Four years after Nigeria switched on a solar-hybrid plant at Alex Ekwueme Federal University in Ndufu-Alike, the numbers behind it read less like an infrastructure case study and more like a balance sheet.
Roughly 9,500 staff and students draw power from the site. Diesel and grid-bill savings have totalled about N1.8 billion in five years. Carbon emissions avoided: an estimated 2,367 tonnes.
It is, by the account of the agency that built it, one of the good outcomes.
It is also, officials now concede, the exception.
When Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency (REA) sent engineers back to inspect the seven university and hospital sites delivered under the first phase of its flagship Energising Education Programme, they found only three in good or usable condition.
At one site, a special-purpose vehicle set up to manage the plant existed on paper but had never collected a naira of revenue. The equipment was there. The institution built to keep it running was not.
That admission, delivered publicly, is the starting point for Renewable Assets Management Company (RAMCO), a new asset-management company REA is standing up to take Nigeria’s already-built renewable energy infrastructure and convert it from a depreciating government liability into a revenue-generating, potentially investable platform.
“We could have chosen not to look,” Abba Aliyu, REA’s chief executive, told an audience that included Nigeria’s power and education ministers, the National Universities Commission, the Budget Office of the Federation, and executives of the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and the Infrastructure Corporation of Nigeria. “We looked, because you cannot fix what you are unwilling to name.”
A portfolio nobody was managing
The scale of what REA has built is, on its own, notable for a country whose power sector is more often defined by what doesn’t work.
Since 2017, the agency has deployed 82 megawatts of solar-hybrid generation across 22 federal universities and three teaching hospitals, a build-out Aliyu valued at roughly N263 billion, funded jointly by the Nigerian government, the World Bank and the African Development Bank.
Another 150 megawatts is under construction or in the pipeline, financed through a patchwork of public vehicles: the Tertiary Education Trust Fund, the Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up program, the National Public Sector Solarisation Initiative, later phases of the Energising Education Programme, and the Desert to Power initiative.
REA projects that within three years, 70 to 80 more public institutions could be added to the portfolio.
What none of that build-out came with, Aliyu said, was an institution whose sole job was to keep the assets alive once the ribbon was cut.
“Nigeria built world-class energy infrastructure and then watched part of it deteriorate — not because of engineering failure, but because we had not adequately institutionalised what happens after,” he said. No dependable revenue mechanism, no sustainable maintenance regime, no owner accountable for the plant’s full economic life.
The Fix: A Company, Not an Agency
RAMCO’s structure is designed to answer that gap directly. It is incorporated under Nigeria’s Companies and Allied Matters Act, not a government department but a company, with the Federal Government’s interest held through the Ministry of Finance Incorporated and overseen by a professional board.
Its job, as Aliyu described it: manage publicly financed renewable-energy assets professionally, contract competent operators, meter and bill consumption, collect revenue, and set aside sustainability reserves so that when a battery or inverter needs replacing in year eight, the funds already exist rather than requiring an emergency appropriation.
Aliyu was careful to frame the model as continuity rather than a new initiative claiming credit. He credited his predecessor at REA with first identifying the sustainability problem, developing a framework for it, and securing the Federal Ministry of Power’s backing for an asset-management vehicle.
“One reason public institutions struggle with sustainability is that we do not always finish what those before us began,” he said. “REA has chosen a different path.”
He was equally explicit about what RAMCO is not. It is not designed to extract profit from the universities and hospitals it serves, where government has already funded the capital cost of a plant, Aliyu said, that capital is sunk, and the tariff charged to institutions should reflect only what is needed to operate, maintain and eventually renew the system, not recover the original build cost.
Nor, he said, is RAMCO a vehicle for repeated Treasury bailouts. Its explicit purpose is the reverse: shifting the long-term cost of keeping renewable assets running away from recurring government appropriations and onto a commercially self-sustaining platform — one that, over time, could be structured to draw in private capital.
The tariff compact
The mechanism only works, however, if the institutions receiving the power actually pay for it, a point Aliyu addressed directly to the vice chancellors and chief medical directors in the room. Government funded the assets, he said; REA built them; beneficiary institutions must now contribute to keeping them running by paying for the electricity they use.
He framed the ask as a substitution rather than a new burden. Institutions already spend money on diesel and on unreliable grid power; a sustainability tariff redirects part of that existing spend toward a system that is cleaner and more dependable over a longer horizon.
“Reliable electricity is not free,” Aliyu said. “The question is whether we pay repeatedly for diesel and failed infrastructure, or pay a predictable tariff that keeps a cleaner, more reliable system operating for twenty years.”
Beyond Maintenance: Manufacturing and Capital Markets
The ambitions attached to RAMCO extend past keeping panels clean and batteries charged. Aliyu described the current model of Nigerian public infrastructure spending as a one-way street, government appropriates, builds, watches the asset degrade, and appropriates again, and argued that a growing, professionally managed portfolio of solar assets with predictable cash flows could eventually be aggregated and leveraged to draw in private financing, rather than relying solely on repeat government funding.
There is also a domestic-manufacturing angle. Under Nigeria’s “Nigeria First” procurement policy, REA has signed joint-development arrangements with seven Nigerian manufacturers spanning solar modules, battery-energy-storage systems, inverters, street lighting and solar-asset recycling.
Aliyu argued that what those manufacturers need most is not policy encouragement but predictable, bankable demand, something a professionally run portfolio approaching 200 megawatts could begin to provide, with knock-on effects for foreign-exchange retention and skilled employment.
RAMCO itself will not operate every plant it owns. Instead, Aliyu said, it will create a competitive market for Nigerian energy-service companies, bound by performance standards covering energy delivery, revenue collection and asset uptime.
The company’s remit could eventually stretch beyond solar generation. Aliyu noted that REA invested roughly 135 billion naira in grid-extension infrastructure between 2012 and 2024, about 3,766 transformers and 9,556 kilometers of network, assets that, he said, require the same sustainability discipline now being built for the solar portfolio.
A Timeline, and a Warning to Itself
Aliyu laid out a compressed set of deliverables running through the end of November: completing valuation and technical assessment of the initial asset portfolio; working with the Federal Ministry of Power to formally transfer assets into RAMCO; onboarding long-term operations and maintenance contractors for Phase II sites of the Energising Education Programme and migrating them into the new framework; and negotiating tariff and payment arrangements with each beneficiary institution alongside the National Universities Commission, the education and health ministries, and the Budget Office.
He committed to reporting progress publicly, a pointed callback to REA’s decision to disclose its own maintenance failures rather than bury them.
“If we have delivered, Nigerians will know,” he said. “If we have fallen short, they will know that too.”
Whether RAMCO succeeds will ultimately be tested less by its incorporation documents than by whether university administrators actually pay the tariffs, whether the sustainability reserves are genuinely ring-fenced from other budget pressures, and whether private capital views a state-linked asset manager as investable.
For now, REA has a working example to point to, a plant in Ndufu-Alike that has quietly saved one university 1.8 billion naira — and a public admission that most of its peer projects have not fared nearly as well.
“Nigeria knows how to build,” Aliyu said. “The harder question has always been whether we can preserve what we build.”
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