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
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.