EIGHT POINT EIGHT MILLION NIGERIANS. NINETY EIGHT WATTS EACH. _A presidential aide read a compendium, and overnight Nigeria became an electrified country. The arithmetic inside that compendium tells a completely different story_ . By Ekeh Chidiebebre

EIGHT POINT EIGHT MILLION NIGERIANS. NINETY EIGHT WATTS EACH.
_A presidential aide read a compendium, and overnight Nigeria became an electrified country. The arithmetic inside that compendium tells a completely different story_ .
By Ekeh Chidiebebre

The number is 8,868,568.
Not “about nine million.” Not “almost nine million.” Eight million, eight hundred and sixty eight thousand, five hundred and sixty eight. That kind of precision is meant to look like counting.
It is not counting. Take the household figure sitting in the same release, 1,478,095, and multiply it by six. You land on the headline. Nobody entered any village and counted 8.8 million Nigerians. Somebody took a connection log, applied an assumed household size, and presented the result as a national achievement.
That is the first problem with this story. It is not the biggest one.

*THE WATTS DO NOT AGREE WITH THE CLAIM*
The release credits 340 mini-grid projects with 145,186 kilowatts-peak of installed solar. Share that across the 1,478,095 households it says were connected, and every single household receives 98 watts-peak.
Ninety eight watts. That is one small panel. Two bulbs, a phone charger, and a fan if the sun is generous and you are not asking for too much.
That is a solar home system. It is a useful thing and I will not mock it. But it is not a mini-grid connection, and calling it electrification is the kind of arrangement that collapses the moment anybody touches it with a calculator.
Ninety eight watts per household. Two bulbs and a phone charger. That is not electrification. That is a lantern with paperwork.
*THEN THE JOBS FIGURE ARRIVED*

120,747 direct jobs, on 145,186 kilowatts of panel. That is one full time job for every 1.2 kilowatts installed.
A modest duplex in Gwarinpa runs a five kilowatt rooftop system. On these numbers, that duplex is employing four people. Permanently.
Per project it is worse. Three hundred and forty mini-grids, 120,747 jobs, which works out to 355 direct jobs at every single site. There are agencies inside the Three Arms Zone with smaller nominal rolls, and at least those ones have offices you can walk into.
⁂
*REA’S OWN CEREMONY CONTRADICTS THE COMPENDIUM*

This is the part the aide did not check. In July, the Minister of Power stood before cameras at the commissioning of 23 completed solar mini-grids delivered with the United Nations Development Programme and the Global Environment Facility. Those 23 mini-grids were presented as delivering electricity to 50,000 people. That is roughly 2,200 people per mini-grid.
The compendium implies 26,000 people per mini-grid. Twelve times what the agency itself announced eleven weeks ago, with a minister at the podium and the press in full attendance.
Somebody somewhere is not reading his own agency’s press releases.

*AND THE RECORD BEING CLAIMED IS BORROWED*

The Nigeria Electrification Project, a 550 million dollar programme jointly funded by the World Bank and the African Development Bank, delivered nearly 200 mini-grids serving more than 164,000 customers, plus over 1.4 million solar home systems, reaching more than 8 million Nigerians.
There it is. The 8.8 million. The 1.478 million households. They are NEP’s figures, and under NEP those millions came overwhelmingly from standalone solar kits, not from mini-grids. NEP also began before this administration came into office. It has now been relabelled, redated to the window 2023 to 2026, and folded neatly into the Renewed Hope Agenda.
Meanwhile the programme actually designed to reach millions has not finished building. DARES, the 750 million dollar World Bank facility, is targeting over 17.5 million Nigerians, and its flagship sites are still at groundbreaking stage. You cannot bank half of a target whose infrastructure is still in the ground.
You cannot bank half of a target whose infrastructure is still in the ground.
⁂
*NOW LET ME COMPLICATE MY OWN CASE*

REA under Abba Aliyu has a real record, and it is verifiable. Forty eight interconnected mini-grids under construction across 19 states. Fifteen universities connected to solar farms. European Union and German money moving into Nigerian off-grid systems, which is not a small thing in a country where foreign lenders have learnt to be very careful who they hand money to.
That is genuine work, done by one of the few federal agencies that development partners will still write a cheque to. Which is exactly why this compendium is an insult to the very agency it was written to praise.

*THE VERDICT*
The claim did not come from REA. It came from a Senior Special Assistant to the President on Community Engagements in the North Central, an office with no statutory relationship to energy policy whatsoever, who read a document and issued praise. A headline then quietly converted “aide commends” into “REA electrifies.” Nobody told a direct lie. Everybody simply upgraded.
And the ground refuses to cooperate. Nigeria remains home to an estimated 87 million people without access to electricity, sitting among the three worst access deficits on earth. The grid was carrying 4,140 megawatts in January for a country of more than 200 million people. Nine million newly electrified citizens would show up somewhere in those numbers. They have not.
Three documents would settle this before close of business: the compendium itself with its methodology annex, the NEP implementation completion report, and the DARES verification agent returns. Publish them. Data withheld is a finding in itself.
Until then, this is not a milestone. It is a multiplication.
⁂

Nigeria does not have an electricity problem that it refuses to solve. It has an electricity problem that it keeps announcing as solved, in figures precise enough to sound audited and vague enough that nobody will ever be asked to prove them.
That is the older problem, and the more expensive one. The darkness, we can fix. It is the arithmetic that keeps us sitting inside it.

Ekeh Chidiebebere
Columnist and political analyst
Abuja
chidiekeh@yahoo.com
chidosqi.substack.com