Nigeria has more natural gas than it can ever use. That's why the blackout is so hard to accept.

Nigeria's proven natural gas reserves stand at over 200 trillion cubic feet. It's one of the largest reserves on the continent.

Barth Nnaji, the chairman of Geometric Power and a former Minister of Power, said what most industry people know but rarely say out loud: "We are a gas-rich country, yet we struggle to supply enough gas to our power plants."

The problem isn't the gas in the ground. It's the chain of unpaid bills connecting the gas companies to the generators to the government. The gas is there. The pipes exist. The plants are built. The money was never wired.

That's not a resource problem. It's a governance one. And it's the reason 16 plants are dark tonight.