In many parts of Nigeria, the first rainfall earlier this week brought something close to relief. Not just from the heat, but from the daily punishment of living in a country where electricity has become a luxury.
March was brutal. In cities like Lagos and Abuja, temperatures stayed between 33 and 38 degrees. And when you combine that kind of heat with poor power supply, what you get is not just discomfort, but exhaustion. Physical exhaustion. Mental exhaustion. Financial exhaustion.
For millions of Nigerians, darkness has become part of daily life.
There is hardly any national embarrassment more consistent than Nigeria’s electricity crisis. The national grid collapses so often that many people no longer react with shock. Businesses lose money, families lose comfort, and yet people are still billed for electricity they never saw.
That is the real insult.
During the 2023 campaign, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu made a bold promise. He said if he failed to solve Nigeria’s power problem, Nigerians should not vote for him for a second term. At the time, it sounded like confidence. Today, it sounds like a statement that may come back to haunt him.
Since he assumed office in May 2023, the national grid has continued to fail repeatedly. In 2024 alone, Nigeria recorded 12 collapses. And even when the entire system does not crash, many communities still live with unstable, unpredictable, and almost useless supply.
At this point, the problem is no longer just technical. It is political. It is administrative. It is a leadership failure.
And perhaps nothing captures that failure more clearly than the fact that even the Presidential Villa appears to have lost faith in the national grid. In 2025, ₦10 billion was budgeted for a solar mini-grid project there. In 2026, another ₦7 billion followed.
Think about that.
The seat of power in Nigeria is quietly preparing to disconnect itself from the same electricity system ordinary Nigerians are forced to depend on. That is not reform. That is escape.
And while the people suffer, they joke to survive.
Nigerians have turned power failure into comedy because if they do not laugh, they may break. In some communities, people see high-tension wires the same way they see trees or signposts—objects in the environment with no practical value. There are even videos online of masquerades climbing streetlight poles because everyone already knows the current is not flowing.
Funny? Maybe.
But it is also tragic.
At the beginning of Tinubu’s administration, there was at least some hope. Rumours circulated that former Kaduna governor, Nasir El-Rufai, had prepared a serious blueprint for the power sector and was even discussing a multi-billion-dollar investment arrangement with Saudi interests.
Whatever the truth of that, it never materialised.
Instead, the ministry landed in the hands of Adebayo Adelabu. And since then, Nigerians have seen very little that suggests strategy, urgency, or transformation.
To say he has failed may actually be too generous. Failure usually implies effort that did not work. The more painful impression is that there has been no convincing evidence of a serious, reform-driven push to fundamentally change the sector.
Yes, some of the problems predate him. Nigeria’s electricity crisis did not start in 2023. The sector has been battling gas shortages, weak infrastructure, liquidity problems, decaying transmission lines, and policy inconsistency for years.
But leadership is tested by what you do with inherited problems.
And under Adelabu, the story has remained the same: excuses, collapses, unstable supply, and cosmetic interventions dressed up as reform.
One of the most controversial outcomes of his tenure has been the continued expansion of electricity payment bands, where consumers are grouped into different tariff categories that often do not reflect actual service delivery. In simple terms, many Nigerians are paying more without getting the reliability they were promised.
That is not reform. That is organised frustration.
Energy experts have repeatedly said the power minister’s role is not to perform miracles from thin air. Nobody expects him to personally generate megawatts. But what Nigerians can reasonably demand is a coherent framework, a workable roadmap, investor confidence, and a reform agenda that does more than recycle old failures.
That is where the biggest disappointment lies.
Nigeria is still behaving like a country trying to run a 21st-century economy with a 20th-century electricity mindset. The operational thinking remains outdated. The bureaucracy is stale. The urgency is missing. The ambition is weak.
And the result is obvious.
A country of over 200 million people is still struggling to consistently deliver around 4,000 megawatts, despite having an installed capacity said to be over 13,000 megawatts. That gap is not just a technical statistic. It is a national disgrace.
It means factories run on diesel. Small businesses depend on generators. Homes survive on inverters, solar panels, candles, rechargeable lamps, and prayers.
Meanwhile, the sector itself remains buried under trillions of naira in debt. By late 2025, estimates placed the burden at around ₦6 trillion. That debt, combined with poor cost recovery, unpaid obligations, and structural inefficiencies, has left the system weak and unattractive to serious investment.
Yet in the middle of this darkness, political ambition still shines.
Adelabu, despite presiding over one of the most frustrating periods in Nigeria’s power history, is still reportedly nursing governorship ambition in Oyo State. And that says a lot about Nigerian politics. In too many cases, poor performance is not punished. It is simply redirected.
That is why accountability remains weak in this country.
The painful part is that Nigeria is not being asked to invent electricity from scratch. Other African countries are showing what is possible.
Egypt has achieved near-universal electricity access. South Africa, despite its own serious load-shedding crisis, still serves a far higher proportion of its population. Ghana and Kenya have also made stronger progress in access and infrastructure expansion than Nigeria.
Nigeria, by contrast, continues to underperform on a scale that should embarrass every government official connected to the sector.
A nation with this size, this population, this economic ambition, and this natural gas potential should not still be negotiating with darkness in 2026.
At some point, the excuses must end.
Because power is not just about bulbs and fans. It is about productivity. It is about education. It is about health. It is about dignity. It is about whether a country is serious about development or simply pretending.
And right now, Nigerians are tired of pretending.
President Tinubu made a promise. Nigerians heard him. They have not forgotten. And if his government truly wants to be judged fairly, then the power sector must stop being a permanent excuse factory.
Until then, every blackout is not just a systems failure.
It is a broken promise.