In October 1991, a boldly headlined story appeared in TELL magazine one of Nigeria's most respected newsweeklies of that era. The headline read: "A Light in NEPA's Tunnel?" Beneath it, a subheading carried a promise that would echo through the decades: "With billions of naira in grants and loans in its kitty, the never-do-well NEPA promises to rehabilitate its plants and transformers and thus ensure steady power supply by 1992. But will it?"
NEPA the National Electric Power Authority had raised over ₦3.7 billion from the World Bank and other international financial institutions to rehabilitate its ageing plants and transformers. The goal was unambiguous: steady, reliable electricity for Nigerians by 1992. Hamzat Ibrahim, NEPA's managing director at the time, was quoted as "already realising that the seat of the chief executive of the country's most criticised corporation is hotter than he had imagined." He was fighting vandals, battling a mounting accounting crisis, and trying to pour billions in borrowed money into infrastructure that had been neglected for years.
The question the TELL journalist posed in 1991 has now been answered not by any government press release or electricity authority communiqué, but by thirty-three more years of darkness.
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The Authority That Never Had Authority Over Darkness
NEPA was formed in 1972 through Decree No. 24, a merger of the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN) and the Niger Dams Authority (NDA). On paper, the arrangement made sense: bring generation and distribution under one roof, create economies of scale, deliver power to a modernising nation. The decree even granted NEPA a monopoly the exclusive right to supply commercial electricity across the Federation.
In practice, Nigerians quickly rewrote the acronym. NEPA, they said, stood for "Never Expect Power Always." The blackouts were not occasional interruptions. They were the baseline. Electricity, when it came, was the surprise.
The 1991 World Bank loan was not the first attempt to fix the problem, and it was not the last. It was simply the most documented early instance of a pattern that would define Nigerian governance for the next three decades: borrowed billions, ambitious deadlines, optimistic managing directors, and darkness.
What ₦3.7 Billion Was Supposed to Buy
According to the TELL report, NEPA's rehabilitation plan was focused on its generation plants and transformer network. The authority had imported over 47 per cent of its total generating plants from Europe equipment estimated at $86 million (₦980.4 million at the exchange rate of the time). A survey by the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) had revealed that only about eight per cent of industrial establishments in the country possessed their own electricity generators. The rest were entirely dependent on NEPA. Frequent power fluctuations had, by that point, already compelled almost every sizeable industry to begin investing in backup generation to avoid production losses.
The TELL story quoted Oladapo Fafowora, MAN's director-general at the time: frequent power cuts and voltage fluctuations had made self-generation not a luxury but a survival strategy for Nigerian business.
The ₦3.7 billion loan was meant to change all of that. Rehabilitate the plants. Fix the transformers. End the era of epileptic supply. Have the lights on steadily by 1992.
By 1999 seven years after the promised deadline only 19 out of 79 generator plants were operational, running at a dismal 28 per cent capacity. The borrowed billions had passed through NEPA's accounts. The darkness had not passed from Nigeria's streets.
A Nation of Generators
What emerged from NEPA's repeated failures was not a solution it was an adaptation. Nigerians bought generators. Then they bought bigger generators. Then they built entire industries around buying, fuelling, and repairing generators.
A 1983 joint UNDP/World Bank study conducted nearly a decade before the TELL article had already found that the cost differential between grid electricity and private generation was 16 to 30 per cent for large industrial establishments. Yet over 90 per cent of Nigerian manufacturers had already installed private generation capacity. They were not idealists waiting for NEPA to fix itself. They were rational economic actors insulating themselves from a state institution that had demonstrated, repeatedly, that it could not be relied upon.
By 2008, private generators were collectively supplying an estimated 6,000 megawatts of power to Nigeria's economy more than the national grid was delivering at the time. The country had, in effect, privatised its electricity sector by necessity rather than policy, with millions of households and businesses each running their own miniature, diesel-guzzling power stations. The economic cost of this informal arrangement was staggering: louder cities, more polluted air, higher manufacturing costs, and a perpetual drain on foreign exchange for fuel imports.
The grid, meanwhile, lurched from crisis to crisis.
Thirty Years of Promises, One Pattern
NEPA was renamed the Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) in 2005 though Nigerians, with characteristic humour, suggested this stood for "Please Hold a Candle Now." The power sector was formally privatised in 2013, with generation and distribution assets transferred to private companies. New promises were made. New deadlines were set.
In 2002, President Olusegun Obasanjo lamented inheriting "a meagre 1,500 megawatts" and promised 10,000 megawatts by the end of 2005. That deadline passed. In 2023, President Bola Tinubu pledged 15,000 megawatts within four years, telling Nigerians not to vote for him again if he failed to stabilise power supply.
Nearly three years into that tenure, Nigeria's grid was generating between 4,000 and 5,000 megawatts for a population of over 235 million people among the lowest per-capita electricity consumption figures in the world, estimated at roughly 140 to 181 kilowatt-hours per person annually. On March 17, 2026, 16 out of 33 power plants were offline, dragging national generation to just 3,705 megawatts. The grid had collapsed three times in less than a month by January 2026 alone. Between 2000 and 2022, it is estimated the national grid collapsed at least 564 times.
Nigeria's installed generation capacity stands at around 13,000 to 14,000 megawatts on paper. Average daily delivery to the grid rarely exceeds 5,000. The gap between what exists and what functions is itself a monument to the institutional failure that began long before the TELL magazine article of 1991.
The Accounting of Darkness
The financial toll of this failure is almost incomprehensible in its accumulation. Electricity distribution companies recorded a combined loss of ₦2.4 trillion over 2024 and 2025. The Nigerian power sector carries over ₦6 trillion in legacy debt. Gas supply to thermal plants which account for the bulk of Nigeria's generation runs at less than 43 per cent of daily requirements. Nigeria needs an estimated $34 billion to achieve universal electricity access, according to figures presented at the Nigeria Energy Conference in October 2025.
The social cost is harder to quantify but easier to feel. Hospitals running on generators. Students reading by candlelight or phone screens. Small businesses calculating their monthly diesel budget before their payroll. The TELL article of 1991 mentioned that a restaurant owner on Gbenga Street, Lagos, had "never experienced power" since arriving there and had stopped using her deep freezer. Thirty-five years later, millions of Nigerians have simply structured their lives around the expectation that the lights will go off and that no one will announce when they will return.
The Question That Would Not Go Away
The TELL journalist who wrote that headline in 1991 asked: "But will it?"
The answer, measured across the subsequent decades, is: No. Not in 1992. Not after the PHCN rebrand. Not after privatisation. Not after the Siemens presidential power initiative. Not yet after the Electricity Act of 2023.
This is not, as apologists sometimes suggest, merely a technical problem awaiting a technical solution. Ghana, after its own electricity crisis between 2012 and 2016, restored stable supply through transparent procurement and contractual discipline. Egypt added 14,000 megawatts of capacity in six years by aligning fuel pricing with investment incentives. Morocco built solar plants that now power over a million homes. The difference, in each case, was not superior technology. It was institutional consistency and the absence of the chronic corruption and mismanagement that has drained every loan, every rehabilitation fund, and every bilateral agreement Nigeria has ever signed in the electricity sector.
The ₦3.7 billion borrowed in 1991 was not the problem. The problem was and remains the system into which the money was poured.
In 1991, NEPA's managing director was photographed for TELL magazine under a caption that read: "No end to darkness?" It was intended as a challenge to the new management. It read, three decades later, like a prophecy.
The lights are still waiting to come on.
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