Nigeria’s grid collapses are not ‘bad luck’ – They are a design failure, and we know how to fix them

Nigeria’s grid collapses are not ‘bad luck’ – They are a design failure, and we know how to fix them

First published in VANGUARD on February 3, 2026 – https://www.vanguardngr.com/2026/02/nigerias-grid-collapses-are-not-bad-luck-they-are-a-design-failure-and-we-know-how-to-fix-them/

On paper, a national grid is supposed to be boring: frequency stays close to 50 Hz, voltage stays within defined bands, dispatch follows rules, and outages are mostly local events; faults isolated quickly, service restored, causes logged, lessons absorbed. In Nigeria, the grid is dramatic. It collapses, recovers, collapses again, and the country treats each failure as if it were an inexplicable meteor strike. In late December 2025 the grid collapsed; it collapsed again on January 23, 2026; and it collapsed again days later, plunging the country into repeated nationwide darkness.

That pattern is not a mystery. It is a predictable consequence of operating a real-time control system outside its stability margins, on top of a distribution sector that leaks energy and revenue, inside a settlement architecture that cannot reliably pay for maintenance, fuel, and system control. The true cause is not a single broken line or one unlucky generator trip. The true cause is system incoherence: weak observability, weak protection discipline, weak reserves enforcement, and weak money-flow discipline; combined.

The question is not “Why did it collapse again?” The question is “Why is the system structured so that ordinary shocks become national blackouts?”

A grid collapse is a systems outcome, not a headline event

Nigeria’s regulator, Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), states plainly what a grid is: a transmission network designed to operate within stability boundaries of voltage and frequency, and that deviations can cause outcomes ranging from partial collapse to full system collapse. Those are not academic words; they are operating constraints. If you violate them often enough, you don’t get “occasional disturbance.” You get cascades.

NERC’s 2024 Annual Report records that, in 2024, average operating voltages on the transmission network were outside the Grid Code’s normal limits, and that the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry recorded nine incidents of system collapse in 2024 (five partial and four total). When a regulator is telling you voltage is out of bounds and collapses are frequent, the grid is not suffering from superstition; it is suffering from control and coordination failure.

The same report also documents how collapses are triggered: cascaded tripping of generation units and transmission lines, driven by instability. That is precisely how fragile grids fail: one disturbance shifts flows and frequency; protection trips more assets; the system loses inertia and reserve; the grid unravels. Nigeria has become skilled at restoration; it has not become serious about prevention.

And prevention is always the same three things: (1) observe the system fast enough to control it, (2) carry and enforce reserves so disturbances are absorbed rather than amplified, and (3) maintain voltage and protection coordination so local faults do not become national cascades.

The problem is bigger than transmission, but transmission is where small failures become national events.

There is a temptation to point at the Transmission Company of Nigeria and stop there. That’s incomplete. Transmission is the “failure amplifier,” but it is not the sole root. The grid collapses frequently because upstream and downstream fragilities reinforce one another.

Start with observability. A system operator cannot control what it cannot see. If the operator’s telemetry is partial, delayed, or unreliable, then dispatch becomes reactive and protection becomes blunt. NERC has repeatedly emphasized system operation, coordination, and the risks of operating outside normal limits. In practical terms, this means Nigeria must treat SCADA/EMS, event recorders, time synchronization, and protection settings governance as “hard infrastructure,” not as optional sophistication.

Then look downstream: distribution. If distribution is loss-ridden and under- collected, the entire value chain starves. That starvation shows up as deferred maintenance, inability to procure spares, and weak incentives to enforce disciplined operations. And tariffs not reflecting cost, theft and nonpayment, policy inconsistency, maintenance culture deficits, captures this reality well.

NERC’s 2024 Annual Report quantifies one piece of the downstream constraint that is rarely treated as a national security issue but should be: metering. As of 31 December 2024, only 46.57% of NERC-registered customers were metered. A distribution system that cannot measure consumption at scale cannot reliably bill; a system that cannot reliably bill cannot reliably collect; a system that cannot reliably collect cannot reliably maintain; and a grid that cannot be maintained will eventually collapse under routine stress.

So yes, transmission fragility matters. But it sits atop a distribution and settlement regime that often cannot produce the cash flows required for stability investments and disciplined maintenance.

What the problems truly are: three binding constraints, one loop

If Nigeria wants to stop performing grief every time the grid collapses, it needs to name the binding constraints honestly and treat them as engineering objects.

1. The stability constraint: frequency, voltage, and reserves

NERC’s reporting highlights the stability boundaries and why violating them produces widespread outages. Stability is not a romantic poetry. It is: (a) primary and secondary reserves that respond when the grid is shocked, (b) voltage/reactive power support where needed, and (c) protection coordination that isolates faults rather than initiating cascades.

When Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission documents repeated collapses and voltage noncompliance, it is pointing to stability discipline that is not yet institutionalized as a strict operating regime.

2. The observability constraint: you cannot run what you cannot see

A modern grid is controlled by data: substation telemetry, breaker status, line flows, synchronized event logs, disturbance recorders, and state estimation. Absent “minimum viable observability,” the system operator cannot detect precursors early enough to intervene. The grid becomes a dark room where you learn what happened only after everything has already tripped.

3. The financeability constraint: money-flow is the second control system

Nigeria’s power sector has long suffered from the liquidity trap: revenue shortfalls and arrears undermine fuel payments and maintenance, which undermine reliability, which further undermines collections. Some of the canonical channels that drive this trap are inefficient tariffs, theft/nonpayment, policy inconsistency, and maintenance culture.

NERC’s own quarterly reporting shows it thinks in these linked terms: operational performance, technical parameters, commercial performance (including ATC&C losses), and remittances. The system is not collapsing only because of physics. It is collapsing because the institutions that finance the physics are unstable. Put these together and you get one loop: weak measurement and enforcement → weak collections → weak maintenance and weak control investments → instability → collapse → further erosion of willingness-to-pay and productive reliance on the grid.

An implementable plan: stop chasing megawatts, start buying stability

Nigeria does not need another national promise to “improve the grid.” It needs a program whose outputs are measurable, auditable, and tied to enforcement and financing tranches. The plan below is practical. It does not require utopia; it requires discipline.

Phase 1 (0–12 months): build the “truth engine” and reduce collapse probability fast

First, implement boundary metering and event logging nationwide as the foundation of accountability. If you cannot measure feeder injection and reconcile it with billed energy, you cannot distinguish technical losses from theft, and you cannot prove improvement. Metering is not a consumer gadget; it is governance infrastructure. NERC’s customer metering shortfall is large; correcting it begins with boundary measurability, not only end-customer devices.

Second, adopt a strict, published major-event discipline: every system disturbance gets a root-cause report and a corrective action that is tracked to closure. NERC already documents collapse mechanisms (cascaded tripping) and the stability logic behind them; the missing ingredient is ruthless closure discipline.

Third, fund and deploy minimum viable observability: critical substations first, with time-synchronized event recorders and dependable telemetry. This is cheaper than endless blackouts and more important than “new capacity” if the system is collapsing.

Fourth, install and enforce a reserve and frequency discipline. NERC’s discussion of frequency control and operating limits underscores that frequency is the primary parameter tracked to avoid disturbances. The policy translation is clear: contract reserves, monitor them, penalize nonperformance.

Phase 2 (1–3 years): distribution-first reliability and collections, because cash is grid stability

Nigeria should adopt a “bounded victory” strategy: pick high-impact feeders (industrial corridors, dense city loads) and implement reliability upgrades (protection coordination, sectionalizing, transformer hotspot remediation) paired with billing integrity and collections enforcement. This is not ideology; it is mechanism design: improve service where you can measure it, enforce payment fairly, recycle incremental cash into more reliability, and publish the result.

This directly attacks the liquidity trap channels; power theft, nonpayment, tariff weakness, and maintenance culture, by making them measurable and enforceable rather than rhetorical.

At the same time, Nigeria should stop pretending that “tariffs” are the first lever. A tariff increase imposed on a system with estimated billing and weak service legitimacy is not reform; it is provocation. The right sequencing is: measure → improve service in bounded zones → enforce billing integrity → then adjust tariffs with explicit protections.

Phase 3 (3–7 years): transmission reinforcement where it matters, plus voltage support and protection governance

The grid will keep collapsing if Nigeria does not build redundancy and voltage stability into key corridors. NERC’s 2024 Annual Report reports voltage performance outside normal limits and records multiple system collapses. The implementable remedy is not “upgrade everything.” It is to reinforce the highest-shadow-cost corridors; the substations and lines whose failure produces outsized national consequences.

This phase must include reactive power support and protection settings governance. In fragile systems, voltage issues and miscoordinated protection are silent killers. If Nigeria upgrades lines but leaves protection and voltage support as afterthoughts, it will buy capacity and keep instability.

Phase 4 (7–15 years): integrate renewables and distributed resilience into a stable platform.

Nigeria should absolutely expand distributed energy and mini-grids where they are economically superior and politically faster, especially for underserved zones. But distributed systems must be integrated under enforceable interconnection and settlement rules; otherwise Nigeria risks two electricity economies: reliability for those who can self-supply, fragility for everyone else.

The country’s own discourse already recognizes the multi-pronged nature of the challenge, financial constraints, tariffs, theft, regulatory inconsistency, security, technical capacity. The missing step is to convert that multi-pronged list into a sequenced program with gates and verification.

The one reform that makes every other reform easier: treat collapses as a performance failure, not a news cycle

A grid that collapses repeatedly is telling you something very specific: the system is running too close to its limits, without enough visibility and control, and without the financial capacity to maintain the assets and enforce discipline.

Nigeria can fix this. The evidence is already visible in the regulator’s own reporting: the grid’s operating limits are specified; the collapse incidents are documented; the voltage noncompliance gap is quantified. The policy failure is not ignorance; it is the absence of a mechanism that forces closure.

So, my prescription is blunt: stop negotiating with reality. Build the truth engine (boundary metering + auditable KPIs), build minimum viable observability (SCADA/telemetry at critical nodes), enforce reserves and protection discipline, fix distribution financeability (metering, loss reduction, collections), and ring-fence cash so essential O&M and fuel payments are not discretionary. Then, and only then, scale complexity: large transmission upgrades, high-renewable integration, and deep regional balancing.

Nigeria’s grid collapses are not fate. They are a solvable systems problem. The only remaining question is whether the country is prepared to govern the grid the way a modern state governs a critical real-time machine: by measurement, enforcement, and discipline rather than by astonishment after each predictable collapse.

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Philip Obazee retired as a managing director and head of derivatives from Macquarie Asset Management – a global asset management company with office in Philadelphia, PA, USA, and currently, he is the founder and chief executive officer of Polymetrics Americas Research.