KEY POINTS
- Nigeria has not financed any major power plant in 11 years, Geometric Power chair Barth Nnaji says.
- The Partial Risk Guarantee instrument that financed Azura-Edo Power Plant was scrapped after a government change.
- Nnaji says natural gas remains Nigeria’s most practical energy path for the next 20 years.
Nigeria has gone 11 years without financing a single major power generating plant. That is the verdict of Barth Nnaji, chairman of Geometric Power Group and a former Minister of Power, who delivered a pointed assessment of the country’s electricity crisis at the 19th Annual Conference of the Nigerian Association for Energy Economics in Lagos on Monday.
Nnaji traced the problem to a specific policy decision made more than a decade ago. He and former Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala had established Partial Risk Guarantee instruments to attract global investors into power projects. The instruments worked. The Azura-Edo Power Plant was financed using exactly that mechanism.
Then the government changed and the instruments were scrapped.
“As soon as government changed, it got wiped away. Until today, we have not financed any major power plant in Nigeria. That is about 11 years,” Nnaji said.
A country sitting on untapped gas
The frustration in Nnaji’s remarks runs deeper than policy inconsistency. Nigeria holds over 210 trillion cubic feet of proven gas reserves and is not converting them into power. The Nigeria LNG plant is struggling to operate at about 60% capacity because the gas feedstock itself is not available. The infrastructure to move gas from the ground to the grid has not been built at the scale the country needs.
Nnaji pushed back on global pressure for Africa to abandon fossil fuels and move immediately to renewables. He pointed to Europe’s own reversal after the Russia-Ukraine war, noting that Germany, which had been among the loudest voices on renewable energy, moved back to coal when its energy security was threatened.
“Europe, that had been harassing the entire world about renewable energy. They were the first to abandon that paradigm,” he said.
What Nigeria should do next
Nnaji’s prescription for Nigeria is natural gas, not as a retreat from clean energy ambition but as a practical bridge. He predicted the country will rely on various forms of natural gas to power its economy for the next 20 years.
He also pointed to continental opportunities being ignored. Congo’s Inga Dam could deliver 100,000MW, and studies have shown that a 1,000-kilometer line to Calabar is feasible. “If we are going to talk about the continent, we can share power. We just are not thinking,” he said.
His list of immediate priorities included cost-reflective tariffs, power purchase agreement support, laws against energy theft and methane management. The Mambila hydropower project, stalled for more than 40 years, remains doable, he said. What Nigeria needs most is the policy discipline to follow through.
