By Kunle Oshobi
There is a particular kind of political audacity that deserves to be admired, if only for its sheer brazenness. It is the audacity of a leader who tells 220 million people that he will fix their power supply, watches the national grid collapse twelve times in a single year, and then quietly budgets N17 billion of public money to wire his own residence off the national grid entirely. If this were fiction, an editor would reject it as too implausible. In Nigeria in 2026, it is simply another week in the Tinubu administration.
“If I do not provide steady electricity in four years, do not vote for me for a second tenure.” Those were Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s own words, delivered with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what Nigerians wanted to hear. It was a bold, categorical, unambiguous promise. No wiggle room. No qualifications. No fine print. Just a straightforward contract between a candidate and his electorate. The problem, nearly three years on, is that the only part of that promise being kept is the part that applies to Aso Rock.
The Inheritance Excuse Has Expired
It has become routine, when confronted with Nigeria’s catastrophic power situation, for the Tinubu administration to point backward. They inherited a broken grid, they say. They met a sector in crisis. This is not entirely false. Nigeria’s transmission infrastructure has been neglected for decades, and the Buhari years before Tinubu were no exception to that neglect.
But the inheritance argument has a shelf life, and it expired some time ago. The country now has an installed generation capacity of over 13,000 megawatts. That capacity, over 70 percent of it built under the Obasanjo administration and completed under the Jonathan administration, is largely stranded because the transmission infrastructure that should wheel it to homes and businesses still hovers at a pitiful 5,000 megawatts. In other words, Nigeria’s leaders spent a generation building the engine but never got around to laying the road. The Tinubu administration is now approaching its third year in office and has not laid a single kilometre of that road in any meaningful sense.
The data is damning. The national grid collapsed twelve times in 2024 alone, in February, March, April, July, August, October (three times that month), November, and December. On one particularly grim day in late December, generation crashed to just 231 megawatts. On another occasion in early 2026, it dropped to 39 megawatts. For context: South Africa, with less than a quarter of Nigeria’s population, generates over 58,000 megawatts. Egypt, with half Nigeria’s population, produces more than 59,000. Nigeria, Africa’s largest economy and most populous nation, struggles to keep the lights on at 4,000 megawatts on an average day. The World Bank estimates that this power failure costs the country 2 percent of GDP annually. Over 60 percent of manufacturing companies had disconnected from the national grid by mid-2025, unable to rely on a system that offered them nothing but uncertainty.
N17 Billion for Aso Rock
Against this backdrop of national darkness, the Tinubu administration has found, buried in consecutive budgets, N17 billion to build a solar mini-grid for the Presidential Villa. N10 billion appeared in the 2025 budget. Another N7 billion was allocated in the 2026 Appropriation Bill for upgrades and maintenance. The Villa, per official plans, is to be fully disconnected from the national grid by March 2026, powered entirely by its own private solar infrastructure, paid for with public funds.
The Presidency, when challenged, offered a defence of surpassing creativity. The Director-General of the Energy Commission of Nigeria explained that it was “unsustainable” for Aso Rock to keep paying its electricity bills, bills that amounted to N483 million in 2024. One is invited to pause here and appreciate the logic: the solution to a N483 million annual electricity bill is a N17 billion solar installation. The presidential spokesperson, for good measure, cited the White House’s use of solar panels as justification, apparently unaware that the American president does not make campaign promises to fix the American grid and then personally opt out of it.
Former Governor Peter Obi put the contradiction plainly: “You cannot tell the people to fast while feasting yourself, securing yourself while Nigerians remain unsecured.” It is a line that cuts because it is simply true. A leader who disconnects the seat of power from the national grid is not just making an energy management decision. He is making a political statement, and the statement is that the grid is not his problem anymore.
The APC’s Thirteen-Year Darkness
It is worth stepping back to appreciate the full arc of this failure. The logical sequence for Nigeria’s power sector was always clear: Obasanjo built the generation capacity and Jonathan completed it; the next step was transmission and distribution. That next step has been waiting for thirteen years of APC governance under both Buhari and Tinubu. What has happened instead? Under Buhari, the Siemens Presidential Power Initiative was signed with great fanfare in 2019, promising to raise transmission capacity to 7,000 megawatts in a first phase and eventually to 25,000. Six years later, the pilot phase remains incomplete, transmission capacity has improved by a reported 700 megawatts at best, and the grid continues to collapse with metronomic regularity.
Under Tinubu, the power minister has been more preoccupied with his 2027 gubernatorial ambitions in Oyo State than with the mandate given to him. Generation companies are owed N4 trillion in legacy debt, with fresh liabilities projected to reach N6.2 trillion in total. The government’s electricity subsidy for 2025 was not even allocated for a significant part of the year, adding financial chaos to technical dysfunction. Band A electricity tariffs were raised by over 200 percent, a move that cost manufacturers an estimated 40 percent increase in input costs and accelerated the exodus from the grid. In 2023 alone, 767 manufacturing firms shut down, costing 18,000 jobs.
A Promise Is a Promise — Until It Isn’t
Tinubu told Nigerians not to vote for him if he failed to fix electricity. That was a promise made in the full glare of public scrutiny, and it was made because the candidate understood that power, or the lack of it, is not an abstract policy question for most Nigerians. It is the difference between a business surviving or closing. Between a student studying at night and sitting in darkness. Between a hospital keeping its equipment running and watching patients die when the generator runs out of diesel.
Three years on, 86 million Nigerians remain entirely without grid connection. Those who are connected receive power for an average of a few hours a day. Manufacturers are fleeing the grid. The grid itself collapses so often that Nigerians have stopped being surprised and simply reached for their generator keys. And the President of the Federal Republic, having failed to fix any of it, has used N17 billion in public money to make sure that none of it is any longer his personal inconvenience.
There is a word for a leader who opts out of the consequences of his own failures while his citizens bear them. It is not a flattering word. And in 2027, when Nigerians return to the polls, Tinubu’s own standard, his own words, his own promise, his own dare to the electorate, will be waiting for him at the ballot box. He set that bar himself, and Nigerians will definitely hold him to it.
Kunle Oshobi is the head of Planning and Strategy of The Narrative Force
