Nigeria has run its power sector on debt since 2013. The debt is now N6.8 trillion. The lights are off on Eid.

Nigeria's electricity has always been unreliable. But what's happening right now isn't a blackout. It's a reckoning.

16 of Nigeria's 33 power plants are offline this week, confirmed by data from the Nigerian Independent System Operator. The plants that are still running are generating a combined 3,705 megawatts for a country that needs at least 40,000. And the reason they're shutting down is not technical. It's financial.

Here's the chain.

The Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading company, NBET, is supposed to buy power from generation companies and resell it to distribution companies. Simple enough. Except NBET has never fully paid the generation companies since the sector was privatised in 2013. The debt has been growing by N200 billion every month. It hit N4 trillion by the end of 2024. By February 2026, it was N6.8 trillion. By the end of this month, it will be N7 trillion.

The generation companies, in turn, owe that same unpaid money to the gas suppliers who power the thermal plants. And the gas suppliers have had enough. They've started cutting supply. No payment, no gas. No gas, no power.

Joy Ogaji, the CEO of the Association of Power Generation Companies, put it plainly: "Yes, it is 120 per cent correct to say that the debt is the reason why we are in darkness."

Now here's the part that should sit with you.

Nigeria has 200 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves. Two hundred trillion. It's not a resource problem. The chairman of Geometric Power, Barth Nnaji, said it out loud at a function in Lagos last week: "We are a gas-rich country, yet we struggle to supply enough gas to our power plants. It's a contradiction that many find hard to understand."

It's not hard to understand. It's just hard to say. Nigeria has the gas, the pipes, and the plants. What it doesn't have is a payment system that works. The government owes the generators. The generators owe the gas companies. The gas companies are cutting supply. And the people at the end of the chain, the ones running generators at N1,300 per litre, are paying for a system that never pays its own bills.

What about the fix?

The federal government announced it would raise N4 trillion from domestic capital markets to clear part of the backlog. A N501 billion bond was issued as a first tranche. That sounds substantial until you do the maths: the debt is N6.8 trillion and grows by N200 billion every month. One bond doesn't stop a moving target.

GAMCO, the new Grid Asset Management Company, was approved by the Federal Executive Council and inaugurated with an 11-member committee in early March. The committee is chaired by the President's Chief of Staff. It includes eight ministers. Its job is to fix the transmission corridor, starting with the Benin to Lagos line as a pilot.

But here's what GAMCO doesn't address: the N6.8 trillion that already exists, growing by N200 billion a month, sitting between the government and the generators and the gas suppliers like a wall no committee can climb.

The minister leaving without his number

There's one more layer to this.

Nigeria's Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, is resigning before March 31. Tinubu ordered all ministers seeking 2027 elective positions to step down by the end of this month, in line with the Electoral Act. Adelabu wants to run for governor of Oyo State. He's going.

His target when he took the job was 6,000 megawatts. The grid is currently at 3,331 megawatts. That's barely half. In 2025, the national grid collapsed 12 times. In January 2026 alone, it collapsed twice more.

Before the 2023 election, President Tinubu stood in front of a crowd and said: "Whichever way, by all means necessary, you must have electricity. If I don't keep the promise and I come back for second term, don't vote for me."

The minister responsible for keeping that promise is resigning to chase a governorship. The grid is at half capacity. The debt grows N200 billion every month.

Tonight is Eid. Over 100 million Nigerians just completed 30 days of Ramadan through bombs, rising petrol, and a budget that forgot the war. They'll celebrate in the dark, on generators, the same way they have every year.

The bill is N7 trillion and counting. Nobody's paid it.