By Emmanuel Emeh

Nigeria’s power problem has a price tag, and it is staggering. The World Bank estimates that unreliable electricity costs the country about 29 billion dollars every year, while its enterprise surveys record Nigerian firms suffering an average of nearly 33 outages in a typical month, with roughly 11 percent of sales lost as a result.

Behind those numbers sits a quieter failure that rarely makes headlines: facilities standing idle for days because a single critical spare part is not on the shelf. It is that failure a Nigerian software engineer and researcher set out to attack, and his name is Obinna ThankGod Okeke.

In 2018, Mr Okeke co-authored a study published in IRE Journals titled Model for Inventory Availability and Plant Uptime Improvement in Energy Facilities, written with C. S. Okonkwo and O. Ogunwole and appearing in Volume 2, Number 4 of the journal, on pages 160 to 172. The paper proposed a model aimed at improving inventory availability as a direct route to better plant uptime in energy facilities.

“Downtime is rarely about the machine alone,” Mr Okeke said. “It is about the part that is not on the shelf when the machine fails. An outage that should cost you hours ends up costing you weeks. We wanted to show that when you manage inventory availability deliberately, uptime follows almost as a matter of course.”

The argument lands differently when set against the national data. Beyond the 29 billion dollars in annual losses, the World Bank has reported that about 85 million Nigerians lack access to grid electricity, the largest such deficit in the world, and that Nigerians spend an estimated 12 billion dollars a year buying and fuelling generators to cope. In that context, research that helps existing facilities extract more reliable output from assets they already own reads less like an academic exercise and more like an economic intervention.

The work did not emerge from a distant laboratory. At the time, Mr Okeke was serving as a full stack developer at Belle Naturals NG LTD, where he built and maintained the company’s online commerce platform, developed its product catalogue, shopping cart, and checkout systems, integrated secure payment processing, and optimised the databases powering sales and inventory reporting. Wrestling daily with livestock data, he said, changed how he saw the subject entirely.

“When you watch inventory records drive real business decisions every single day, you stop seeing inventory as paperwork,” he said. “You start seeing it as infrastructure. Whether the shelf holds skincare products or turbine components, a gap in stock visibility becomes a gap in output, and somebody pays for it.”

His foundation was laid at Federal Polytechnic Oko, where he trained in computer science and developed the problem-first discipline that would define his work. The trajectory is a familiar Nigerian one, a polytechnic-trained technologist confronting local constraints with local knowledge, but the choice to publish, to submit his thinking to review and put it on the record, set him apart early.

Industry observers have long argued that Nigeria’s downtime crisis is as much a management problem as an engineering one. The World Bank Enterprise Survey found that 27 per cent of Nigerian firms identify electricity reliability as the main obstacle to their business, ahead of finance and corruption.

Procurement delays, weak forecasting, and blind spots in stock records sabotage plant performance long before any component actually fails. The model he helped develop speaks directly to that diagnosis, treating spare parts availability not as an afterthought of maintenance but as a driver of production itself.

For Okeke, the larger lesson is about who gets to solve Nigeria’s problems. “Nigeria does not lack talent, and it does not lack ideas,” he said. “What we need is disciplined, homegrown research applied to our own realities, published where others can test it and build on it. The answers to our downtime problem will not be flown in. They will be worked out by people who understand the terrain.”

A crisis measured in tens of billions of dollars will not yield to slogans. It will yield to the unglamorous work of getting the right part to the right place at the right time, and to researchers willing to show how.

As policymakers and plant operators search for ways to reclaim those staggering annual losses, the record shows that at least one young Nigerian engineer asked the right question early. Okeke put his answer in print in 2018, and it is still waiting to be fully used.