Eighteen hours of electricity after three months without it is a real improvement. A refinery producing petrol locally, instead of Nigeria importing all of it, is also real. A political coalition finishing a full campaign structure in a matter of days is a fact about what organisation can do when people commit to it, not an accusation.

But improvement raises an awkward question. Better than what?

If a household goes from zero hours of electricity to eighteen, the change is enormous. If that same household's supply still depends on a grid where transmission towers keep getting stripped for scrap a few hundred kilometres away, the eighteen hours is also fragile. Both things are true of the same power sector on the same day.

So maybe the useful measure isn't whether something is better than it was last month. It's whether the improvement is becoming the new floor everyone can rely on, or whether it's still one vandalised tower away from going back to where it started.