NERC chairman wants half of the World Bank's $750 million solar fund moved to industrial power

The regulator in charge of Nigeria's electricity market has questioned whether the biggest foreign loan for the sector is going to the right place.

Oseni's case

Speaking on a panel on distribution reform at the Nigeria Energy Exhibition and Conference in Lagos, NERC chairman Dr Musiliu Oseni said the World Bank's $750 million DARES programme, which pays for solar mini-grids and home systems in rural areas, is good in itself but should not be the only priority while industries already connected to the grid get poor supply.

"There is a need for us as a country to look at repurposing some funds we are getting from the World Bank," he said, ThisDay reported. His proposal is to divide the money: half for rural access, half for the transmission and distribution bottlenecks that starve industrial centres.

He gave Lagos as the example. The state should receive 1,300 to 1,400 MW on a normal day, he said, but was getting about 700 MW because of transmission lines tripping, a problem the public rarely sees because the transmission company has no direct customers. At ₦1,500 a litre, he reckoned, diesel power costs a factory about ₦500 per kilowatt-hour.

DARES was approved by the World Bank in December 2023 and is run by the Rural Electrification Agency. It aims to give new or better power to 17.5 million Nigerians through 1,350 mini-grids, 250 of them connected to the main grid.

On the DisCos

Oseni said some investors had walked away from even the better distribution companies because their books showed large losses with no clear path to recovery. He put the minimum investment the DisCos need at ₦500 billion and said that would have tariff implications.

Merging DisCos is harder under the Electricity Act 2023, which carved their territories along state lines; Ibadan DisCo, he noted, now straddles five or six states. He said restructuring or fresh capital may be more realistic, and that franchising shows more promise, citing two approved deals in the Kaduna DisCo's area, in Zamfara and southern Kaduna, with Access Power.

The manufacturers' side

Dr Oluwasegun Osindipe, the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria's director of research, said on the same panel that more than 30 per cent of manufacturers have already moved off the grid and another 25 per cent are midway through plans to do so. In 2025 alone, he said, manufacturers spent more than ₦1.3 trillion on their own power, on top of their grid bills.

He said Band A tariffs had risen from ₦68 to ₦209 per kilowatt-hour, more than 230 per cent, without the promised hours of supply, and that members see six to eight outages a day. Asked by Oseni whether manufacturers would pay a premium for guaranteed grid supply, Osindipe said the answer was a mix of both grid and own generation.

What it means for you

The argument is about where scarce money goes: to villages with no power at all, or to the factories and grid customers whose supply keeps failing. Both are real needs, and the World Bank, not NERC, decides how its loan is spent, so nothing changes until Nigeria formally asks.

If you run a business on Band A, the exchange above is the clearest official admission yet that the tariff rise has not been matched by supply. If you live in a village waiting for a mini-grid, it is a sign that the money earmarked for you is now contested. Either way, Lagos getting half the power it should is the number to remember.