Former Transmission Company of Nigeria Managing Director Usman Mohammed has blamed Nigeria’s persistent electricity crisis on incompetent appointments and corruption, noting that even well-intentioned reforms under past administrations failed to fix the sector.
Nigeria’s power problems aren’t a mystery, says a man who once ran the country’s transmission network — they’re the result of the same mistakes, made over and over.
Speaking on Oseni Rufai’s Nevon Podcast, former Managing Director of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), Usman Mohammed, laid out why the lights keep going out despite decades of promises and reforms. His diagnosis: successive governments have repeatedly gotten it wrong, and kept going anyway.
“The problem in the power sector has not been solved because we have made mistakes and continue to make mistakes,” he said. “In Nigeria, we rush to do things without adequate studies. We put incompetent people in charge; that is why we have been failing and continue to fail.”
According to Mohammed, two forces have combined to keep Nigeria in the dark: poor appointments that place unqualified people at the helm of critical power sector institutions, and corruption that undermines whatever progress might otherwise be made.
He did offer some nuance, crediting former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s administration with genuine intentions to fix the sector’s problems — even as those efforts ultimately stalled and hit what he described as a brick wall.
DAILY POST notes that Nigeria’s power sector crisis has dragged on for more than a decade since privatisation was supposed to turn things around. Despite that overhaul, the country still generates only between 3,000 and 6,000 megawatts of electricity for a population estimated at 250 million — a gap that has left households and businesses across the country grappling with epileptic power supply, forcing many to rely on expensive generators and alternative energy sources just to keep the lights on.
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