What Nigerians Pay For Electricity They Rarely Receive

In the course of The AWB News’s intelligence gathering into why a country that is one hundred and twelve years old by creation on 1 January 1914, and sixty-six years old by independence from Britain on 1 October 1960, still struggles to keep the lights on for its citizens in 2026, several answers emerged not from government offices but from the streets themselves.

Across all six geopolitical zones, a similar pattern surfaced in conversations with Nigerians who, despite the burden, remained largely warm and forthcoming. In most towns and cities, neither the government nor the private distribution companies extend new cables, poles, or transformers street by street as neighborhoods grow or ageing equipment fails. That work falls, in practice, to residents themselves, who either pool money to buy the materials outright or wait for an election cycle, when a candidate from the area turns a transformer or a stretch of cable into a campaign promise. Samson, who lives in Emure Ekiti in Ekiti State, described the routine plainly: “I’m from Ekiti State, and where I live, particularly Emure Ekiti, I can’t even tell where to start. No light. And if a transformer gets faulty, the belief is that the DisCo or TCN technicians are coming to fix it, but you wait forever. The only way to fix it is for your entire neighborhood to contribute money and pay them before it gets fixed, or you wait for election year, when politicians use it as a campaign promise: ‘If you vote for me, I will fix or donate a transformer.'”

In Delta State, a resident named Tega offered a variation on the same theme, one tied less to elections in general and more to the specific fortunes of local politics. According to him, when a sitting governor hails from a particular local government area, supply to that governor’s home turf tends to noticeably improve for the duration of the governor’s time in office, a pattern that ties the reliability of a basic utility to the geography of political power rather than to any uniform standard of service.

The Northwest endures its own chronic version of the same crisis, layered with frequent load-shedding, persistently low voltage, and blackouts driven by repeated national grid collapses and transmission infrastructure stretched well past its intended capacity. Residents there, like those in the south, routinely pay DisCos or field technicians out of pocket to fix faults or replace transformers, and many questioned openly what their electricity bills are actually paying for given the state of the infrastructure they depend on. In Oyo State, a teacher named Ola raised a more structural objection, questioning the fairness of the Band A through E system itself: whether Nigerians fortunate enough to live on a Band A feeder contribute anything more meaningful to the country than those on lower bands. “There is no reason for Band this or Band that,” he said. “Everybody should be on the same band.”

The Eastern region emerged from our reporting as, by several measures, the hardest hit. There, the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company holds responsibility for maintenance, but communities frequently pay out of pocket to restore power quickly rather than wait indefinitely for official repair. “It is like what you see but you do not have,” said Mr Akuabia, describing supply that exists on paper more than in practice. He went further, explaining the near impossibility of a Nigerian earning ₦100,000 a month affording Band A service without constantly switching off appliances to conserve usage. “Literally, if you are poor, no electricity supply for you. With your eyes, you can see it, but it’s not meant for you. That is the state our government has pushed us into. Your alternative is to compromise through an illegal bypass,” he said.

Testing Mr Akuabia’s claim against the numbers bears it out. What ₦5,000 buys in electricity in Nigeria depends entirely on which tariff band a household falls into. For Band A customers, expected to receive at least 20 hours of electricity daily, ₦5,000 typically buys about 24 prepaid meter units, enough to last roughly 2 to 5 days for an average household. For Band B, entitled to at least 16 hours of daily supply, the same ₦5,000 purchases roughly 80 units, lasting about 8 to 16 days. For Band C, with a minimum of 12 hours daily, ₦5,000 buys approximately 100 units, lasting 10 to 20 days. Band D customers, expected to receive at least 8 hours daily, can obtain around 116 units for ₦5,000, lasting roughly 12 to 23 days. Band E customers, receiving a minimum of 4 hours daily, get approximately 125 units for the same ₦5,000, lasting about 13 to 25 days. In simple terms, the higher the band, the fewer units the same money buys, because each unit costs more, but the higher bands are supposed to deliver significantly longer daily supply in return. These figures are rough nationwide estimates; the exact number of units a household receives varies by distribution company, local tariff adjustments, and regulatory charges.

The financial pressure on this system is set to shift further. On July 31, 2026, Nigeria’s Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, announced that the federal government plans to phase out electricity subsidies starting in 2027, telling reporters in Lagos that the government intends to end what he called the “so-called subsidy” as part of broader reforms to restore the power sector’s financial health and halt a debt burden that has climbed into the trillions of naira. Tegbe ruled out any immediate tariff increase, stressing that current rates would hold while the government focuses on improving supply and metering, with support for vulnerable households to be channeled through the Power Consumer Assistance Fund. In practice, subsidies exist because tariffs for Bands B through E are kept below the actual cost of generating and distributing power. When the government stops covering that shortfall, the gap has to close somehow, most directly through tariffs moving toward cost-reflective levels over time. Officials have been careful to avoid saying tariffs will rise, framing the change instead as gradual removal paired with efficiency gains and targeted support. But unless generation, transmission, and distribution costs fall substantially, or another funding mechanism emerges, the end of broad subsidies will likely push average electricity bills higher over the coming years, even if no immediate hike is announced.

Based on our own field observations across the six geopolitical zones, rather than a formal survey, adequate and reliable power supply, as distinct from mere grid connection, appears to reach far below thirty percent of Nigerian households. In a handful of locations in each state, supply runs close to 24 hours a day; in most locations, closer to 16 hours across an entire month. In many towns, residents go weeks without power, some for months. In most Nigerian villages, there is none at all. This observational estimate should be read alongside, not in place of, the nationally surveyed grid-connection figures cited in AWB News’s earlier report on the Service-Based Tariff system, since connection to the grid and reliable service from it are not the same thing. What our reporting suggests is that the shortfall between the two may be wider, in practice, than the connection statistics alone would indicate. The path to closing that gap, our sources across the country agreed in one form or another, runs less through new tariff structures than through the political will to enforce the standards those structures already promise.