nigerian household consumes less electricity in a year than the median South African household consumes in three weeks.