Nigeria woke up to darkness again on September 10, 2025 — the national grid collapsed, and generation plunged from roughly 2,918 megawatts to 1.5 megawatts in the space of an hour. The collapse is painfully literal: lights out, hospitals on emergency power, businesses frozen, the public scrambling for answers. The headlines are the same as they always are on these days of shame — “national grid collapses again” — but the human story is getting worse, not better.
This is not a technical quirk happening in isolation. It is the predictable consequence of choices: a decades-old transmission system starved of investment, chronic vandalism and sabotage of lines, a power market riddled with opaque contracts and broken promises, and regulators and players who too often serve private reward rather than public service. Government rhetoric promised 18 hours of light after subsidy removal; what it delivered instead is sky-high bills, rolling rationing, and a grid that implodes at the first sign of stress. The result is a perverse economy where citizens pay world-class prices for third-world service — and pay twice: first with their cash, and then with their lives when hospitals flicker and ventilators go silent. (See President Tinubu’s emergency appeal on power in health facilities.)
Across the Federal Capital Territory this year, residents and businesses have lived under rationing orders and planned outages — not infrequent, not local, but extended and predictable in the wrong way. The Transmission Company of Nigeria and distribution firms have announced deliberate supply reductions to whole axes of the FCT during infrastructure works and in response to system fragility, and residents report rotating schedules that leave communities dark for long stretches (one-day-off and other rationing patterns have been widely reported). What is being called “load-shedding” in polite technical terms reads to the average person as punishment: two days with light, one day without; or weeks of scheduled reductions while bills arrive as if nothing has changed.
And who pays for this misgovernance? Small businesses do — in cash and in closure. The private sector’s pain is not abstract. Recent analyses and private-sector groups have documented a hemorrhage: roughly 30 percent of Nigeria’s registered micro, small and medium enterprises — amounting to about 7.2 million MSMEs out of some 24 million — shut down between 2023 and 2024 amid the brutal business climate, of which unreliable power was a central driver. Small traders, tailors, food processors, welders, and shop owners once counted on a fragile margin; without reliable electricity, those margins evaporate and enterprises fold. The economic toll is staggering: beyond closures, experts estimate annual losses to small businesses from unreliable energy in the tens of billions of dollars. These are not abstract figures on a spreadsheet — they mark livelihoods extinguished and jobs that will not return.
So do not let the politicians sanitize the language. When ministers and officials speak of “concern” and “regret” — as the presidency has done about outages in hospitals — understand the translation: promises that failed to happen, pledges that were paper-thin, and a system that values damage control prose more than systemic overhaul. Concern is diplomatic for apology without consequence. Meanwhile, ordinary Nigerians are left to ration their lives around electricity schedules and to buy light with crippling costs: households forced back to diesel generators, clinics turning to small-scale solar where they can, and families paying monthly bills that eat into rent and food.
If this reads like anger, it is supposed to. This is the other kind of national emergency — not only the spark that trips a generator, but the slow burn of greed and mismanagement that makes every blackout meaningful. When billions are budgeted and contracts issued but substations remain unfinished and meters stay uninstalled, we are not talking about mere technical failure. We are describing a moral failure: graft that inflates projects, procurement that favours cronies, and a regulatory environment that excuses those who should be held to account. Until we foreground transparency, recover stolen value, and align incentives so that private operators are paid for performance rather than speculation, every reform will be a rerun and every tariff rise will feel like theft.
There is a temptation to dream in engineering fixes alone — add capacity here, lay a line there, privatize this. Those are necessary steps, but they are insufficient. The lights will remain fragile while a handful capture the revenue and millions shoulder the risk. Real reform demands three non-technical shifts: first, ruthless accountability for public money and contracts in the power chain; second, a transparent, performance-based market where generators, transmitters and distributors are paid for delivered megawatts, not for paperwork; and third, an emergency social policy to protect the poorest from becoming recipients of permanent austerity — because a minimum wage earner paying tens of thousands monthly for estimated bills is not a policy outcome, it is state violence in slow motion. (Recent reporting on rationing and its human impact illustrates how supply decisions translate to household catastrophe.)
Let us be blunt: we cannot fix the national grid until we fix our national greed. Fixing greed is not about moralizing individuals alone; it is about restructuring systems so that public infrastructure serves the public and private profit is tethered strictly to public value. It is about ending the cycles where every crisis becomes an opportunity for arbitrage, and where technical consultants, middlemen, and shadowy firms skim value while communities stay in the dark. When transparency replaces opacity and when corruption from transmission towers to meter-reading is treated as a national security threat, then we might begin to see durable light. Until that day, every “collapse” will be a page in the same indictment: that this country can price electricity as if it were a luxury, while delivering it like a charity.
This is not an essay for the comfortable. It is a summons. The stakes are maternal wards that cannot run incubators, clinics that cannot perform CT scans, factories that cannot keep jobs, shops that cannot keep stock. When a nation tolerates such a calamity while cashing the bills, it betrays its social compact. Let us stop pretending the problem is only technical jargon and start treating it as the political and economic emergency it is. Let us demand audits, swift prosecutions where crimes exist, and a reconfiguration of power markets so that investors who deliver power are rewarded and parasites who profit from failure are starved of opportunity.
If you want the lights to stay on, do not lull yourself with slogans and assurances. Demand evidence of reform: transparent contracts, published performance metrics, independent audits, and real protections for the vulnerable. Only when policy, enforcement, and public interest align will a grid that collapses on September afternoons become a memory rather than a ritual. Until then, we keep paying a public price for private greed — in bills, in business closures, and in lives lost in the dark.
Only when we conquer greed will Nigeria truly conquer darkness.
— Mohammed Bello Doka
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