Blackouts Deepen Poverty, Officials Trade Excuses

As households and businesses struggle with prolonged outages and expensive alternatives, Festus Akanbi examines the anger trailing official explanations, the failures impoverishing electricity consumers and former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s renewed call for private-sector control

For Nigerians enduring another night of suffocating heat and another working day without dependable electricity, the official explanations are painfully familiar. Gas shortages. Maintenance. Vandalism. Low water levels. The vocabulary changes little; neither does the darkness. What changes is the damage: depleted savings, spoiled food, abandoned orders, and businesses spending their way towards insolvency to stay open.

The anger surrounding the prolonged outages reflects more than discomfort. Electricity failure strips households of purchasing power and enterprises of working capital. Consumers must finance an alternative supply or endure the consequences of doing without. For families already struggling to meet basic expenses, both choices deepen deprivation.

Against that background, exchanges among power-sector institutions have become particularly galling. While customers count losses, organisations responsible for electricity delivery dispute which part of the system failed. Their explanations contain technical distinctions, but the absence of a coordinated account exposes a management problem whose consequences extend far beyond institutional reputations.

On November 9, the Managing Director of the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors, Sunday Oduntan, apologised during a live television programme. “Apology is needed; it is essential,” he said. 

He warned that operators were returning to the blame-shifting that characterised the industry between 2016 and 2019.

That admission captures the frustration. Years after earlier rounds of accusations, consumers are watching distributors, transmission operators, generators and gas suppliers explain why responsibility belongs elsewhere. The customer remains at the end of this procession, holding an electricity bill and searching for money to buy generator fuel.

An apology acknowledges suffering; it cannot recover a trader’s spoiled stock or restore a workshop’s lost production. Repeated expressions of regret, without sustained improvement, leave consumers financing failures they neither caused nor can fix. For vulnerable businesses, each additional outage eats into the money required to survive the next one.

The exchanges between Power Minister Joseph Tegbe and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited illustrate the coordination deficit. Tegbe attributed reduced supply to planned maintenance at Egbin Power Station, gas constraints affecting some thermal plants and sabotage of transmission infrastructure. He said affected generating units would begin returning within 48 to 72 hours; unfortunately, his assurances, like earlier ones, proved to be political statements without substance.

NNPC defended its gas transportation network and reported approximately 10 per cent growth in gas production during 2026. Its statement distinguished transportation availability from production, commercial arrangements and actual deliveries to individual generating stations.

Those distinctions matter. A functioning pipeline does not establish that every power station received sufficient gas. Increased production does not prove that contracted volumes reached the plants requiring them. Equally, a general reference to gas constraints does not explain whether the difficulty involved supply, payment, transportation or plant readiness.

The apparent contradiction therefore requires investigation rather than competing declarations. Public exchanges lack a consolidated account identifying affected plants, unavailable capacity, delivery shortfalls, and restoration milestones. Nigerians are enduring the consequences while institutions debate how to describe the cause.

Questions about competence consequently become unavoidable. Maintenance is foreseeable. Seasonal changes in water availability require planning. Vulnerable infrastructure demands contingency arrangements. Although no electricity system can eliminate disruption, effective management should prevent separate difficulties from repeatedly combining into prolonged hardship. The present outcome provides little reassurance that existing arrangements are adequate.

Oduntan’s demand for ministerial intervention concerns a basic leadership obligation. Consumers cannot coordinate the gas-to-power chain themselves. Where institutions issue separate explanations while supply deteriorates, the ministry’s assurances must be judged against its ability to reconcile operational information, organise recovery and communicate measurable progress.

The financial consequences are visible in manufacturing. MAN’s regional chairman for Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu, Dr Adaora Chukwudozie, put alternative-power expenditure at approximately N1.35 trillion in 2025, against N1.11 trillion in 2024, an increase of roughly 22 per cent. She identified funds diverted from raw materials, machinery, salaries and expansion into electricity generation.

Behind those figures lies a damaging exchange: money that could increase production instead purchases the means to sustain existing operations. Businesses absorb the expense through reduced margins, transfer some costs to customers or curtail activity. Each response weakens the prospects for investment, affordable goods and employment.

Smaller operators have less room to manoeuvre. A frozen-food seller risks losing stock and the money needed to replace it. A welder loses productive hours when generator fuel becomes unaffordable. A neighbourhood shop must choose between preserving perishables and protecting cash for its next purchase. Outages turn routine commercial decisions into survival calculations.

Households face a similar squeeze. November retail indications place some 12.5-kilogramme cooking-gas refills around or above N21,000, although prices vary. Cooking gas and generator fuel serve different purposes but draw upon the same limited income. Families struggling to prepare meals have fewer resources available to purchase relief from darkness.

Heat compounds the hardship. NiMet’s November outlook projects maximum temperatures between 28.6°C and 37.7°C, with humidity increasing discomfort in parts of southern and North-Central Nigeria. Without affordable backup electricity, even the modest relief of a working fan becomes uncertain.

Premium-paying customers have an additional grievance. NERC places Band A consumers on a minimum supply expectation of 20 hours daily. Persistent shortfalls therefore undermine the service promise underpinning their tariff classification. For affected customers, paying more has failed to secure dependable protection against the darkness.

Against this backdrop, former President Olusegun Obasanjo renewed his call for greater private-sector responsibility. Speaking on November 10 at the Youth Governance Dialogue in Abeokuta, he argued that government alone could not resolve the crisis and urged Nigeria to draw lessons from telecommunications. “Until we put energy in the hands of the private sector, we won’t solve it,” he said.

His intervention reopens an important debate, but Nigeria already transferred major generation and distribution assets to private investors in November 2013. Thirteen years later, the continuing outages require a closer look at what additional privatisation would change. The issue extends to investor capacity, access to finance, regulatory enforcement and the commercial relationships sustaining electricity production.

Private capital can support expansion and operational improvement. Its effectiveness, however, depends on enforceable obligations, credible payment arrangements and institutions capable of holding operators accountable. Transferring assets without securing those conditions risks preserving the weaknesses that leave consumers paying for unreliable service. Obasanjo’s proposal therefore raises questions about the structure and quality of participation, alongside ownership.

For Nigerians counting losses, the test remains straightforward: reliable supply at a cost that leaves room for food, rent and productive investment. Every prolonged outage widens the gap between that expectation and daily experience. Until delivery improves, official explanations will continue to meet anger from households losing purchasing power and businesses watching their capital disappear into the cost of keeping the lights on.