When the Grid Fails, the Grid Goes Private

A national grid is a promise made in copper and steel: that power generated in one place can be delivered, reliably, to everywhere else. In Nigeria, that promise keeps breaking — sometimes literally, all at once. The grid collapsed on 23 January 2026, generation falling to zero megawatts and supply to all eleven distribution companies cutting out completely. It had already collapsed days earlier, on 29 December. Two failures inside four weeks is not an accident. It is a pattern, and increasingly, a verdict.

The macro picture explains the micro catastrophe. By late February, gas supply to the country's power plants stood at roughly 692 million standard cubic feet a day — under 43 percent of what the plants need. Average generation hovered around 4,200 megawatts for a country of well over 200 million people; the distribution companies rationed even less. Somewhere between 90 million Nigerians and the national grid sits a gap that no amount of tariff reform has closed.