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By Adeniyi Adeoloye

The Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC)’s dissolution of the Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company’s (KAEDC) board on August 10, 2026, is a stark reminder that privatisation is no silver bullet to service improvement when the underlying structural weaknesses of a utility remain unaddressed.

NERC attributed its action to “severe financial insolvency, with KAEDC accumulating over ₦118.6Billion [$88.77Million] in additional market debt under ASI Engineering Limited by May 2026, bringing total market obligations to approximately ₦456.5Billion [$341.69Million].”

The financial challenges at the heart of this insolvency translate into real world outcomes, given that distribution companies are customer facing, and responsible for recovering the revenue used to settle every participant in the electricity value chain.

The depth of KAEDC operational and financial freefall is significant. The DISCO, whose operations cover four states in Nigeria: Kaduna, Kebbi, Sokoto, and Zamfara, “remitted only 41.93% of its adjusted market invoices in 2025, recorded ATC&C losses of 71.88%, invested only ₦2.48Billion [$1.856illion] against a capital requirement of ₦24.51Billion [$18.35Million], and maintained customer metering coverage of less than 36%,” according to NERC. These numbers not only paint a picture of a utility in crisis, but also one buckling under its own weight.

ATC&C (Aggregate Technical Commercial and Collection) losses are the most consequential metric for assessing a utility’s health, because they capture the utility technical inefficiency, billing gap, billing collection failure and overall system performance. With ATC&C losses at 71.88%, KAEDC effectively earns ₦28.12 ($0.021) for every ₦100 ($0.075) worth of electricity delivered to its network. The severity of this is that, without public financials, it is clear the utility must be struggling to cover overheads, with little room for the capital investment needed to improve its operational and financial state.

Can the change of the board stop this hemorrhaging? Unlikely. A new board may steady the ship, but it cannot turn the corner without deep operational reform and infrastructure investment well beyond the meagre tenth of required capital KAEDC spent per NERC.

While KAEDC is in NERC’s crosshairs today, its operational and financial distress is far from unique. Across the industry, several DisCos exhibit similar troubling fundamentals: high ATC&C losses and persistently low metering coverage.

NERC data shows that ATC&C losses in the year 2025 stood at 61.19% for Yola DisCo, 62.15% for Jos, 44.63% for Kano, 44.29% for Benin, 42.93% for Ibadan, 40.55% for Enugu, 39.60% for Port Harcourt and 33.96% for Abuja. The outliers are Eko and Ikeja with significantly lower losses of 16.13% and 20.22% respectively.

Federal subsidy masks much of the remittance weakness across the DisCos, with the notable exception of KAEDC, where even subsidy cannot conceal the scale of the shortfall, according to NERC data. Eko, Ikeja and Port Harcourt DisCos are often adjudged top performers with perfect remittance. However, the gap between NBET (Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading plc) invoices and actual payments remains substantial even among the better‑performing DisCos.

Ikeja Electric received ₦511.45Billion ($382.82Million) in NBET invoices and remitted ₦244.09Billion ($182.7Million) – 48%, leaving a ₦267.37 Billion ($200.13Million) shortfall covered by federal subsidy. Eko DisCo remitted ₦218.73 Billion ($163.72Million) against ₦450.65 Billion ($337.31Million) invoiced – 49%, with ₦231.91Billion ($173.59Million) subsidised. Port Harcourt DisCo paid ₦95.18Billion ($71.24Million) out of ₦243.55Billion ($182.30Million) billed – 39%, requiring ₦148.36Billion ($111.05Million) in subsidy.

Abuja DisCo received a total invoice of ₦519.06Billion ($388.52Million), remitting ₦240.69Billion ($180.16Million) – 46%, while the federal government covered the short fall of ₦278.37Billion ($208.36Million). Benin Disco paid ₦137.28Billion ($102.75Million) of its invoice of ₦316.02Billion ($236.54Million) – 43%, and the government covering the shortfall of ₦178.74Billion ($133.79Million).

Ibadan DisCo remitted ₦162.11 Billion ($121.34Million) out of ₦402.05 Billion ($300.94Million) billed – 40%, leaving ₦239.94 Billion ($179.60Million) unpaid. Enugu DisCo paid ₦117.14 Billion ($87.66Million) out of ₦283.55 Billion ($212.29Million) billed – 41%, leaving ₦166.42 Billion ($124.57Million) outstanding. Kano DisCo remitted ₦70.24Billion ($52.57Million) out of ₦188.76Billion ($141.29Million) billed – 37%, leaving ₦118.52Billion ($88.67Million) unpaid. Jos DisCo paid ₦65.71Billion ($49.18Million) of its ₦168.29Billion ($125.94Million) invoice, – 39% with ₦102.58 Billion ($76.77Million) subsidised. Yola DisCo paid only ₦15.49 Billion ($11.60Million) of its ₦88.89 Billion ($66.54Million) invoice – 17%, leaving a ₦73.40Billion ($54.95Million) shortfall.

The federal government subsidised the sector to the tune of ₦1.928Trillion ($1.44Billion), translating to about 57% of total invoices in 2025. These figures reveal the depth of structural insolvency across the DisCos, where actual remittances routinely fall below 50% of NBET billing without federal backstop, indicating how exposed the market is if subsidy is removed.

Metering across the DisCos remains a structural weakness. NERC data shows only Eko and Ikeja DisCos have achieved meaningful progress, at 85.87% and 86.40%, leaving gaps of about 13 – 14%. Abuja and Port Harcourt DisCos sit in the mid tier with gaps between 22 – 36%, while Benin, Enugu and Ibadan hover around a 46 – 48% gap.  Jos, Kano and Yola recorded metering gaps above 64%. The implication is far reaching – the sector still struggles to determine consumption accurately, a foundational metric that drives ATC&C losses and undermines revenue recovery, despite the various existing metering framework by introduced by NERC.

The bottom line is clear: nearly 13 years after privatisation, the DisCos still struggle to deliver the service improvements the reform envisioned. While KAEDC’s board is the one that has recently faced the regulator’s hammer, the operational and financial performance of other DisCos is not materially better, as the remittance and metering data show.

This industry wide distress now intersects with a new regulatory landscape created by the Electricity Act 2023, which ends the era of NERC as the sole regulator and introduces a multi-tiered system where subnational governments now hold full authority over licensing, tariff setting and enforcement within their boundaries, while NERC retains overriding authority in certain jurisdiction.

In a market where DisCos were incorporated as natural monopolies under a single federal regulator, this decentralised framework raises critical questions: does the current corporate structure still make sense in a decentralised, state driven regulatory environment or should utilities be reorganised along state lines? If performance of DisCos remain weak across board, how long should existing investors hold these assets before the privatisation is revisited and more capable investors brought in?

With subsidy removal back on the table and the attendant sunset of federal backstopping, decision makers must now confront the old but unavoidable question over whether electricity in the country can continue to be treated as a social good or must now be priced as a commercial one.

Ghana’s energy minister John Jinapor said the country imported a 450,000-Barrel cargo of light crude oil on May 19, 2025, just in time to replenish the stock of fuel on which the country relies for power generation. He told parliament on 16 May that the country had only 2.6 days of supply left.

”The vessel has arrived. We are OK with the fuel. We are going to start the discharge”, Jinapor said of the imported crude oil cargo on local radio station CitiFM 97.3 on May 19, 2025. His parliamentary disclosure of low crude oil stock sparked public uproar, especially as various parts of the country saw blackouts over the weekend of May 16–18, 2025.

But Jinapor said his words were taken out of context because the country’s power sector does not rely on light crude oil primarily but on natural gas that is sourced from the country’s offshore fields and pipeline imports from Nigeria.

“There is no challenge with gas. ENI is producing even beyond capacity, beyond their contractual volume. Tullow, they are producing beyond what they normally produce”, Jinapor said, referring to gas supply from the two international upstream producers operating offshore Ghana. “Nigerian Gas has even increased their [supply]. But for those three sources we would have run into a real problem”, Jinapor continued.

State-owned Ghana National Gas Company Limited(Ghana Gas) said in a press release that “a technical issue” on the floating production, storage and offloading (FPSO) vessel Kwame Nkrumah, located on the Jubilee field operated by the UK-listed independent Tullow Oil, stopped the supply of natural gas to the domestic market on  May10, 2025. But the problem was resolved and gas supply resumed within a few days. ENI scheduled a maintenance shutdown of its John Agyekum Kufuor FPSO this year that would have put Ghana’s power sector in a difficult situation, but the government has convinced the Italian operator to push back the planned maintenance to next year, Jinapor said.

Given the natural gas supply situation, there should have been no uproar over the depletion of the stock of light crude oil that only serves as back-up fuel for Ghana’s thermal power plants, Jinapor said. The cargo of imported crude was bought from Nigeria over a month in advance, allowing sufficient time for sea transport, Jinapor said.  And, the power cuts were responses to the adverse weather conditions that prevailed over the weekend of May 16–18 2025, having been requested by the National Disaster Management Organisation, the energy minister continued.

Although other industry sources put the value 30% lower, the energy minister said that Ghana generates about 4,700MW of electricity. But demand is growing at an annual rate of 300MW, against a backdrop of $3Bilion in sectoral debts of which $1.8Bilion are arrears owed to independent power plants. In the week of May 26, 2025, , Jinapor had also alerted parliament to a threat by Turkish energy firm Karpowership to shutdown its 470MW power ship by May 18, 2025 over $400Million in debts. But the energy minister tried to reassure the public during his radio interview, saying he has negotiated a resolution to that problem and the company will no longer follow through with its threat.

Ghana produces light sweet crude but its reliance on imports for power generation might be due to pricing and supply dynamics that are connected to the country’s steadily declining oil output. The parliamentary oil industry watchdog PIAC said on  April 29 2025 that Ghana’s crude production has declined every year from about 196,000BOPD in 2019 to about 132,000Barrels of Oil Per Day (BOPD) in 2025.

Ghana’s finance ministry had announced, in the first quarter of 2025,  that government was plansning to build another gas processing plant that would “reduce the country’s reliance on expensive imported liquid fuels, improve gas supply for power generation and industrial use, and save the nation close to $500Million every two years”.

Jinapor said the government has now formed an implementation committee that will lead the building of the new power plant, the second after the 150Millio standard cubic feet per day (MMscf/d) Atuabo plant that started operations in 2015. There is sufficient gas supply for the new plant’s capacity to be at least 100MMscf/d, Jinapor said. But the energy minister expects Ghana’s power sector to maintain an 80:20 fuel mix of natural gas to liquids as a risk management strategy against gas supply disruptions even after the new plant starts.

The Nigerian government is exploring the establishment of a National Data Park and Computing Infrastructure at Egbin Power Plant, a facility run by the Sahara Group, a top African home-grown energy provider.

The project aims to harness data sovereignty and cybersecurity for accelerated economic growth, according to a statement by Sahahar Group’s spokesperson, Bethel Obioma

Mr. Obioma says that the collaboration  is being driven by Bosun Tijani, the country’s Minister of Communications, Innovation & Digital Economy.

Obioma quotes the minister as saying that “the project aligns with the National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS) which was launched in 2024”,  and he adds that  the Data Park would ultimately become the “enabler of Nigeria’s digital transformation and facilitate sustainable value extraction from Nigeria’s digital economy.”

“The Data Park will play a critical role in accelerating the nation’s quest for achieving credible centralised data, drive seamless coordination of computational resources and accelerate the development and deployment of AI solutions across various sectors.,” Obioma notes in the release.

In Obiomas report, Kola Adesina, Executive Director, Sahara Group, said  that Sahara Group has been working on establishing the Egbin Industrial Park as a vehicle for promoting sustainable development in Nigeria.

“We are confident that the planned collaboration with the Federal Government will propel Nigeria’s digital future to new heights. This will certainly be a landmark example of how collaboration can be leveraged to deliver world-class solutions that will impact all sectors of the economy positively,” Adesina reportedly said.

Thirty African Heads of State and government have committed to concrete reforms and actions to expand access to reliable, affordable, and sustainable electricity to power economic growth, improve quality of life, and drive job creation across the continent.

The leaders pledged their commitment in a declaration during the two-day Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit, which wrapped up January 28, 2025  in the Tanzanian commercial capital, Dar es Salaam. Mission 300 partners pledged more than $50Billion in support of increasing energy access across Africa.

The Dar es Salaam Energy Declaration represents a key milestone in addressing the energy gap in Africa, where more than 600Million people currently live without electricity. The commitments in the Declaration are a critical piece of the Mission 300 initiative, which unites governments, development banks, partners, philanthropies, and the private sector to connect 300Million Africans to electricity by 2030. The Declaration will now be submitted to the African Union Summit in February for adoption.

By addressing the fundamental challenge of energy access, Mission 300 serves as the cornerstone of the jobs agenda for Africa’s growing youth population and the foundation for future development.

Twelve countries—Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia—presented detailed National Energy Compacts that set targets to scale up electricity access, increase the use of renewable energy and attract additional private capital.  These country-specific plans are time-bound, rooted in data, endorsed at the highest level and focus on affordable power generation, expanding connections, and regional integration. They aim to boost utility efficiency, attract private investment, and expand clean cooking solutions. Deploying satellite and electronic mapping technologies, these compacts identify the most cost-effective solutions to bring electricity to underserved areas.

“Tanzania is honored to have hosted such a monumental summit to discuss how, as leaders, we will be able to deliver on our promise to our citizens to provide power and clean cooking solutions that will transform lives and economies,” said H.E. Dr. Samia Suluhu Hassan, President of the United Republic of Tanzania.

Implementing the National Energy Compacts will require political will, long-term vision and the full support from Mission 300 partners. Governments are paving the way through comprehensive reforms, complemented by increased concessional financing and strategic partnerships with philanthropies and development banks to catalyze increased private sector investment.

Dr. Akinwumi A. Adesina, President of the African Development Bank Group, emphasized the need for decisive action to accelerate electrification across the continent. “Critical reforms will be needed to expand the share of renewables, improve utility performance utilities, ensure transparency in licensing and power purchase agreements, and establish predictable tariff regimes that reflect production costs. Our collective effort is to support you, heads of state and government, in developing and implementing clear, country-led national energy compacts to deliver on your visions for electricity in your respective countries.”

During the summit, partners announced a series of commitments:

• African Development Bank Group and the World Bank Group plan to allocate $48Billion in financing for Mission 300 through 2030, which may evolve to fit implementation needs.
• Agence Francaise de Development (AFD): €1Billion to support energy access in Africa.
• Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB): $1Billion to $1.5Billion to support Mission 300.
• Islamic Development Bank (IsDB) Group: $2.65Billion in support of Mission 300 and energy access in Africa from 2025-2030.
• OPEC Fund: An initial commitment of $1Billion in support of Mission 300 with additional financing to follow.

World Bank Group and the African Development Bank Group: Launched Zafiri, an investment company that supports private sector-led solutions, such as renewable mini-grids and solar home systems. Zafiri anchor partners will invest up to $300Million in the first phase and mobilize up to $1Billion to address the persistent equity gap in Africa in these markets.

The firm commitments made by governments and partners at the summit demonstrate the unique power of the Mission 300 partnership. By combining government reforms, increased financing, and leveraging public-private partnerships, African countries are positioned to turn plans into action, delivering tangible benefits to millions of people.

The Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit was hosted by the United Republic of Tanzania, the African Union, the African Development Bank Group (AfDB), and the World Bank Group (WBG), with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, ESMAP, Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP), Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) and the Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa.

Twelve countries—Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia—presented detailed National Energy Compacts that set targets to scale up electricity access, increase the use of renewable energy and attract additional private capital.  These country-specific plans are time-bound, rooted in data, endorsed at the highest level and focus on affordable power generation, expanding connections, and regional integration. They aim to boost utility efficiency, attract private investment, and expand clean cooking solutions. Deploying satellite and electronic mapping technologies, these compacts identify the most cost-effective solutions to bring electricity to underserved areas.

In a landmark judgement that threatens to annul the growth of fossil fuels based thermal power plants in the country, a High Court has declared the South African government’s plan to add 1,500MW of coal-fired power to the national grid as inconsistent with the Constitution.

The plan to build the power plants, according to  Judge Cornelius van der Westhuizen, was ‘unlawful and invalid’ because the government failed to present any evidence or facts demonstrating that they had considered the human rights impacts of new coal-fired power, especially those of children.

The case came to the hearing of Judge van der Westhuizen in October 2024, four years after the NERSA had approved the plan.  The judgement was released on December 4, 2024.

Judge van der Westhuizen said that the (then) Minister of Energy and Mineral Resources Gwede Mantashe and the National Energy Regulator of South Africa (Nersa) – failed to adequately consider the impact of new coal power on constitutional rights, particularly those of children, when planning for new coal.  The Judge also insisted that the decision-making process lacked transparency and violated sections 24 and 28 of the Constitution, which guarantee the rights to a healthy environment and prioritisation of children’s well-being.

The “Cancel Coal” case, as it is widely known, was filed in court in 2021, and is South Africa’s first youth-led climate change litigation, brought by environmental and climate justice groups, the African Climate Alliance, Vukani Environmental Justice Movement and groundWork, and represented by the Centre for Environmental Rights (CER).

The government’s argument, in defence, was that the Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) 2019, in which  the proposal to develop the power plants was published, is a policy decision not subject to review. Government lawyers noted that no constitutional violation had occurred since coal procurement had not begun. They told the court that the IRP plan emphasised consideration of youth input during public consultations.

“The judgement could spell the end of any new fossil fuel power in South Africa”, wrote Michelle Sithole and Wandisa Phama, two attorneys at the Centre for Environmental Rights, a South African non-profit, in a website named The Context. “It will make it difficult for new fossil fuel power to meet constitutional duty to protect children”

The judgement is “the first time South African courts have ruled on the specific impacts of coal power generation on the rights of children”, Ms Sithole and Ms. Phama wrote.