Tinubu And His Incredible Ministers

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has failed to keep his promise to provide a constant electricity supply. He said at a business lunch in December 2022 that he shouldn’t be voted for a second term if he didn’t fix the electricity supply problem and end estimated billing in his first term.

Although he modified that pledge by saying he should only be spared if he gave “adequate reasons” for failure, the only thing worse than his broken steady power supply promise is his appointment of paper tigers as power ministers.

If CVs could guarantee a stable power supply, Tinubu’s first minister, Adebayo Adelabu, who served nearly three years, and the current one, Joseph Tegbe, his successor, would have turned Nigeria into a net exporter of power. Both, I’m told, have first-class credentials and know this power business like the back of their hands.

By the time Adelabu finished serving, however, Tinubu had not only budgeted for a full-service 24/7 N17 billion solar power grid for the Presidential Villa, but the minister was also stumbling over millions of distressed Nigerians stranded in darkness, begging him to leave.

The cameo warden

When he finally yielded in April and showed up as a cameo traffic warden at a junction in Ibadan, Oyo State, it was clear that he was a waste at the power ministry. He should have been a warden – any kind of warden – all along.

And then, in came Tegbe, whose credentials could light a bulb. A first-class graduate in Civil Engineering from Obafemi Awolowo University, he also holds a degree in Public Administration from the University of Birmingham. He has 35 years of professional experience, including senior leadership roles at KPMG.

As for relevant power-sector experience, he played a central advisory role in reforming the sector at both the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading (NBET). If Nigeria ever needed a peg to square its power hole, Tegbe looked a fit. Except that his recent journey to the deep freezer of Nigerians suggests he might well not be the man after all. Like Adelabu, his predecessor, Tegbe’s obsession with our deep freezers is an icy joke. I’ll return to him.

Overcharged freezers

In April 2024, after the government established discriminatory payment bands for electricity consumers, Adelabu accused Nigerians of leaving their freezers frozen for days because they weren’t paying much for electricity.

Adelabu’s headache, despite 16 total or partial grid collapses on his watch, was curbing electricity wastage – a legitimate concern that could be resolved automatically with the mass installation of prepaid metres. But Adelabu wasn’t bothered about meter availability, or didn’t think meters could adequately bill consumers who waste electricity on iced-over deep freezers.

He was soon distracted by his ambition to become the governor of Oyo State. In his futile chase for political power, he became entangled with a prophet whom he accused of a N150 million cash-for-prophecy blackmail. What prophetic ritual couldn’t do for electricity, it obviously couldn’t do for political power.

Nothing has significantly changed in the electricity sector – not supply, distribution, or even voltage since then. Perhaps that is why Tegbe has come with his own fabulous and freezing fantasy tale.

A statement attributed to him almost implies that deep freezers are forming glacial ice in people’s homes due to an excess of electricity supply. According to Tegbe, he has been disturbed by calls “to slow down” by some Nigerians whose refrigerators are caked in ice and who, perhaps, would appreciate the lights being turned off, maybe for a few days or weeks.

Tegbe was so sold on his own delusion that about one month after his appointment, he said by 2027, “By the grace of God, we will put a stop to this so-called subsidy in the power sector.”

With friends like Tegbe…

I don’t know how many ordinary folks have the privilege of access to Minister Tegbe’s phone number, or the ones that consider it a better patriotic duty to complain to the minister rather than walk into the kitchen and turn off those damned freezing chambers.

Or, for that matter, if he knows the way around town to see for himself how solar panels have become an added weight on roofing sheets and how inverters and batteries are taking up spaces inside homes and offices. If he does, then he should be aware that he needs to speed up rather than “slow down” due to the environmental impact of having nearly every shop in Wuse Market – in the nation’s capital – running on petrol or diesel generators.

Further afield, Tegbe must visit the industrial layouts of Sharada and Bompai in Kano; Kakuri in Kaduna; Oluyole in Ibadan; Bukuru in Jos; or Emene in Enugu, at least just these few, to see how many factories are shut down or operating below installed capacity because of poor electricity supply.

Perhaps, residents of those towns are even struggling to remember whether there’s a Ministry for Power and what the minister’s name might be. They can’t afford the luxury of a minister’s phone number, and so they can’t call him to report how the absence of power supply has slowed down their businesses and preoccupations.

Perhaps Tegbe is also blissfully unaware that ice block making is a big business in itself and that ice block suppliers invest in generators and cold compartments, without which many people on the streets of Nigerian cities won’t find a cold drink within the nearest perimeter of an endurance trek.

Post cold-beer talk

Minister Tegbe and those who can call him are lucky. They may not be living in Nigeria after all, or may be insulated in some luxury mansions, totally oblivious to how many refrigerators are permanently disconnected simply because the available voltage is insufficient to power them.

If the minister was not basking in a delusional fantasy – the sort of hyper optimism often exhibited after one bottle too many of cold beer, then he should have started where it matters most: dissuade the Presidential villa from budgeting N17 billion (about $12.5 million) to install the solar grid mentioned earlier. Just show them the freezing evidence.

Reality check

According to the NERC, the country has a total installed generation capacity of 13,625 megawatts (MW). But it currently generates and distributes roughly 4,000 to 5,000 MW of electricity to the national grid, some of which, reports indicate, cannot be discharged because of decrepit transmission infrastructure.

Using a population assumption of 200 million, Nigeria’s 13,625 megawatts of grid-connected installed generation capacity works out to just 68.13 watts per person, slightly more than the power required by a single 60-watt incandescent bulb. This is a theoretical capacity-to-population ratio, not the electricity each person actually receives; actual generation and electricity delivered to consumers are lower.

Is this the voltage level freezing the homes of those fortunate Nigerians who are complaining to the minister, or is there something else at play?

Freezers and campaign

Tegbe is nesting in a strait of imagination, oblivious to the continuous power outages and grid collapses that have forced many homes and businesses to emulate Aso Rock by investing in alternative energy sources and getting off the national grid. He’s not in touch with reality at all!

But it’s the season of campaigns – a time when many storms, even freezing blasts, are brewed in the teacups of politicians.

Tinubu should tell his minister that this particular line is a brazen lie that adds to the annoyance of a broken promise.