Nigeria's Power Crisis Deepens Under Minister Adelabu
In a scathing editorial, Azu Ishiekwene, Editor-In-Chief of LEADERSHIP, delivers a severe critique of Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu's performance, asserting he has no viable roadmap to solve Nigeria's chronic electricity failures. Despite a national grid capacity of 13,000 MW, supply hovers around only 4,000 MW due to persistent gas shortages, moribund plants, infrastructure deficits, and frequent collapses—12 recorded in 2024 alone. The sector is burdened by approximately ₦6 trillion in debt as of late 2025, fueled by non-cost-reflective tariffs and widespread unpaid bills.
The failure is so systemic that the Presidential villa allocated ₦17 billion combined in 2025 and 2026 for a private solar mini-grid, effectively disconnecting itself from the national grid it oversees. Compared to regional peers like Egypt (100% access), Ghana (89%), and Kenya (76%), only 57% of Nigerians are grid-connected, experiencing outages 85% of the time, with poor metering and corruption perpetuating estimated billing.
The author attributes this stagnation to Adelabu's apparent lack of action or framework to attract investment, noting he operates with a 1950s-era manual. This incompetence, Ishiekwene argues, is compounded by the President's appointment and Senate's confirmation. With ambitions to become Oyo State governor, Adelabu is framed as emblematic of a system that rewards failure. The piece concludes by highlighting the tragic reality: Nigerian businesses rely on Indian generators, homes on Chinese solar panels, and streetlight poles serve as laundry lines because the power is never on.
The core intelligence is that the power sector's collapse is not just technical but profoundly political and managerial. The same problems persist under a minister who, in the author's view, has neither tried nor delivered. The question for citizens is: if the seat of power is building its own escape route, what does that mean for the rest of the country's power future, and what accountability mechanisms exist to address such catastrophic sectoral failure?