🇳🇬NIGERIA’S ELECTRIC GRID IS SO BAD… GENERATORS HAVE A UNION

🇳🇬NIGERIA’S ELECTRIC GRID IS SO BAD… GENERATORS HAVE A UNION

Nigeria has 200 million people.

Half of them don’t have reliable electricity.

The national grid? It works about as well as a group project where nobody shows up.

So instead, people run their homes, schools, businesses, and their dreams on diesel generators — which now produce twice as much power as the actual grid.

It’s so loud in Nigerian cities from all the generator buzz, you could record a dubstep album just by opening a window.

And this isn’t because Nigeria doesn’t have the juice.

It’s sitting on enormous natural gas reserves — but decades of mismanagement, corruption, and “plans” that vanish faster than a politician’s campaign promise have left the whole system leaking power and money.

So now, instead of stable electricity, folks get noise, fumes, and bills.

Schools go dark.

Hospitals pray the backup kicks in.

And businesses burn through cash to power the same bulb twice.

Fixing it? That’s the real challenge.

It’s not about buying tech — it’s about building trust, regulation, and wires that don’t catch fire every August.

Until then, Nigeria’s grid remains the world’s most unreliable overachiever.

Source: The Economist (2025)