Government's power reset: ₦3.3 trillion of old debt, two new asset companies and an order to "go fix Mambila"

Nigeria's power problem is not a shortage of plants. That was the message from the two men now running power policy when they spoke at the Nigeria Energy Exhibition and Conference in Lagos on 28 October.

Losses first

Dr Rilwan Babalola, the President's Special Adviser on Power, put it plainly: "The gap is not a shortage of capacity." Installed generation is above 13,000 MW. Daily output is 4,000 to 5,000 MW.

He said losses above the regulator's targets cost the market about ₦150 billion in the second quarter alone. More than a third of the energy delivered to distribution companies in that quarter was not paid for. Loss rates were 30 to 40 per cent depending on the DisCo, roughly double what NERC allows and far from the 5 to 10 per cent he called best practice. About 21 per cent of the power reaching transformers was never billed, and 20 per cent of what was billed was never collected.

Babalola said President Tinubu has approved a "reset and restoration" blueprint built on four commitments: measure every plant and every feeder, fix the chain end to end on losses, metering and collection, prove the fix on a few corridors before scaling it, and complete the market with bilateral contracts between generators and large industrial customers. Technical audits have begun.

The debt

Minister of Power Joseph Tegbe put the sector's legacy debt at about ₦3.3 trillion and said government has paid ₦1.23 trillion of it. For the rest he listed structured settlements, payment assurance mechanisms and net-off arrangements where the law allows them. ThisDay and Arise reported that the government is also considering payment assurance guarantees to stop new debt building up.

Three phases, three corridors

Tegbe's roadmap runs in three stages: stabilise, from June 2026 to February 2027; scale, from March 2027 to June 2028; and transform, from 2028 onwards. It is anchored on five milestones, which he did not list.

Rather than attempt everything at once, the plan starts on three corridors. Lagos-Ogun carries about half of national demand. The others are Benin-Edo-Port Harcourt and Abuja-Kaduna-Kano. Lagos-Ogun and Abuja are the proof-of-concept areas. A problem fifty years in the making, he said, cannot be fixed across the whole country overnight.

Two new companies are part of the plan: a Grid Asset Management Company (GAMCO) and a Renewable Asset Management Company (RAMCO). Both are meant to connect stranded capacity, power that exists but cannot be delivered or sold, with customers able to pay for it. Tegbe named Alaoji, the gas plant in Abia State, as an example of capacity he sees no reason not to evacuate today.

Mambila and the dams

Tegbe said that in a meeting the day before, the President told him, "Minister, go fix Mambila," the 3,050 MW hydropower project in Taraba State that has stalled for years. He also said 21 dams along the Sokoto-Badagry expressway route would be developed into hydro projects, with small hydro supporting farming corridors.

The long-term target stays at 270 GW by 2060, he said, citing the pull of data centres and artificial intelligence on demand elsewhere.

What it means for you

Nothing in the plan changes your supply this month. What it does change is the order of work: losses, metering and collection on a few corridors first, new capacity later. If you live in Lagos, Ogun or Abuja, your DisCo is where the first visible changes should show, in metering and in how outages are reported.

The debt figure is the one to keep an eye on. Legacy debt gets settled with public money one way or another, through the budget, through bonds or through tariffs. How the remaining ₦2 trillion or so is handled will decide whether generators keep running their plants, and that decides how many hours of light you get.