Tinubu bets N1.23trn debt payment can revive Nigeria’s power sector

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President Bola Tinubu’s government has paid N1.23 trillion of the legacy debts it owes power generators, betting that clearing arrears ...

President Bola Tinubu’s government has paid N1.23 trillion of the legacy debts it owes power generators, betting that clearing arrears will revive a stalled electricity sector, Joseph Tegbe, Nigeria’s power minister, has said.

The payment represents more than a third of the N3.3 trillion Tinubu approved for verified obligations to generation companies.

Tegbe disclosed the figure at a luncheon with senior editors in Lagos on Friday, where he conceded that Nigerians’ frustration with unreliable supply is justified and that the sector remains far from meeting expectations.

Unpaid bills to generators have long sat at the center of the industry’s dysfunction. Power plants that are not paid struggle to buy gas, maintain equipment and attract fresh investment, which in turn limits how much electricity reaches homes and factories in Africa’s most populous nation.

Clearing the backlog is meant to break that cycle, though roughly N2.1 trillion in approved payments is still outstanding.

Tegbe described the sector’s troubles as systemic rather than isolated. He pointed to gas supply constraints, ageing infrastructure, vandalism, transmission bottlenecks, poor metering and commercial weaknesses running through the entire value chain from generation to the customer’s meter.

Fixing one link, he argued, will not help unless the others improve alongside it, and that calls for disciplined implementation of reforms rather than short-term patches.

The government is also leaning on grid upgrades. Newly commissioned substations and equipment have added more than 1,300 megavolt-amperes to transmission capacity, with work covering Apapa, Ijora, Ikeja, Kumbotoso, Dankata, Mashi, Dan-Agundi, Biliri and Walalambe.

Authorities are building a new National Grid Control Centre in Osogbo to replace a facility more than 60 years old, and are working toward expanding generation capacity to 10,000 megawatts.

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