By Geraldine Onyenweaku
Across Lagos and much of Nigeria, the lights are going out and staying out. For long stretches of the day, millions of homes and businesses are left without electricity, making it impossible to perform even the most basic tasks: keeping food from spoiling, pumping water, charging a phone, or running a small shop. When consumers cry out to their electricity distribution companies, the response, more often than not, is silence. The excuses have become painfully familiar. Sometimes it’s a collapsed national grid, a problem the distribution companies say is beyond their control. Other times, it’s simply that the scale of the breakdown has overwhelmed them. Either way, the outcome for ordinary Nigerians is the same: they are left to bear the cost of a system that keeps failing them. “A Whole Day Without Light.”
Nowhere is the frustration more visible than in Ogba, a residential and commercial hub in Lagos, where residents say they have all but given up hope of the situation improving. Pleas to have electricity restored have gone largely unanswered, with some households going an entire day without any sight of power. Mrs Kudirat Oyebanji, a hairdresser who runs a small salon in the Ogba area, said the outages have taken a direct toll on her livelihood. At home, she can no longer rely on her refrigerator to preserve food, she said, and her business suffers whenever the community is plunged into darkness, which, she noted, happens often. “Life, here, has become extremely frustrating,” she said, adding that decent living feels increasingly out of reach in a country where, in her words, “government exists for show rather than service, more interested in helping itself to public funds than serving the people who elected it.” Households Bear the Brunt.
For families like the Oyebanjis, epileptic power supply is not an inconvenience; it is a daily emergency. Refrigerators stocked with food go warm for hours, and perishables spoil, wiping out money that households can ill afford to lose. Water pumps sit idle, forcing families to go without running water. Children study by candlelight or phone torch. For many, the only alternative is a petrol or diesel generator, an expense that has become steadily harder to bear as fuel prices climb. The frustration is compounded by a sense of helplessness. Complaints to distribution companies frequently go unanswered, and consumers say they have little recourse when billed for power they never received.
Small and medium businesses, the backbone of Nigeria’s economy, are arguably taking the hardest hit. With grid power unreliable, many have no choice but to run generators for most of the working day, absorbing the high cost of petrol, diesel, or gas just to stay open.
For businesses already operating on thin margins, like Mrs Oyebanji’s salon, this added cost eats directly into profit, and in many cases, into survival. Manufacturers, cold-chain operators, and food vendors are especially exposed, as extended outages mean lost inventory and lost income in equal measure.
The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, has publicly acknowledged the scale of the crisis. Speaking recently at the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry’s Renewable Energy Outlook Conference, he admitted that although Nigeria has installed generation capacity of more than 13,000 megawatts, less than half of that reliably reaches consumers, a gap he described as a paradox of remarkable natural endowment and underwhelming performance. Tegbe pointed to the grid disturbances of late 2025 and early 2026, which plunged Lagos, Abuja, and Port Harcourt into darkness as proof that piecemeal fixes will not work, arguing that his administration is pursuing systemic reform instead of incremental tinkering. He cited progress under the Electricity Act 2023, which now allows states to generate, transmit, and regulate their own power supply, with roughly 20 states having enacted their own electricity laws.
On infrastructure, he said 82 power transformers were installed between 2024 and 2025, adding more than 8,500MVA in transmission capacity, while a $1.16 billion grid digitalisation programme, including over 3,000 kilometres of fibre-optic cable and upgrades to more than 100 substations, is about 69 percent complete. Still, the minister’s assurances are being met with scepticism shaped by history.
Earlier this year, reports suggested Tegbe had promised to fix the national grid within 100 days of taking office; his office later clarified that only “visible stabilisation” was intended within that window, with comprehensive reform expected to take up to a year.
But, for many consumers of electricity, it is a familiar pattern: his predecessor made similarly confident pledges for 2026, promising an end to grid collapses, only for outages to continue into the new year, deepening public doubt that promises from Abuja will translate into light in homes like Mrs Oyebanji’s.
What has deepened public anger is the perception that government attention is elsewhere. As blackouts stretch on and complaints pile up, many Nigerians echoing Mrs Oyebanji’s frustration feel that policymakers are more focused on positioning for the next general election than on fixing a crisis that touches nearly every household in the country.
This is not a hidden problem. Nigeria’s power sector has for years struggled with an ageing and undersized grid, insufficient gas supply to power plants, and distribution networks that have not kept pace with demand.
Analysts have repeatedly warned that without urgent investment in generation, transmission, and grid stability, outages will keep worsening rather than improving. Yet for many consumers, the promises of reform have not translated into light in their homes.
The electricity crisis is no longer just a comfort issue; it is an economic one. Every hour without power is an hour of lost productivity, spoiled goods, and mounting frustration for a population already grappling with a difficult economy. Left unaddressed, the crisis risks deepening poverty, stalling small business growth, and further eroding public trust in the government’s ability to deliver on basic services.
For residents of Ogba and millions like them across Nigeria, the message is simple and urgent: the lights need to come back on, and government action, not campaign promises, is what will make that happen.