The Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, has unveiled a comprehensive action plan to stabilise Nigeria’s electricity sector, with priorities spanning grid reliability, infrastructure protection, metering, tariff and market governance.

Relatedly, presidential candidate of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), Atiku Abubakar, has called for a comprehensive public audit of all power sector intervention funds raised by the President Bola Tinubu administration, describing the latest revelations by the Association of Power Generation Companies (APGC) as the collapse of the government’s narrative on the settlement of power sector debts.

At the second quarterly Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) Stakeholders’ Meeting convened by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) in Abuja, Tegbe said addressing the country’s electricity challenges would require collective responsibility from all players across the value chain.

The meeting, chaired by the Chairman of NERC, Dr Musiliu Oseni, brought together operators, regulators and policymakers, including the Special Adviser to the President on Power, Rilwan Babalola, and the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Power, Mahmud Mamman.

Delivering the keynote, the minister said the power sector reforms would be driven by collaboration among electricity generation companies (GenCos), distribution companies (DisCos), the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), the Nigerian Independent System Operator (NISO), regulators, and government institutions.

“Nigeria’s power crisis was not built by one hand, and it will not be fixed by one hand,” Tegbe said, urging stakeholders to accept shared responsibility for resolving the sector’s longstanding challenges.

On infrastructure, the minister called for power installations to be formally recognised as Critical National Assets, warning that vandalism, grid sabotage and energy theft amount to economic attacks on Nigerian households.

He said efforts to secure critical infrastructure would proceed alongside measures to optimise the performance of existing assets, noting that the government was addressing transmission bottlenecks, improving spinning reserves and strengthening priority substation relay systems to enhance grid reliability in the near term.

Addressing metering and electricity pricing, Tegbe said estimated billing had continued to unfairly burden consumers while concealing inefficiencies within the power value chain.

He disclosed that the ministry was working with industry stakeholders to accelerate meter deployment, reduce Aggregate Technical, Commercial and Collection (ATC&C) losses and develop a sustainable tariff transition framework that protects vulnerable consumers from sudden cost increases while providing investors with greater certainty for long-term investments.

On market governance, the minister stressed that tariff reforms must be supported by improved payment discipline across the electricity market.

He called for greater transparency in calculating Derived Remittance Obligations (DRO), arguing that confidence in the sector depends on openness and accountability.

“Trust in the market begins with trust in the numbers,” he said.

Tegbe further disclosed that the ministry was working towards publishing key performance indicators (KPIs) and performance scorecards for GenCos and DisCos to improve accountability and make both strong and weak operational performance visible to the public.

ATIKU, in a statement by his Senior Special Assistant on Public Communication, Phrank Shaibu, asserted that Nigerians had been presented with evidence that the Federal Government’s repeated bond issuances have become an endless cycle of borrowing without accountability.

He said the disclosure by the Executive Secretary of APGC, Dr Joy Ogaji, that the much-publicised N501 billion bond had not been fully disbursed, despite repeated government claims to the contrary, raises questions about transparency, fiscal discipline and the credibility of the administration’s economic management.

The statement noted that Ogaji had also challenged the Federal Government to publish the complete list of beneficiaries, the amounts paid to each GenCo, and the dates of such payments, if the money was indeed released.

He quoted Ogaji’s description of the government’s token payment as being “like rubbing oil on a crying child’s mouth to imply that he had eaten,” which it said captured the administration’s approach to governance.

According to the statement, Nigerians have for months been “inundated with announcements of bond after bond supposedly floated to clear power sector debts,” beginning with a promise of a N590 billion intervention, followed by the N501 billion bond “celebrated as a breakthrough,” and later a “multi-trillion-naira settlement programme.”

Atiku accused the administration of treating governance as “an endless exercise in announcements”, saying every challenge is met with another ceremony and every unresolved debt answered with another borrowing plan, even as electricity generation remains constrained and Nigerians continue to pay heavily for darkness.

“A government that constantly changes the figures cannot expect citizens to trust its arithmetic,” it said, adding that the administration “must stop moving the goalpost” and stop expecting Nigerians to celebrate fresh debt while refusing to account for previous interventions.