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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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.