Electricity should decide Nigeria’s 2027 elections

By Farooq A. Kperogi

Wherever Nigerians congregate in the diaspora, conversations about our country almost invariably gravitate toward electricity. That was what happened after I delivered a keynote address at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley on October 1. The Nigerians I met there agreed with me that perhaps the greatest incubator of poverty and underdevelopment in our country is the absence of stable, reliable electricity.

Two Nigerian professionals at the university, an engineering professor and a pharmacist, urged me to devote a column to the subject and help make it a defining issue in the 2027 elections. I told them I had written several columns about Nigeria’s electricity woes. They knew. They wanted me to write another one. One of them later sent me a scholarly study of how India, which is several times Nigeria’s size, and which often competes with Nigeria for the dubious distinction of being the poverty capital of the world, has brought electricity to nearly all its households.

I have often wondered why Nigeria’s political class treats electricity as an irritating inconvenience that can be managed with occasional sterile speeches, ministerial reshuffles and grandiose promises. The power crisis has arrested our development, strangled innumerable talents and made the ordinary business of living needlessly expensive. It ought to be the defining issue of every election.

During the 2023 presidential campaign, Bola Ahmed Tinubu told a Nigerian Economic Summit Group audience that “a common screwdriver can create a path to fortune if electricity is taken care of.” One of my compatriots in Texas told me the remark impressed him enough to support Tinubu.

I can understand why. The screwdriver was an unusually evocative trope. Think of the mechanic, the machinist, the carpenter, the barber and the hairdresser who have skills, energy and enterprise but whose work is perpetually interrupted by darkness. Give such people dependable electricity and their modest tools can become instruments of prosperity. Take it away and you force them to spend much of their earnings buying fuel to power their own little electricity companies.

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