The Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, has stated that Nigeria requires \$10 billion annually for the next 20 years to achieve a stable electricity supply.
Speaking during the inauguration of a 2.5-megawatt solar hybrid power project at the Nigerian Defence Academy (NDA) in Kaduna State, Adelabu highlighted key challenges in the power sector, including inadequate maintenance, insufficient investment, and the failure to upgrade transmission grids. These issues, he noted, have contributed to an infrastructure deficit spanning over six decades.
The minister emphasized that President Bola Tinubu’s administration is actively working to tackle the persistent issues of unreliable power supply nationwide.
He also reiterated the government’s commitment to providing sustainable and dependable energy solutions for critical national institutions such as the NDA.
“For us to achieve functional, reliable, and stable electricity in Nigeria, we need at least $10 billion annually for the next 20 years. But there is some foundational bottleneck that we experienced in the past that needs to be fixed for the spending of this money to have meaning,” he stated.
According to Adelabu, the signing of the energy bill into law was one of the important steps taken by the government to tackle the challenges in the power sector.
“This bill has achieved liberation and decentralisation of the power sector to enable all levels of government — federal, state, and local governments — to legally and morally play roles in the power sector to give their citizens at sub-national levels electricity.
“This act has given autonomy to more than 11 states, and more are still coming. They can now play roles in the power sector from generation to transmission to distribution and even metering.
“We talk about infrastructure deficit, then we talk about fixing infrastructure deficit, which has piled up over the last 60 years due to lack of maintenance, lack of additional investment to revive our transmission grid,” he added.