The government raised the cost of the fuel that makes your lights come on. It still owes the people who made them come on last time.

Here's the situation at your circuit breaker right now.

Nigeria generates more than 75 percent of its electricity from natural gas. Gas-fired power plants are not a backup plan. They are the plan. And effective April 1, the government's energy regulator raised the price of gas supplied to those plants from $2.13 to $2.18 per unit. Five cents more per unit, across every power plant in the country.

That sounds small. What it lands on is not small.

Gas suppliers have been threatening to walk away from power plants entirely. The reason is that power generation companies owe them ₦3.3 trillion. Power generation companies can't pay because the Federal Government owes them ₦6.5 trillion in unpaid electricity support obligations. And in all of 2025, the government settled ₦71.49 billion out of ₦1.92 trillion it owed. That's 3.7 percent. Less than four kobo of every naira it was supposed to pay.

Now into that same chain, the regulator has introduced a higher gas price. More expensive to generate. Still not paid for what was generated before. Still no mechanism to clear the debt.

This is the architecture of Nigerian electricity in 2026. Not a technical failure. An arithmetic one.

The mechanism works like this. Gas producers supply gas to power plants. Power plants generate electricity. Distribution companies sell electricity to consumers. The government subsidises the gap between what consumers pay and what the system costs. Except it doesn't actually pay the subsidy. It approves it, accrues it, and defers it. The deficit moves through the chain. From the government to the generator to the gas supplier. At each point the creditor absorbs the shortfall and keeps the lights on anyway, because turning them off is worse.

Until it isn't. Until the gas supplier says the number has gotten too large. Until the generator company says it can't pay its contractors. Until the plant runs at 30 percent capacity because the supply pressure has dropped.

This is the pattern that has produced Nigeria's chronically underperforming grid for over a decade. Installed capacity is one number. Available capacity is another. What actually reaches your meter is a third number, much smaller.

The complication here is real. The new price was set under the Petroleum Industry Act, which is designed to make gas supply commercially sustainable. The logic is sound: if gas is priced too cheaply, producers don't invest in new supply. If they don't invest, the supply chain tightens further. The regulator isn't wrong that gas needs to find its price. What the regulator didn't solve is the payment problem. You can price gas correctly and still not get the lights on if the company buying the gas can't pay for it, because the entity that owes it money hasn't shown up.

Nigeria has been here before. The power sector crisis of 2015 to 2019 ran the same loop. Generation companies filed debt claims, gas companies reduced supply, the government announced intervention funds, and the lights stayed off. The 2013 privatisation of the power sector was supposed to break the cycle by introducing market discipline. What it introduced instead was private companies inheriting a government payment problem they had no leverage to solve. The government is still the biggest debtor in the chain. It privatised the sector. It didn't privatise its own obligations.

That's what makes the April 1 price increase hard to read as reform. It signals market discipline in one direction. Gas pricing. But it doesn't resolve the market failure in the other direction, which is payment.

The person this lands on is you. Not the generator company. Not the gas supplier. Not the regulator. You, running your generator on Easter Friday because the grid delivered three hours yesterday. You, calculating how many litres of petrol your generator needs this week now that the pump price is still above ₦1,280. You, doing the maths on what it costs to keep a business open when the public system and the private backup both respond to price signals you didn't vote for.

What the government built in April 2026 is a system where the cost goes up and the obligation doesn't follow. That's not a coincidence. That's how it's designed. The question isn't when the lights get better. The question is whether the chain ever gets aligned in the same direction. From government obligation to gas supply to generation to your meter.

Right now, it isn't.