My laptop can run for four or five hours on a full charge. That should be enough for serious work. In Nigeria, it merely begins a negotiation with darkness.
The battery dies precisely when thought becomes useful. Not because the machine is weak, but because public electricity has been absent long enough for private resilience to become another unpaid profession.
We speak about power failure as though it were an inconvenience. It is not. It is a tax on thought.
Every outage interrupts more than appliances. It breaks concentration, delays research, corrupts files, shortens equipment life and forces the worker to become a miniature power company. Before a Nigerian builds software, writes a paper or runs a business, he may first need to buy fuel, service a generator, replace an inverter battery and pray that the transformer has not entered eternal rest.
Then we ask why innovation is expensive.
The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission reported an average available grid-connected generation capacity of about 5,400 megawatts in the fourth quarter of 2025. This is for a country of more than 200 million people. The figure is not darkness itself, but it helps explain why millions experience electricity as a visitor rather than infrastructure.
The access gap is just as grave. World Bank data indicate that roughly four in ten Nigerians still lacked electricity access in 2023. Access also does not guarantee reliability. A wire entering a house is not development if current enters it only when the gods of distribution are briefly cheerful.
The consequences reach beyond comfort. A barber raises prices because fuel costs money. A clinic risks medicines when refrigeration fails. A student studies according to the mood of the grid. A small manufacturer competes against foreign firms while carrying an electricity plant on its back.
Talent survives these conditions. That is often presented as evidence of national strength. It is also evidence of national waste.
We celebrate the young Nigerian who builds through blackouts, poor internet and scarce capital. We should. But resilience has become too convenient for those responsible for removing the obstacle. A society cannot keep manufacturing heroes merely because it refuses to manufacture reliability.
There is progress worth acknowledging. The Electricity Act 2023 opened more room for states to develop electricity markets, and distributed solar and mini-grids can reach places the central grid has neglected. But reform must eventually become current in a socket. Policy does not charge a laptop.
Reliable power is not one item on a long development list. It sits beneath almost every other item. Digital education needs charged devices. Artificial intelligence needs data centres. Modern laboratories need controlled temperatures. Hospitals, factories, farms and financial systems all assume electricity before they can perform their miracles.
A nation may possess brilliant people and still imprison their brilliance inside logistical survival.
The tragedy is not that Nigerians cannot innovate. We already do. The tragedy is how much invention is spent defeating problems that should have been settled before the first idea arrived.
Darkness does not only switch off bulbs. It reduces the number of thoughts a people can carry to completion.
And no nation should mistake unfinished genius for a shortage of genius.
Abraham Ikongshul Ashindortiang
Sources: NERC Fourth Quarter 2025 Report; World Bank Atlas of electricity access; World Bank Nigeria Power Sector Recovery Program.
Comments
Post a Comment