‘The Owners Are Billing Darkness’: Ben Murray-Bruce Urges Tinubu to Reset Nigeria’s Power Sector

OPEN LETTER TO MR PRESIDENT: START THE DANCE ON ELECTRICITY. THE PRIVATIZATION FAILED. THE OWNERS ARE BILLING DARKNESS.

Your Excellency,

I write not to insult anybody. I write to end a national pretence.

In April this year, our own regulator, NERC, published the figures. Of 13,625 megawatts of installed generation capacity, only 4,286 megawatts were available for dispatch. Thirty-one per cent. Ten plants out of twenty-eight produced eighty-one per cent of everything the country generated.

Six days ago, on Saturday 22 August, the grid fell to 1,132 megawatts at half past eight in the evening, down from above 4,000 megawatts the same afternoon. Twelve stations were producing nothing at all. Egbin. Geregu. Kainji. Shiroro. Zungeru. Nobody has explained why. Nobody ever does.

That is not an industry, Your Excellency. That is a rumour of an industry.

Let us name the original sin.

The 2013 privatisation was not a reform. It was a transfer of custody.

The men and women who bought the GenCos and the DisCos had enough money to purchase the assets. They did not have enough money to run them. Owning a power station and capitalising a power station are two different economic acts, and we confused them.

So let me say the thing everybody in Abuja knows and nobody will put in writing: by the standard of what this industry actually requires, the people who bought Nigeria’s electricity assets are poor. Not poor as men, but poor as utilities. A serious distribution company in a country of 240 million people needs a balance sheet measured in billions of dollars, not billions of naira. They do not have it. They never had it. They were never going to have it.

We should have sold these assets to first-class multinational operators with global brands, technical depth and the capacity to sink billions of dollars into the network before earning a kobo back. Instead we handed a national utility to a consortium of gentlemen with bank loans.

What did we get? We got PHCN, with debt.

PHCN could not run the assets and owed nothing. Today, private owners cannot run the assets and the nation is buried in liabilities. The GenCos say they are owed over ₦7 trillion. Your Government has had to approve a ₦4 trillion bond programme to clean up the mess. Roughly ₦10 trillion of public money has gone into this sector in thirteen years and the lights are still off.

The process was not imperfect. It was a monumental catastrophe. Let us stop debating a corpse.

To the DisCos, let me be direct.

As of February this year, 5.1 million of Nigeria’s 12.31 million active electricity customers were still unmetered. Forty-one per cent. Yola meters 31.86 per cent of its customers. Jos, 34.04. Kano, 35.37. Kaduna, 35.59. Ibadan, with the largest customer base in the country, has left nearly half of 2.48 million customers without a meter.

And yet between January and April, the DisCos collected ₦801.16 billion.

Let us be honest about what that is. A meter is a machine that tells the truth. An estimated bill is a machine that does not. An industry that cannot generate power has discovered it can still generate revenue by billing darkness. That is not a business model. That is a levy on a suffering people, and it is enforced with the coercive power of a monopoly the state granted them.

To the GenCos: you are owed. That is true and I will not pretend otherwise. But you contracted into a market you knew was insolvent, and you have spent a decade lobbying for tariffs and bailouts rather than capital. You cannot be a private company on the day the tariff rises and a public charity on the day the invoice falls due.

Now let me tell you what will actually work.

Your Excellency, the answer is not another minister, another summit, another Siemens phase. The answer is to stop trying to power 240 million people from one wire.

Every village, every estate, every community in Nigeria should have its own PHCN.

Here is the model, and it is not theory.

Suppose you are the chairman of Dolphin Estate in Lagos which has about five thousand families. You go to a bank. You borrow ₦3 billion to build metered solar generation sufficient to supply the estate one hundred per cent. The State Government guarantees the loan. You use the meters already installed. Residents pay the association for power at cost plus a regulated margin of twenty-five per cent. Those who do not pay are disconnected, as the law provides.

Multiply that across every estate, every ward, every community in this country.

You will not merely have solved electricity. You will have created a new class of millionaires and billionaires in every local government area in Nigeria. Owners, not beneficiaries. Nigerians are entrepreneurs by nature. They are bold, they are intelligent, they are creative. Give them a guaranteed loan and a customer base and stand out of the way.

Then divide the remaining responsibility honestly:

The States power their streetlights, police stations, primary health centres, schools and secondary roads largely by solar, which requires no fuel, no gas pipeline and no vandalised transmission line. Security improves in every community the day the streetlights stay on.

The Federal Government powers federal roads, federal hospitals, federal universities and federal institutions. Nothing more.

The Minister of Power supervises the Commissioners of Power in the thirty-six states and the FCT. He is not the electrician of the Federal Republic. He is the coordinator of a federation.

And before anybody opens their mouth to argue about money: the funds exist. The World Bank puts the cost of unreliable electricity to this economy at roughly $26 billion every year. Households and small businesses spend about $12 billion annually buying and running generators. The AfDB reported this year that seven in ten Nigerian firms depend on generators, losing about three per cent of annual sales to outages. We are already paying for power. We are simply paying for the most expensive, dirtiest and least reliable version of it ever devised.

The law is already on your side, Mr President.

The Electricity Act of 2023 signed by you, removed electricity from the Exclusive Legislative List. Seventeen states have now taken regulatory control of their own markets. The legal architecture for everything I have described already exists. What is missing is not law. It is nerve.

And the proof is not hypothetical. On 23 January this year, the national grid collapsed completely, and generation fell to 20 megawatts. The entire Federal Republic went dark. Except Aba. Nine hundred thousand people in Aba kept their lights on, because Geometric Power’s 188 megawatts and its metered network do not depend on Abuja.

One city solved it. Not with a policy paper. With a plant and a meter.

Finally, to my fellow Nigerians.

Stop blaming the President for the darkness in your street.

Since 2023, electricity has been a concurrent responsibility. Your streetlight is your governor’s job. Your community’s power is your local government chairman’s job. When you deregulate, the cost of power in a state is a matter for your State Electricity Regulatory Commission, not Aso Rock. Go to the Government House. Go to the council secretariat. Ask them what they have done with the powers this President signed into law.

Your Excellency, the Federal Government has itself paid only about ₦77 billion of the ₦1.859 trillion in subsidy invoices raised between April 2025 and April 2026. That is roughly four per cent. Nobody in this chain is clean—not Abuja, not the governors, not the DisCos, not the GenCos. But you are the only person with the standing to end the pretence and reset the model.

Do this, and I will say it publicly and plainly: within four years, seventy per cent of Nigeria will have power.

Forget PHCN. Forget the men who bought what they could not run. There is nothing left to discuss.

Let us move forward.

Yours in the service of our country,

Ben Murray-Bruce.