A Sectoral Analysis: Edition One — Power
As Issued by Kenneth Odusola-Stevenson, Director of Media and Publicity, Renewed Hope Ambassadors, Ondo State Chapter
For 34 months, the Government of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, has approached electricity not as a mere commodity, but as a constitutional imperative. The outcome now crystallizing is both elegant in jurisprudence and consequential in economics: the institutionalization of energy federalism as doctrine and practice.
Nigeria’s inherited electricity architecture was a study in structural dissonance. A federation of 200 million citizens was tethered to a unitary grid that achieved neither the efficiencies of centralization nor the resilience of decentralization. Generation was geographically estranged from demand. Transmission infrastructure, conceived in scarcity, became fragile by operation. Distribution companies, encumbered by aggregate technical, commercial, and collection losses, functioned more as custodians of rationing than as purveyors of service. The social consequence was a silent but punitive levy on national productivity — the diesel economy. In it, the metrics of enterprise were recalibrated: output was measured in litres combusted, profitability in hours of generator noise avoided, and competitiveness in the depth of a firm’s fuel reserves. Households rationed light as though it were luxury. Hospitals triaged power as though it were medicine. Schools scheduled learning around the availability of voltage. A republic that cannot guarantee electricity cannot, with integrity, promise industrialization, universal healthcare, or quality education. It can only promise forbearance.
May 2023 inaugurated a legal and philosophical departure from that inheritance. By assenting to constitutional amendments that transfer electricity from the Exclusive to the Concurrent Legislative List, President Tinubu, GCFR, executed more than a legislative amendment. He dissolved a six-decade monopoly of paralysis and re-founded the compact between federation and productivity. The governing principle is subsidiarity — the doctrine that authority, and by extension power, must reside at the level most competent to exercise it and most accountable to those it affects.
Under this new covenant, a state may now legislate, license, generate, transmit, and distribute electricity within its territory. The national grid is no longer conceived as a solitary, vulnerable spine, but as an ecosystem of interoperable, sub-national systems — each responsive to its industrial geography and demographic reality. Thus, Lagos may now align its Lekki and Epe industrial corridors with captive gas-fired generation. Ondo State may convert its bitumen endowment into embedded energy for processing and export zones. Kano may deploy solar-hybrid mini-grids to power irrigation, agro-processing, and cold-chain logistics, collapsing the distance between farm and market. Ekiti may light its knowledge economy with dedicated supply to its universities and technology parks. Power ceases to be a distant, national abstraction. It becomes a local, accountable instrument of development.
Constitutional permission is now yielding operational reality. Across the federation, states are enacting electricity laws, establishing independent regulatory commissions, and gazetting licensing regimes for embedded generation, franchise distribution, and mini-grid development. The Rural Electrification Agency, the Nigeria Electricity Regulatory Commission, and allied federal institutions are evolving from controllers to convenors — providing technical standards, market rules, and catalytic financing without re-imposing centralization.
The private sector, long repelled by regulatory ambiguity and contractual uncertainty, is re-engaging. Bankability is returning because the law is now predictable. Feasibility studies are displacing memoranda of understanding. Bilateral power purchase agreements are being negotiated between industrial clusters and independent power producers, bypassing the congestion and insolvency of the legacy grid. Universities and tertiary hospitals are commissioning hybrid energy systems to retire diesel dependency.
New markets are being authored: a tomato processor in Jos may soon contract directly with a solar farm in Langtang; a garment cluster in Aba may co-invest in a gas turbine in Ukwa. This is the material meaning of democratized productivity: when the welder, the teacher, and the surgeon can all plan their day around the certainty of supply, not the probability of outage.
Reform, however, is not inaugurated by assent. It is sustained by stewardship. Three interlocking imperatives now confront the federation. The first is the economics of bankability. Sub-national markets must be financially credible. Cost-reflective tariffs are indispensable to attract generation investment, yet social equity demands that the vulnerable be protected through targeted subsidies and lifeline bands.
The error of blanket subsidies must not be replicated at state level. The end-user must not be compelled to underwrite the inefficiencies of the past or the hesitations of the present.
The second is the imperative of technical and regulatory capacity. The velocity of law-making exceeds the velocity of line-laying. States must urgently build competent commissions, develop technical codes, enforce safety and service standards, and adjudicate disputes with fairness and speed.
The devolution of authority must not become the decentralization of dysfunction. Competence must follow jurisdiction. The third is the discipline of integration. A federation of state grids remains a national economy. Gas supply and pricing, frequency stability, inter-state wheeling, and system-wide planning require a new etiquette of cooperative federalism. Autonomy without coordination is fragmentation. The centre must remain a guarantor of system integrity, even as it relinquishes operational monopoly.
For Renewed Hope Ambassadors, Ondo State Chapter, the ultimate ledger is neither installed capacity nor peak generation. It is the lived experience of the Nigerian citizen. Macro-watts must descend into micro-relief. When a welder in Owo completes eight uninterrupted hours without the calculus of diesel, reform has arrived. When a cold-room operator in Akure prices fish without factoring spoilage, stability has become succour.
When a final-year student at Adekunle Ajasin University prepares for examinations under LED light rather than the flicker of kerosene, the constitution has performed its highest duty. When a surgeon in the State Specialist Hospital performs a procedure without the contingency of a generator, governance has justified its mandate.
The administration of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu, GCFR, has conferred upon Nigeria the legal instrument to generate its own light. The historic task of this generation is to ensure that light traverses the last mile — to the kitchen that preserves food, to the classroom that preserves dignity, to the factory that preserves employment. It must arrive on time, within budget, and without apology. Between the distortion we inherited and the design we are constructing, there lies one bridge: delivery. In the power sector, delivery will not be measured in megawatts announced at conferences, but in minutes of darkness erased from daily life. It will be measured in the quiet disappearance of generators from residential streets, in the return of night-shift manufacturing, in the revival of small enterprises that once closed at dusk.
That is the eulogy this reform must write. Not in communiqués, but in the condition of lives illuminated. Not in kilowatts, but in possibilities switched on.
In subsequent editions, Renewed Hope Ambassadors, Ondo State Chapter, will continue this sector-by-sector analysis across oil and gas, agriculture, infrastructure development, road network, security, social protection, and fiscal policy.
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