Senator Ben Murray-Bruce’s open letter to President Bola Tinubu on Nigeria’s electricity crisis is a passionate contribution to a debate the nation desperately needs. His frustration is shared by millions who have endured decades of darkness while billions of naira has been poured into a system that stubbornly refuses to deliver. However, sincerity of intent […]
Senator Ben Murray-Bruce’s open letter to President Bola Tinubu on Nigeria’s electricity crisis is a passionate contribution to a debate the nation desperately needs. His frustration is shared by millions who have endured decades of darkness while billions of naira has been poured into a system that stubbornly refuses to deliver. However, sincerity of intent does not guarantee soundness of prescription. The Senator’s analysis, for all its rhetorical power, suffers from selective evidence, a misdiagnosis of the crisis, and a proposed solution that ignores basic economic and engineering realities. This is not a defence of the status quo—the sector is unequivocally in crisis—but a call for intellectual honesty before prescribing cures that could worsen the patient’s condition.
The most fundamental flaw in the Senator’s proposal is its disregard for the economics of scale that underpin every successful electricity system in the world. There is an efficiency that comes with running large central generation systems and interconnected networks—what engineers call a multiplexing efficiency factor. When thousands of homes and businesses connect to a single grid, the system benefits from the diversity of demand: not everyone uses peak power simultaneously, and capacity that would otherwise sit idle can be shared across the network. The Senator’s proposal to fragment the grid into thousands of community mini-grids would destroy this efficiency, forcing Nigeria to spend vastly more to generate far less power. A household with solar panels might have batteries fully charged by 1 o’clock in the afternoon, leaving surplus generation it cannot sell because there is no interconnection. Most generators in Nigeria run at about half capacity because there is no grid to absorb their excess production. The Senator’s model would lock in this inefficiency permanently.
The Senator’s arithmetic is dangerously flawed. He suggests that an estate of 5,000 families could borrow N3 billion to build solar generation sufficient to supply the estate completely. Let us do the actual mathematics. For 5,000 households at 5kW peak per household—a reasonable estimate for a modern home with air conditioning, refrigeration, lighting, and entertainment systems—the total generation capacity required would be 25MW. A project of this scale, inclusive of battery storage, is estimated at approximately $40 million, or roughly N60 billion at current exchange rates. Even if we target a more modest 3kW peak per family, the project would still require N30 billion, not the N3 billion the Senator casually suggests. The Senator is off by a factor of ten, and this is not a minor arithmetic error; it is a fundamental miscalculation that invalidates his entire financial model.
Now consider Lagos State. With an estimated population of 25 million people, or roughly 5 million households, even assuming that only 10 percent—500,000 households—could be served by this model, the cost implications are staggering. One hundred communities of 5,000 households would require 100 multiplied by N30 billion, totalling N3 trillion. That is N3 trillion to serve just half a million households in a single state, leaving 25 million Lagosians entirely untouched. Lagos State’s entire 2026 capital budget is approximately N2.185 trillion. The Senator is proposing that Lagos borrow roughly one and a half times its entire capital budget to electrify just 10 percent of its population. This is not a solution; it is a fantasy that would bankrupt the state.
The Senator’s model would effectively replicate the very Band A syndrome he criticises—creating an elite class with reliable power while the majority remain disconnected. Only about 20 per cent of Lagos’s electricity demand is currently met by the national grid. The Senator’s proposal would entrench this inequality. Wealthy estates would build solar mini-grids and enjoy 24-hour power, while the poor in Ajegunle, Mushin, and Ikorodu would continue to rely on generators and darkness. N3 trillion to create a parallel system for the elite—this is not reform; it is privilege dressed up as policy.
The Senator’s proposal that state governments should provide loan guarantees for private estates raises equally troubling questions. Why should the public purse—already overstretched and failing to honour its subsidy obligations—guarantee private borrowing for exclusive communities? Only the wealthiest neighbourhoods would benefit, while the poor, the rural, the marginalised would be left behind. The public guarantee would expose the state to enormous contingent liabilities, potentially triggering a sovereign debt crisis. The Senator’s model would have the state underwrite private risks while reaping none of the rewards—privatising profits and socialising losses.
The financial reality makes the Senator’s proposal even more untenable. According to the Association of Power Generation Companies, suppliers were owed about N6.8 trillion as of February 2026, a debt that continues to grow by about N200 billion each month. Sixteen of the 33 power plants were not supplying any power as of August 2026 because they simply cannot afford to run their equipment or pay for gas. The Rural Electrification Agency discloses that Nigeria requires about $23 billion to close its electricity gap but has secured less than $2.5 billion, leaving a funding shortfall of approximately $20 billion. If raising $10 million for a single project is a monumental challenge, how does the Senator propose raising the billions required for his community model?
The Senator’s call to abandon the grid ignores the staggering wastefulness of his proposal. Nigeria has 13,625MW of installed generation capacity, but 8,000MW to 9,000MW of already-built capacity sits idle—billions of dollars of investment yet to deliver value. The Senator would abandon this and borrow tens of billions to build a parallel system. This makes no economic sense. It would require billions to install new capacity when Nigeria already has billions of naira worth of idle capacity that could be brought online with far less investment by fixing gas supply and transmission issues.
The Senator’s citation of Aba as proof his model works is perhaps the most troubling aspect of his analysis. Just weeks before his letter, the Aba Ring-fenced Area was thrown into darkness for over two weeks after a single component failure at a legacy gas plant. Professor Bart Nnaji acknowledged the outage was caused by a clutch gear and starter motor failure—components built between 50 and 60 years ago. If Aba, backed by a globally renowned engineer, two decades of planning, and a dedicated distribution network, can be brought to its knees by a single mechanical failure, what hope is there for every village building its own solar mini-grid? The Senator presents Aba as a model of success when it is, in fact, a warning about the fragility of isolated systems.
This number needs to be corrected. Studies on distributed generation in Nigeria have found that while 20MW hybrid systems are technically feasible, they are not yet at grid parity. The Band A tariff of approximately N209 per kilowatt-hour falls well short of the N168 to N334 per kilowatt-hour required to make such systems viable without heavy subsidies. Furthermore, decentralised state electricity markets lack creditworthy buyers, secure payment structures, and sufficient scale. A subsidiary incorporated 18 months ago has no audited history and no balance sheet, and lenders finance cash flow, not enthusiasm. Devolution has multiplied regulatory risk, not removed it.
The Senator’s closing instruction—stop blaming the President because electricity is now a concurrent responsibility—is a convenient but misleading framing. The federal government retains responsibility for the national grid, inter-state transmission, and national policy coordination. More critically, its failure to pay subsidy obligations has cascaded down the value chain. The Senator attempts to absolve the President while simultaneously blaming the federal government for the N1.68 trillion subsidy shortfall—a logical contradiction. The timing, with elections approaching, raises questions about whether this is genuine policy intervention or a campaign document dressed as an open letter.
A credible reform agenda must address structural drivers of failure without abandoning principles that make electricity systems work. The solution is to transition to cost-reflective tariffs with targeted subsidies, ensure prompt settlement of subsidy obligations, phase out NBET in favour of bilateral trading, and invest in transmission and distribution. As Professor Adeola Adenikinju has argued, the solution requires capital, not just sanctions—operators lack the capital to deliver stable electricity, and injecting additional capital to upgrade equipment, reduce losses, and ensure metering is essential.
Senator Murray-Bruce has performed a public service by forcing this conversation, but his proposed solution—abandoning the grid, fragmenting the market, socialising private risks, and ignoring capital scarcity—would leave Nigeria worse off. The Lagos example alone demonstrates the impossibility: N3 trillion to serve 10 percent of the state’s population. Let us approach reform with rigor and data, not rhetoric and magical thinking.
