The power minister put a deadline on his own promise yesterday. The grid has 16 plants offline.

Babatunde Adelabu promised power recovery "within 14 days" yesterday.

That clock started March 24. April 7 is the date it expires.

Here's where the grid actually is. As of March 17, 16 of Nigeria's 33 power plants weren't generating anything.Generation had dropped to 3,705 megawatts. The country needs 30,000 to function at capacity. The gap between what exists and what's needed isn't a maintenance problem. It's a structural one, built across decades of underinvestment, political interference, and a tariff system that prices electricity below the cost of producing it.

The minister said the issue is "beyond the ministry's direct control." That sentence is doing more work than any 14-day promise can.

He's right, technically. The immediate crisis is gas supply. Distribution companies have recorded ₦2.4 trillion in losses over two years. Sector debt sits at ₦6.8 trillion. Gas companies aren't sending gas to plants that can't pay them. The government is raising ₦4 trillion in bonds to clear part of that debt. GAMCO, a new government vehicle, has been approved to rehabilitate three idle plants with a combined capacity of 1,775 megawatts. That's real structural movement, not just words.

But here's the pattern. Adelabu promised stable power "in 2026" after the December blackouts. Fourteen months of pledges haven't moved the generation figure. Band A customers, who are supposed to get twenty hours of power daily, are getting far less. Manufacturers are running generators instead of machines. The ₦10 billion Aso Rock solar mini-grid, announced the same week Nigerians were sitting in the dark, has become a symbol of what this crisis actually reveals about who the system is designed to serve.

April 7. Either the 14-day window produces something measurable, or it joins the list.

You've heard this before. So has everyone else still running a generator.