Nigeria is exporting electricity to Togo while Band A customers get six hours. The system isn't broken. It's working exactly as designed.

The power crisis has had many framings this week. Gas debt. Sixteen plants offline. Adelabu's 14-day promise. Three thousand and fifty-three megawatts shared across eleven distribution companies for a country of 220 million people.

Here's the one that cuts through all of it.

Nigeria is currently supplying 75 megawatt-hours of electricity to Togo under a contract the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors says must be honoured. ANED chief executive Sunday Oduntan defended the export publicly this week. His reasoning was direct. Togo pays for what it buys. Nigerian customers don't pay their bills, or steal electricity outright. International customers create the revenue stability that helps DisCos stay financially viable.

That argument isn't wrong. It's just a precise description of who the system serves.

DisCos recorded ₦2.4 trillion in losses over the last two years. The sector owes generation companies ₦6.8 trillion. Gas suppliers are cutting supply to plants that can't pay. Thermal plants that need 1,629 million standard cubic feet of gas per day are getting less than 43 percent of that. The whole chain is broke in every direction.

And inside that broke chain, Togo gets its 75 megawatt-hours because Togo set up a payment structure that works.

Band A customers, the ones who pay the highest tariffs in exchange for a guaranteed 20 hours of supply daily, are getting between three and six hours in large parts of the country. Manufacturers are running generators. Hospitals are running on diesel. In 2025, manufacturers spent ₦676.6 billion on backup power and still couldn't cover all their needs.

The argument for honouring the Togo contract isn't cynical. Contracts matter. Sovereign commitments matter. A country that cancels its international obligations when it's convenient becomes a country nobody will sign agreements with.

But that principle cuts both ways. The government that honours its contract with Togo because Togo pays, while the citizens who funded the infrastructure through decades of taxes and tariffs and subsidies sit in the dark, is a government that has made a choice about which obligations are real. The contract that matters is the one with the party that can enforce it.

Your generator ran last night. It cost you fuel money you didn't budget for, on top of a tariff you already pay, for a grid that sent your allocation to a neighbour because the neighbour pays on time. That's not misfortune. That's the price of being the party in the contract with no enforcement mechanism.