SPECIAL REPORT: Inside Nigeria’s Power Sector Reset — Tegbe’s First 100 Days

Three months ago, Chief Joseph Tegbe walked into the Ministry of Power with a mandate that has defeated many before him: fix a sector so structurally broken that no single intervention, however well-funded, could repair it alone.

On Monday, at a media parley in Abuja, the Minister laid out what his first 100 days in office actually looked like, and the picture he painted was less a triumph than a candid diagnosis of a patient still in intensive care, but stabilising.

“We have made modest progress,” Tegbe told journalists, careful not to oversell the numbers. “Many Nigerians continue to face unreliable electricity and the cost of self-generation. We recognise that hardship.”

The scale of dysfunction Tegbe inherited is worth dwelling on, because it explains everything that follows. At every link of the electricity value chain — generation, transmission, distribution, and the market itself, his team found decay.

Gas supply to power stations was choked by damaged pipelines and commercial terms unattractive to investors. The generation fleet leaned heavily on ageing thermal plants running on deferred maintenance and stalled projects.

Generation companies, starved of revenue, were being paid for barely 27 percent of their bills, a collection failure severe enough to threaten their ability to maintain equipment or pay gas suppliers at all.

Transmission fared no better: vandalised towers, overstretched lines, and a network prone to tripping under pressure. Distribution, the layer closest to the consumer, was haemorrhaging 30 to 40 percent of electricity to technical faults, poor metering, estimated billing and weak collection discipline.

Layered atop this was a market choking on debt government ministries alone owed more than 100 billion naira, and a fog of inconsistent data that made it hard for policymakers to even agree on the facts.

Tegbe described the resulting dynamic in blunt terms: a self-reinforcing cycle in which unpaid bills starve gas supply and maintenance, unreliable supply depresses collections, and poor collections deepen debt further still. “A new power station cannot, by itself, resolve that cycle,” he said. It is this diagnosis, not political theatre that he says justified devoting the first 100 days to stabilisation rather than headline-grabbing expansion.

THREE PILLARS, ONE STRATEGY

The Minister’s programme rests on three interlocking pillars: stabilising the value chain, restoring market discipline, and strengthening governance. Progress on each, he argued, is what will eventually translate into something Nigerians can actually feel in their homes and businesses.

Stabilising the value chain. The most visible win is the return of the 375 MW Alaoji open-cycle plant to the national grid after three years offline. Transformer upgrades at Apapa, Ijora, Alausa and Lekki in Lagos, plus a new 300 MVA unit at Katampe in Abuja, have unlocked more than 900 MW of transmission capacity in the country’s two most demand-hungry corridors.

The dividend shows up in the numbers: generation and transmission have recently topped 5,000 MW, up from a 3,700–4,700 MW range before June, with a peak of 5,330 MW recorded in August and September.

Less glamorous but arguably just as consequential is the unsticking of bureaucracy. Working with relevant agencies, the Ministry helped free over 300 containers of transmission equipment stranded at Nigerian ports — hardware that had sat idle while projects remained unfinished for want of exactly that equipment.

On the renewables side, the Rural Electrification Agency and its partners have completed 62 solar and mini-grid installations across 30 states, adding roughly 43.6 MW of installed solar capacity, 41,735 new connections and an estimated 208,000 beneficiaries. A 3MW solar hybrid system recently commissioned at Yakubu Gowon University now powers a campus of over 50,000 students and staff.

The government has also launched the Renewable Asset Management Company (RAMCO), a first for Nigeria tasked with professionally managing publicly financed renewable assets and targeting N3 trillion in long-term investment.

Restoring market discipline. Here the numbers speak to the sector’s core problem: money. An estimated N1.23 trillion has been raised toward clearing the N3.3 trillion backlog of sector debt. Targeted enforcement along the Ikorodu-Sagamu industrial corridor has blocked an estimated N120 billion in annual losses to energy theft and revenue leakage.

Metering has seen roughly 350,000 installations in the first 100 days, pushing cumulative installations past one million. The resolution of long-running AMMON litigation has unlocked procurement of about 1.4 million more smart meters, while a Power Force programme is training 5,000 young Nigerians as installers. Notably, Tegbe was emphatic on one point: “We have no plan to increase electricity tariffs.”

Strengthening governance. The Minister described efforts to fully operationalise the Electricity Act 2023 in partnership with subnational regulatory commissions, framing decentralisation not as a threat to federal authority but as an opportunity for competition and investment.

MOBILISATION OF FOREIGN CAPITAL

A significant share of the Ministry’s diplomatic energy in these 100 days has gone into a renewed push with Chinese investors. A Nigeria-China power mission secured fresh commitments from Sinomach, CMEC, CNEEC and Chinese financiers, tied to firm delivery schedules rather than vague intent.

CMEC has reaffirmed its role in the 1.9 GW Presidential Power Initiative, with first transmission lines due in early 2027. CNEEC has advanced financing for the $116 million Zungeru evacuation project. TBEA has floated a $500 million industrial park for power-equipment manufacturing alongside a three-year delivery path for the East-West Super Grid. HengFei Cables has committed to supplying cable for PPI Phase Two, with proposals for a local assembly plant and training centre. Separately, a cooperation agreement with Huawei targets grid digitalisation, loss reduction and SCADA system upgrades.

Perhaps the most symbolically significant development came from arbitration, not negotiation: Nigeria’s victory in the long-running Mambila Hydro Power case, which the Minister said has reopened a path potentially a phased one, toward delivering one of the country’s largest stalled renewable energy projects.

THE ROAD AHEAD

Tegbe was careful to frame the achievements as incomplete by design. “National progress can coexist with an unreliable feeder in a particular community,” he said, rejecting any suggestion that improvements in Lagos or Abuja erase the experience of communities still in the dark. “This is not a sprint, rather, it is a marathon.”

Four priorities now define the next phase: deepening grid stabilisation along the Lagos, Enugu–Port Harcourt and Abuja–Kaduna–Kano corridors; launching development of a Transmission Super Grid; improving utilisation of existing generation assets through bilateral GenCo-DisCo arrangements; and preparing infrastructure — including the Mambila project and smaller hydro schemes — for future demand growth.

What distinguishes this account from typical ministerial self-assessment is its restraint. Tegbe repeatedly resisted the temptation to declare victory, framing even the flagship 5,330 MW peak as a foundation rather than an achievement to rest on.

The real test of this “diagnosis and stabilisation” strategy will come in the next six months, when the Ministry has promised to report progress against concrete service measures — supply reliability, billing accuracy, and complaint resolution, rather than aggregate megawatt figures that can mask uneven local experience.

Whether the debt-clearance drive, the metering push and the Chinese-financed transmission projects convert into fewer blackouts for ordinary Nigerians remains the open question.

For now, the Minister’s closing message doubled as a plea for patience: quoting motivational author Steve Maraboli, he told Nigerians that “an inch of improvement is better than a mile of intentions,” an apt summary of a sector attempting to rebuild itself one transformer, one meter, and one repaid debt at a time.

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