NIGERIANS have barely caught their breath from the fuel subsidy removal and the floating of the naira, and here comes the Federal Government with another gift wrapped in the language of reform. The plan, we are told, is to phase out electricity subsidy payments starting in 2027, a move officials say will address the trillions of naira in legacy debt weighing down the power sector. President Bola Tinubu has already approved a N4 trillion bond programme to help clear the verified debts owed to Generation Companies and gas suppliers.
Mind you, I am not against reform. Nigeria’s power sector has been a theatre of the absurd for decades, and something has to give. But my grouse is with the timing. You don’t remove one subsidy and start planning the removal of another before the first has even settled in the stomach of the common man. Fuel subsidy removal in May 2023 more than tripled pump prices overnight.
The naira, floated weeks later, has lost a huge chunk of its value since. Millions of Nigerians are still trying to find their footing after those two shocks. To now be talking about electricity subsidy phase-out, even with a 2027 start date, is like telling a man who just got out of one hospital bed to start preparing for another admission.
Nigerians have seen this movie before. The power sector was privatised in 2013 with similar promises: stable supply, private capital, an end to the National Electric Power Authority jokes that gave birth to the nickname “Never Expect Power Always.” Thirteen years later, generation capacity still hovers stubbornly below 5,000 megawatts on most days, distribution companies still owe GenCos, GenCos still owe gas suppliers, and the grid still collapses with a regularity that would embarrass a country a tenth our size. Every few years, a new debt figure emerges, a new bond is floated, a new minister promises this time is different. Forgive the scepticism. We have earned it the hard way.
To be sure, the Ministry of Power says there are no immediate plans to raise electricity tariffs during the initial transition phase. That is meant to be reassuring. But we have heard “no immediate plans” before in this country, and it has a way of becoming “with immediate effect” the moment the government needs quick cash.
The objectives on paper sound noble enough: stabilise the power market, attract private investment, improve service delivery without completely cutting off vulnerable consumers. Every government since 1999 has recited some version of that same script. What has changed is the size of the bond and the year on the calendar.
Then there is the matter of the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, and his now famous freezer remark. Speaking at the commissioning of a 3-megawatt solar hybrid power project at Yakubu Gowon University, formerly the University of Abuja, the minister claimed some Nigerians had actually begged him to slow down electricity improvements because everything in their freezer was freezing. His response, in his own words, was that a freezer is meant to do exactly that, let it freeze the food that needs to be frozen. I read the report twice, thinking it was one of those satirical pages that litter our social media space. It was not.
According to the minister, parts of the country that previously went as long as three months without electricity are now enjoying eighteen hours of stable power daily. If that claim holds up under scrutiny, it deserves genuine credit, because Nigerians have suffered enough darkness to celebrate a working freezer. But a single commissioning event and a quotable anecdote about frozen food do not amount to a national power transformation.
There is a difference between a solar hybrid project switched on for cameras and a national grid that has stopped collapsing every other month. Nigerians have been fed press releases about power sector miracles since the Power Holding Company of Nigeria days. Forgive us if we ask for the meter readings before the applause.
Let me steelman the government’s position for a moment, because fairness demands it. Officials argue that the circular debt in the power sector, where GenCos are owed by distribution companies who are themselves squeezed by non-cost-reflective tariffs, is the real reason generation capacity stays locked below 5,000 megawatts for a country of over 200 million people.
Without clearing that debt and eventually removing the subsidy that helps create it, gas suppliers will keep threatening to cut supply, GenCos will keep running below capacity, and blackouts will continue no matter how many solar hybrid projects get commissioned. That argument has merit. A sector cannot run forever on unpaid bills and political goodwill.
Where the argument falls apart is in the sequencing and in the tone. A government that removed fuel subsidy while food inflation was already biting, and floated the naira while businesses were still recovering from COVID-era losses, does not get to act surprised when citizens flinch at the word subsidy again. Nigerians are not economically illiterate. They understand that subsidies distort markets. What they cannot understand is why every painful reform seems to land on their heads first, while the promised relief, cheaper transport from subsidy savings, better roads, functional refineries, takes years to show up, if it shows up at all.
And this is where the minister’s freezer comment becomes more than a throwaway joke. It reveals a mindset in Abuja that treats power supply complaints as a comedy sketch rather than a genuine cry from citizens who cannot afford to run generators on N1,400-a-litre fuel and are now watching their electricity bills climb under the Band A tariff system introduced last year. Somewhere in Maiduguri, in Sokoto, in parts of rural Kogi and Niger, families still light candles at night while a minister in Abuja jokes about freezers working too well.
Small business owners in Aba, Kano, and Onitsha, the same people the government keeps promising will drive job creation, are still budgeting more for diesel than for raw materials. That gap between the language of governance and the reality of the governed is exactly the kind of spectacle that keeps this country stuck.
No doubt, clearing legacy debt to GenCos and gas suppliers is necessary if we ever want a power sector that functions without collapsing every rainy season. But necessity does not excuse poor communication, and it certainly does not excuse mockery, even good-natured mockery, of citizens who are simply struggling to survive back-to-back reforms. A government that wants Nigerians to trust the next round of painful adjustment should start by respecting how exhausted the last two rounds have left them.
What should actually happen between now and 2027 is not complicated, and it does not need a policy document to explain. Publish the debt. Nigerians who are being asked to eventually fund this bailout deserve to see exactly whose figures make up that N4 trillion, not a round number announced at a press briefing and repeated in subsequent statements as though repetition were proof.
Tie any tariff movement to what actually happens on the ground, generation improving, transmission losses shrinking, meters reaching the homes still relying on crazy estimated billing, rather than to a date on a calendar that can be shifted whenever it becomes politically convenient. Protect the vulnerable consumer bands for real, with criteria citizens can see and challenge, not a soft promise whispered to calm nerves. And perhaps the simplest ask of all: officials tasked with selling painful policy to an exhausted population should stop cracking jokes about freezers and start reading the room.
Nigerians are not opposed to a power sector that works. We are opposed to being treated as an afterthought in reforms that keep landing on us first and rewarding us last. The removal of fuel subsidy was sold as a painful but necessary step toward eventual relief. Two years on, most Nigerians are still waiting for that relief to arrive.
Before this government asks the same tired and battered population to absorb another subsidy removal, however gradual, it owes them proof that the last one actually worked. Show us the cheaper transport fares. Then, and only then, can we have an honest conversation about 2027. Anything short of that is asking a hungry man to fast twice before you have proven you can feed him once.
- Nda-Isaiah is a political analyst based in Abuja and can be reached on jonesdryx@gmail.com. His syndicated column appears on News Point Nigeria newspaper on Saturday.