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.
zeeks
1 Comments
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.