West Africa’s giant is back in the dark. On Monday 5 October 2026, output on Nigeria’s national grid dropped to 2,033.66 megawatts, with sixteen power plants feeding in nothing at all. Eleven days earlier, on 24 September, the country had still reached a peak of 5,403 MW. The fall exceeds 3,300 MW, meaning roughly 62% of available capacity vanished in under two weeks.
The effects on the ground were immediate. Residents in several states now receive less than three hours of electricity a day. In Lagos, the distributor Ikeja Electric issued a notice that same day, blaming reduced supply on a cut in its allocation from the national grid. Customers were far from convinced: on social media, some said they had gone more than 160 hours without power.
How does a gas-producing country end up here? The paradox lies in that very resource. More than 70% of grid electricity comes from gas-fired thermal plants, which struggle either to obtain fuel or to pay for it. Whenever a pipeline is disrupted or a contract goes unpaid, the turbines stop. Add to that a transmission network unable to carry all the available energy, and frozen tariffs that starve the sector of cash.
The timing is awkward for the authorities. Power Minister Joseph Tegbe had recently assured Nigerians that they were beginning to see noticeable improvements in supply. The figures from early October tell a different story, though it remains unclear whether this is a temporary dip or the start of a longer decline.
For households and small businesses, the workaround has been the same for years: the generator. Shops, workshops and clinics run on diesel, at a cost that eats into their margins. Outages are estimated to cost the Nigerian economy around one billion dollars a year, according to figures cited in the local press.
The gap with real needs remains dizzying. Experts put the minimum capacity required to supply Africa’s most populous country at 30,000 MW, about fifteen times what the grid delivered on Monday. Until gas supply, transmission and sector financing are tackled together, every improvement risks being no more than a respite.