A nation powered by generator, ruled by solar

A Nation Powered by Generators, Ruled by Solar

Babayola M. Toungo

The defining image of the Bola Ahmed Tinubu presidency will not be one of reform carefully explained or sacrifice collectively embraced. It will be remembered, instead, as a moment of almost theatrical indifference: a wave of the hand, a few clipped words – “subsidy is gone.” With that declaration, an entire nation was plunged, not into reform, but into a vast and unrelenting experiment in economic shock therapy. No preparation. No cushioning. No visible sacrifice from those in power. Just pain – swift, sweeping, and indiscriminate.

And as if that were not enough, the government proceeded to tighten the vice. Electricity tariffs were hiked repeatedly, ruthlessly, and without regard for the already collapsing purchasing power of ordinary Nigerians. In a country where power supply is notoriously erratic, this was not reform – it was punishment. Nigerians were effectively ordered to pay more for darkness, more for failure, more for a system that does not work.

Yet today, the same government that invoked fiscal discipline as justification for stripping away subsidy now announces, with astonishing nonchalance, that it will spend ₦3.3 trillion to “settle legacy debts” in the electricity sector. One is forced to ask: whose debts are sacred, and whose suffering is expendable? When the poor need relief, it is called subsidy and must be eliminated. When powerful operators require settlement, it becomes a fiscal obligation of the state.

And lurking beneath this entire crisis is a deeper, more uncomfortable question – one that cuts to the very architecture of Nigeria’s energy dependence. For years, the fate of Nigeria’s electricity sector has been tied to thermal power plants, themselves held hostage by gas supply constraints, pricing disputes, and what increasingly resembles a system of structural blackmail. Generation falters, not always because capacity does not exist, but because gas does not flow – or flows at a price that makes stable electricity economically impossible.

Yet there exists – or rather, there existed – a pathway out of this trap: the long-abandoned Mambilla Hydroelectric Power Project. A project of immense potential, capable of fundamentally altering Nigeria’s energy mix, reducing dependence on gas-fired plants, and breaking the stranglehold of those who profit from scarcity. Why, then, does it remain in limbo? Why has a project that could decisively weaken the leverage of gas suppliers been left to languish in bureaucratic purgatory, while Nigerians are told to endure tariff hikes and systemic failure? At what point does neglect begin to look less like incompetence and more like design?

Because the uncomfortable possibility cannot be ignored: that the continued paralysis of Mambilla serves entrenched interests. That a diversified, hydro-powered energy base would disrupt a lucrative status quo. That keeping Nigeria dependent on gas is not merely an accident of policy, but a convenience for those who benefit from a system where scarcity can be weaponized and costs endlessly transferred to the public. If that is even partially true, then what Nigerians are experiencing is not just policy failure – it is policy capture.

But even this staggering contradiction pales beside what is perhaps the most obscene symbol of this administration’s detachment from reality. While millions of Nigerians sit in darkness, while businesses collapse under the unbearable cost of diesel and petrol, while families ration electricity like famine victims ration food, the state has quietly built for itself an escape route. Over ₦10 billion reportedly spent on solar power installations at the Presidential Villa – because, we are told, electricity from the national grid is too expensive and too unreliable.

Too expensive? Too unreliable? This is not merely irony. It is an indictment. The government has, in effect, passed a vote of no confidence in its own energy system – yet demands that citizens continue to fund and endure that same broken system. It has created a fortified island of uninterrupted power for itself while leaving the rest of the country to drown in darkness and noise. This is no longer governance in any meaningful sense. It is segregation by infrastructure.

One Nigeria lives behind high walls, powered by solar grids, insulated from the chaos. The other Nigeria coughs and sweats in generator fumes, paying extortionate prices for fuel just to simulate the most basic conditions of modern life. And this is where the cruelty of the current policy direction becomes undeniable.

Across the country, small businesses are not merely struggling – they are dying. Quietly. Systematically. Irreversibly. The barber who once survived on modest margins now watches his income vanish into fuel costs. The welder shuts down earlier each day. The cold-room operator loses stock. The printer, the tailor, the baker – all are being suffocated by an energy regime that has turned productivity into punishment.

Hospitals and clinics – places where failure should never be an option – are now forced to triage electricity itself. Surgeries delayed. Vaccines at risk. Lives placed on a precarious line between power availability and generator fuel. And in homes across the country, a slow violence unfolds daily. Parents choose between feeding their children and powering a fan in suffocating heat. Students read by torchlight. Entire families recalibrate their lives around the erratic rhythms of blackout and noise.

Nigeria is no longer merely an oil-producing nation; it is becoming a generator-dependent wasteland, where the hum of engines is the soundtrack of state failure and the smell of diesel is the scent of survival. Yet from the corridors of power comes no urgency that matches this suffering. Instead, what one observes is calculation – cold, clinical, and unapologetic. Political alliances are stitched together. Electoral strategies are refined. Narratives are manufactured. The next election looms larger in the minds of the ruling elite than the present catastrophe unfolding beneath their feet. This is the true scandal – not just bad policy, but a moral vacuum.

Because governance, at its core, is not an accounting exercise. It is a test of empathy, of fairness, of shared destiny. It demands that those who wield power do not merely prescribe hardship, but partake in it. It demands that sacrifice, if it must come, is borne collectively – not imposed selectively.

But what we are witnessing instead is a government that has exempted itself from its own policies. A government that has abandoned the system it administers. A government that has, quite literally, unplugged itself from the national grid while leaving its citizens trapped within it.

And when a government ceases to share in the conditions it imposes, it forfeits something fundamental. Not just credibility. Not just trust. But legitimacy. Because at that point, reform is no longer reform. It is imposition. And power, stripped of empathy and accountability, begins to look less like leadership – and more like extraction.