Fifteen States. One Saboteur. Zero Megawatts. Nigeria spent three years building a new electricity governance framework. NERC is now dismantling it one illegal directive at a time. By Chidi Ekeh
Fifteen States. One Saboteur. Zero Megawatts.
Nigeria spent three years building a new electricity governance framework. NERC is now dismantling it one illegal directive at a time.
By Chidi Ekeh
Let us begin with a fact so precise it requires no embellishment.
Section 230(6) of the Electricity Act 2023 the legislation that NERC administers, enforces, and routinely invokes against others states the following:
“On the completion of the transfers… the Commission shall have no further regulatory responsibility over the transferee company whose regulatory oversight has been transferred.”
No further regulatory responsibility.
Not reduced responsibility. Not shared responsibility. Not responsibility subject to national grid considerations or overriding oversight clauses or NERC’s own interpretation of what a state electricity market may or may not do. No further responsibility. Full stop.
Fifteen states have now completed the regulatory transfer process. Fifteen state electricity regulators have formally assumed jurisdiction over electricity markets within their territories. And in at least one documented case with evidence now in the public domain NERC has responded to that transfer not by stepping back, as its own enabling Act requires, but by attempting to redirect physical electricity assets away from a state-owned company and back toward a legacy distribution operator whose failure is the very reason the reform existed in the first place.
“This is not a regulatory dispute. It is a regulatory institution acting in contempt of the law it was created to administer.”
Exhibit A: The Ondo evidence
In late March 2026, the Niger Delta Power Holding Company formally transferred electricity distribution infrastructure within Ondo State — specifically the 54-kilometre Omotosho 33kV distribution line and the 30 kilometre Fortune University feeder line to the Ondo State Power Company.
The Ondo State Electricity Regulatory Bureau, OSERB, approved the leasing arrangement. The assets were integrated into the Ondo State electricity market’s Regulatory Asset Base. The transfer was complete, documented, and legally unimpeachable.
NERC’s response was to attempt to reassign those same assets to BEDC Electricity Ondo Limited the successor entity of the distribution company that had managed, or more precisely failed to manage, electricity infrastructure in Ondo State for over a decade without activating the very assets in question.
Consider what that means in practice. NDPHC built infrastructure. BEDC sat on it without activating it. The Ondo State Government spent years constructing the legal and institutional architecture to take control of its own electricity market. NDPHC formally handed those assets to the state. And NERC’s response was to attempt to hand them back to the operator whose inaction justified the entire exercise.
That is not oversight. That is obstruction dressed in regulatory language.
Section 70(1) and 70(2) of the same Electricity Act explicitly prohibit the transfer, lease, or affiliation of electricity undertakings without the consent of the relevant regulator. The relevant regulator for assets within Ondo State is OSERB not NERC. Any NERC directive reassigning those assets would itself violate the sections NERC is supposed to enforce.
NERC would be breaking the law it administers, to undo a transfer it has no lawful basis to reverse, in favour of an operator it has no remaining jurisdiction to protect.
Exhibit B: The Enugu precedent
But Ondo is not the story. Nigeria is.
In July 2025, the Enugu State Electricity Regulatory Commission cut the top-band electricity tariff charged by its state distributor from ₦209.5 per kilowatt-hour to ₦160.4 after independently assessing operating costs and determining that consumers were being overcharged. NERC issued a public rebuke within six days. Within three weeks, the state distributor’s power allocation had been cut by half.
A regulatory commission exercising its statutory authority to protect consumers produced, within a month, a physical reduction in electricity supply to those same consumers because the federal regulator chose to make an example of a state that had the temerity to regulate independently.
More than sixteen states through the Forum of Commissioners of Power and Energy formally condemned NERC’s approach in a joint statement, describing it as creating constitutional conflict, undermining cooperative federalism, and subordinating state laws to federal provisions even within intra-state electricity markets.
Sixteen states. A joint statement. And the amendment that NERC’s behaviour was helping to shape was signed into law anyway, in February 2026, with the “overriding oversight” clause intact a phrase deliberately left undefined, giving NERC legal cover to intervene in any state electricity market connected to the national grid.
Whlich is every state electricity market in Nigeria.
The investment consequence nobody is discussing
Private investors considering electricity projects in Nigerian states are watching this. Every renewable energy developer, every mini-grid operator, every independent power producer evaluating a state-licensed project in any of the fifteen states with regulatory transfers is now watching a federal regulator attempt to override a state regulator’s asset approval — in direct contradiction of the statute both operate under.
What does that tell an investor?
It tells them that a licence from a state electricity regulator may not be worth the paper it is issued on, if NERC decides to contest it. It tells them that assets they acquire or develop under a state regulatory framework may be subject to reassignment by a federal body with no clear legal basis to act but with the institutional power to act anyway. It tells them that Nigeria’s electricity sector — after three years of carefully constructed reform architecture — still has a single point of failure: a federal regulator that has not accepted the boundaries the law drew around it.
Nigeria has averaged below 5,000 megawatts of electricity generation for a population of 220 million people for longer than most Nigerians can remember. The reforms of 2023 and 2025 represented the most serious structural attempt in a generation to change that — by creating competitive state-level markets, attracting distributed investment, and breaking the monopoly grip of a national system that has consistently failed. NERC’s behaviour is not merely a legal problem. It is an investment deterrent.
And in a country that goes to sleep in darkness every night, investment deterrence is a public health issue.
The specific remedy
The National Assembly must act. Not against NERC as an institution — NERC serves a legitimate and necessary function coordinating the national grid and interstate electricity activities. But against the ambiguity that NERC is exploiting.
The phrase “overriding regulatory oversight” in the Electricity Act Amendment 2025 must be defined with surgical precision. It must specify exactly which categories of decision and only those categories NERC may override in a state electricity market connected to the national grid. Tariff decisions on intra-state distribution by a state-licensed operator should not be among them. Asset transfer approvals by a state regulator for infrastructure domiciled entirely within state territory should not be among them. Consumer protection regulations issued by a state regulator within its own market should not be among them.
What should be among them: national grid stability, interstate transmission, wholesale market pricing, and technical standards that cross state boundaries. These are legitimate federal concerns. Everything else is a state matter and the law should say so in language that does not require a High Court to interpret.
Until that amendment is made, NERC will continue to define “overriding oversight” for itself, in its own favour, against the plain language of the Act it was created to serve.
The verdict
A regulator that uses its institutional power to contradict its own enabling legislation is not a regulator performing its function. It is an institution in the business of self-preservation protecting its own jurisdiction not because the law requires it, but because the alternative is accepting that the reform worked, that states are capable, and that the centre’s grip on electricity governance in Nigeria has legitimately loosened.
That is an uncomfortable truth for any federal institution to absorb.
But Nigeria’s electricity crisis has never been a technical problem. It has always been a governance problem specifically, a problem of concentrated authority, captured institutions, and the persistent refusal of those with power over the sector to allow reform to actually reform anything.
NERC is not a villain. It is an institution behaving exactly as Nigerian institutions behave when their relevance is threatened. The question is whether the National Assembly which wrote the law that NERC is now selectively reading has the discipline to write it more clearly, and the will to enforce it when NERC selectively reads that one too.
Nigeria cannot keep sleeping in the dark while regulators argue about who owns the switch.
Chidi Ekeh, a current affairs analyst, writes from Abuja, chidodo11@gmail.com