Nigeria's water crisis mirrors its electricity crisis. But a nation cannot build prosperity by requiring every family to become its own water utility and electricity provider. Individual ingenuity cannot substitute for public institutions.
We must rediscover the value of collective provision. Water and electricity should not depend on a household's ability to finance its own infrastructure. Government must provide reliable services, while citizens share responsibility for sustaining them. A borehole may solve a family's water problem, and solar panels its electricity problem. Neither, by itself, builds a functioning society.
As a six-year-old boy returning from school, I knew nothing about reservoirs, treatment chemistry or public budgets. I only knew that I could reach the tap in front of our compound, cup my palms and drink clean water. That simple privilege was made possible by collective infrastructure.
On October 8, 2026, Finance Minister Taiwo Oyedele announced a 30-day petrol discount at NNPC stations, prioritising public transport. He proposed a ₦1,350-per-litre ex-gantry or landing-cost ceiling, with suppliers temporarily absorbing excess costs for later recovery.
A 30-day discount for untracked transporters offers temporary relief, not an energy-affordability architecture. I propose a sustained, targeted, measurable and trackable productive-energy subsidy whose impact can be assessed. Support should remain elastic in response to changing market conditions, declining as crude prices fall and CNG infrastructure expands.
THE aim of a leader should be the welfare of the people whom he leads. I have used ‘welfare’ to denote the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the people—Chief Obafemi Awolowo in his 1967 address to Western leaders of thought in Ibadan. On that premise, today’s intervention serves two purposes: a response to President […]
Inclusive prosperity is impossible without grassroots energy availability and affordability. Macroeconomic gains are meaningless if the middle class is priced out of basic survival. To prove this, the essay subjects the presidency's messaging to a microeconomic stress test using three illustrative teachers earning between ₦135,000 and ₦160,000 monthly. The arithmetic reveals that fuelling a modest car and running a small generator for lesson preparation devours a crushing 56% to 66.4% of their income—before food, rent, and healthcare, illustrating how arbitrary subsidy removal plunges professionals below the poverty line. To rescue productivity, the essay advocates for a targeted production subsidy tied to domestically refined crude, proposing an immediate pilot program for verified public school teachers and non-VIP police personnel. By leveraging existing NIN infrastructure, the government can track energy quotas directly to verified individuals, capping fiscal exposure.
LAST week, I returned to Scotland, more than 11 years after completing my Ph.D. at Heriot-Watt University’s School of Energy Geoscience Infrastructure and Society. I landed in the cold City of Edinburgh on Sunday morning to the warm reception of my friend and leader of the Inspire Nigeria Group, Evong Evong. We attended service at […]
A nostalgic return to Scotland inspires reflections on energy affordability in Nigeria and support for Atiku Abubakar’s production-subsidy proposal—with an amendment: target subsidies at vulnerable Nigerians and productive activities, quantify their actual fuel needs, and use data, technology and independent auditing to make the system measurable and difficult to corrupt.
In Part I, we established that Nigeria had 13,625 megawatts of installed grid-connected generation capacity, but only about 5,174 MW was available on average between April 2025 and March 2026, according to quarterly reports by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC).
Part IV traces the financial end of Nigeria’s electricity value chain. It shows that the 30.31 TWh delivered to domestic DisCos carried a total GenCo invoice of about ₦3.14 trillion, of which roughly ₦1.39 trillion was assigned to DisCos through the DRO framework while ₦1.75 trillion became a Federal Government tariff-subsidy obligation. DisCos also faced about ₦320.76 billion in Market Operator obligations and left roughly ₦96.7 billion unpaid during the period.
