The collapse of power in Nigeria: Bring back ECN, By Jibrin Ibrahim

Earlier today, our neighbourhood, estates around Sun City, organised a protest at the AECD office that serves our area. It was good being on the stomp again. Due to advancing years, my legs have been protesting against standing and marching, so I had gradually been phased out of demonstrations by biology. It felt good to scream out and insult DisCos and the Minister of Power who is a total failure. We reminded them that we are on Band B and are supposed to get between 16 and 20 hours of electricity a day. We feel lucky when we get between two to four hours. Unfortunately, as former elites, most of us cannot afford the price of diesel, so we wallow in darkness although we have paid for electricity.

As we screamed at the office walls, the management had all run away, I remembered with nostalgia the good all days. In the early 1970s, my parents used to complain bitterly about the Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN). Why is it that on some days, we get electricity for only about twenty hours a day, they would grumble. Dear President Bola Tinubu, if you give us twenty hours a day, I will not grumble. Please Excellency, Bring Back ECN.

Due to complains of Nigerians, the Government dissolved ECN in 1972 and established the National Electric Power Authority as a professional company that would guaranty power supply 24-hours a day. With NEPA, power supply declined to less than ten hours a day. Bring Back RCN. In 2005 the Power Holding Company was set up as prelude to privatisation which occurred in 2013 and since then we have seen two significant changes. An astronomical collapse of the price of electricity and a near total collapse in its supply.

The real story is the lack of seriousness of the Nigerian State that has been non-challant about electricity supply. The revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin said it so many years ago that power production is the pathway for placing Russia on the path to development: “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.” Egypt read the memo, understood it and decided to act in the national interest. They raised their electricity production up by 30,000 MW in six years within the last decade. In that short time frame, Egypt achieved self-sufficiency in electricity since June 2015, and now enjoys an electricity surplus of more than 25 per cent. It also spent far less than what we have spent for no tangible results.

Nigerian governments have been promising us the great leap forward in electricity generation and distribution since 1999 but have simply refused to achieve this. Instead, they write fiction. For his eight years in power, President Buhari’s APC administration could not deliver more than 4,000 megawatts of power to consumers and it left after establishing the new tradition of frequent total grid collapse. His predecessors were not better. Let’s start from 2013 when the PDP government assured the nation that it would be producing 20,000 megawatts of electricity by December 2014. The then Minister of Power, Pastor Nebo assured us that we will have 10,000 megawatts produced daily by December 2013 en route to achieving the stated objective.

Going further back, we all remember that on 19^th February 2008, the late President Yar’Adua had launched the Presidential Committee on the Accelerated Expansion of Power. He promised Nigeria that 18-months from that date, Nigeria would be producing at least 6,000 MW of power – i.e. by August 2009. Indeed, during the 2007 election campaigns, Obasanjo’s promise to Nigerians was that by December 2007, his National Integrated Power Project (NIPP) projects alone would be producing 6,000 megawatts. Later, President Yar’Adua explained that President Obasanjo forgot to give contracts for the gas to fire the plants, which he promised would be done by August 2009. As these promises claimed, we were on course to enjoying 20,000 megawatts of electricity by December 2010. Should we forget that the late Chief Bola Ige promised us in June 1999 that by 2001, there will be so much electricity produced in Nigeria that those with private generators will be sorry for themselves, as they will not need it and it will have no second-hand value, as no one else would need them. Yes, indeed, writing fiction as policy is an established tradition of government.

Returning to the current state of affairs, we all recall that in April 2024, without warning, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) raised the electricity tariff for most urban households and industries by 300 per cent, on the basis of a big lie. According to the Vice Chairman of NERC, Musiliu Oseni, Band A electricity consumers regularly get 20-plus hours of electricity supply a day and should pay much more than other consumers who get much less. These privileged Nigerians do not spend much money on fuel for their generators, so they have all the extra money that accrues to them to pay their DisCos. The problem is that everybody in this country knew that this was a lie, another fiction, as no sector of society regularly gets a minimum of 20 hours of electricity a day. You cannot build a new policy on lies and such a huge price increase in the middle of the most severe cost of living crisis in Nigerian history was a death sentence for the economy. Since then, industries, hospitals, universities and even government departments, I dare not add Aso Rock are unable to pay their bills and are closing down or adjusting to operating in darkness.

The original sin was the mode of privatisation of the Nigerian electricity sector. It was a much-anticipated reform exercise that created much hope for Nigerians. Launched in 2010, the exercise was intended to modernise the sector and cater to the country’s growing demand for electricity. However, over a decade later, the desired outcomes have not materialised and the electricity available on the national grid to light up homes and power the economy has stayed at an almost constant 4,500 megawatts (MW). One reason for this is the technical inefficiency of the grid, beginning with badly organised gas supplies, the inability of the transmission system to deploy adequate electricity, and the lack of investment by production and distribution companies.

Such inefficiencies in the sector are compounded by the ‘legacy’ corruption that has led to the poor maintenance of the transmission network during state-ownership and to the presence of politically connected bidders in the privatisation process. The design of contracts and lack of regulatory oversight further deterred credible and technically competent investors during the bidding process. The politically connected nature of many of the acquisitions also mean that the government is reluctant to take any tough decision with regard to the sector. The conditions in which consumers lack supply and firms are unable to make profits have given rise to a host of interdependent corruption mechanisms. As the sector moves deeper into loss, the space for formal earnings becomes narrower, and the perverse incentives to be corrupt deepens. This has now pushed the sector into a state of low-level equilibrium, with significant restructuring needed in order to turn things around. The DisCos, for example, have refused to provide metres to most consumers, so that they can be charged what they have not been supplied.

A recent ACE-SOAS study of the Nigerian power sector reveals that the reality is that we Nigerian consumers spend more to purchase and maintain petrol and diesel generators than we do on electricity from the grid. The power sector reform has been a total failure and for that reason Nigerians are reluctant to pay more for a supply that is erratic and fails repeatedly. It is clear that Nigeria’s power sector is unsustainable, which has repercussions for inclusive growth. The current crisis is a liquidity crisis as a result of deep structural distortions in the sector. The design of contracts, post-privatisation, led to adverse selection, with only politically connected bidders participating in the process, rather than technically competent ones. These bidders used Nigerian banks for financing, which have ended up assuming much of the systemic risk. The financial health of the sector was based on tariffs and projections that could never be politically implemented. Projections for the performance of the sector were based on the generation and distribution companies (which are not publicly listed) reinvesting in the sector to build technical capacity. Instead, the companies started paying themselves. Dramatic increases in tariff lead to more corruption, rather than improvement in power supply. The companies have no intention of investing to improve supply. The entire reform has to be reviewed because the dual goals of increasing efficiency and investment have failed significantly.

The larger question is that since Bola Ige’s promise to sort the problem 26 years ago, five successive presidents have promised to provide adequate power and failed woefully. Obasanjo and Buhari stand out as the greatest failures because they each had eight years as president and as Egypt has shown, that’s more than enough time to solve the problem. The result, we can state categorically, is that Nigerian governments have lost the capacity to govern any sector of the economy and society. Their greatest skill has been in corruption and, not surprisingly, that has been the only growth sector in the country’s Fourth Republic. That is why I can say that they have refused to power our development. We need our Lenin.

A professor of Political Science and development consultant/expert, Jibrin Ibrahim is a Senior Fellow of the Centre for Democracy and Development, and Chair of the Editorial Board of PREMIUM TIMES.