Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has revealed that Nigeria requires a yearly investment of $10 billion over the next 20 years to achieve a stable and reliable electricity supply.
Adelabu made this known during the commissioning of a 2.5-megawatt solar hybrid power plant at the Nigerian Defence Academy in Kaduna State.
He connected the country’s power challenges to decades of underinvestment, poor infrastructure maintenance, and the failure to modernize and expand the national transmission grid.
According to Adelabu, these issues have worsened over the years which created a significant infrastructure gap in the power sector.
He said “For us to achieve functional, reliable, and stable electricity in Nigeria, we need at least $10 billion annually for the next 20 years.
“But there is some foundational bottleneck that we experienced in the past that needs to be fixed for the spending of this money to have meaning.
“Number 1 is the legislative and policy foundation which this administration has achieved by signing into an act as the first bill in 2023 by President Bola Tinubu immediately he resumed.
“This bill has achieved liberation and decentralisation of the power sector to enable all levels of government — federal, state, and local governments — to legally and morally play roles in the power sector to give their citizens at sub-national levels electricity.
“This act has given autonomy to more than 11 states, and more are still coming. They can now play roles in the power sector from generation to transmission to distribution and even metering.
“We talk about infrastructure deficit, then we talk about fixing infrastructure deficit, which has piled up over the last 60 years due to lack of maintenance, lack of additional investment to revive our transmission grid.”
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