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
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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.