Owei Lakemfa
Adelabu Adegoke was one of the most flamboyant and charismatic politicians in pre-independence Nigeria. When one day, the press asked him about deliberations in the Western Region House of Assembly, he replied that it was a “peculiar mess”. He pronounced the words with a Yoruba intonation making the two words sound like “Penkelemesi”. So, his sobriquet became Penkelemesi.
Today, his grandson, Adebayo Adelabu, is the Minister of Power who rather than do the job he is paid for, prefers serving Nigerians peculiar mess as menu. Under his watch, the national grid in 2024 on average, collapsed monthly and, power supply remains epileptic while tariff is astronomically increased. In other words, Nigerians under him pay astronomical electricity tariff for the darkness supplied.
However, rather than be quiet, Adelabu insults Nigerians at per second billing. For those who may not be aware, Nigerians as customers buy everything in the hope of being supplied electricity. We buy all: from wires, poles, transformers to meters with which we are billed. Despite these, Adelabu adds to the injury with insults and loads of Trump-like alternative truths. For instance, in April, 2024, Adelabu needed to astronomically increase electricity tariff in line with the biddings of the International Monetary Fund, IMF, and the World Bank who falsely claim that the cost of electricity is too cheap in Nigeria.
So, the grandson of Penkele spins a tail in which he blames and insults Nigerians for the epileptic power supply and why they had to be punished with high tariff increases. He said: “A lot of people will come back from work, they want to have dinner, or they want to see their colleagues down the road, they switch on the AC for the room to be cooling before they come back. Some people will be going to work in the morning, a freezer that you left on for days, they will still leave it on when all the items in the freezer are frozen and five, six, eight hours of their absence will not make it to defreeze, they will still leave it to be consuming power just because we are not paying enough.”
In his 2024 Independence Day message which also marked his one year in office, the Minister told Nigerians that over 40 per cent of us are enjoying 20 hours of electricity daily. The truth is that while some Nigerians have less than four hours of electricity supply daily, many have less. There are actually towns that were not supplied electricity at all within that period. In fact, as at April 18, 2025 areas in Kaduna metropolis like Romi and Sabo, for weeks, have had less than two hours power supply daily!
In any case, where did the increase in power distribution come from when for decades our maximum power distribution capacity remains 4,000 megawatts? Nigerians knew Adelabu was lying because that was not the reality of their existence. Also, Adelabu knew he was lying because as the Yorubas say, two persons cannot be deceived simultaneously; if the person being deceived does not know, the deceiver knows what game he is playing. However, Nigerians were too hungry to be bothered about debunking such optics by a man belching at the nation’s table. This spin by Adelabu on hours of power supplied is not original. It is an old template in the files of the Power Ministry. It was used on June 9, 2020 by one of his predecessors, Mamman Kwagyang Saleh, who on June 9, 2020 on the Nigerian Television Authority, claimed Nigerians were enjoying 18-24 hours of power supply every day.
Adelabu had also tried to play on the intelligence of Nigerians. While not increasing power distribution above the 4,000MW we have had for over a decade, he categorised consumers into what he classified as Band A, B, C. Under this false categorisation, he billed those in Band B, N63 per kilowatt-hour and those in Band A N209 per kilowatt-hour. After achieving the tariff increase, the Ministry decided to “regularise electricity tariffs” which is an euphemism for tariff increase and obliteration of the deceptive ‘Band’ system.
In his latest outing on April 17, 2025, Adelabu held a long, sonorous press briefing with no verifiable statistics to back his claims. He told Nigerians: “We have increased our generation to 6,003 megawatts, up by 1,700 megawatts in one and a half years since President Tinubu assumed office. It took Nigeria over 40 years to achieve an incremental 2,000 megawatts of average energy; we achieved this in less than two years.”
The claim by Adelabu that it is the Tinubu government that has increased power generation to 6,003MW is contradicted by facts from the supervisory Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission, NERC. In its “Daily Energy Watch” for January 28, 2015, the agency stated that power generation was 6,421 MW. In January, 2017, Buhari’s Minister of Power Babatunde Fashola announced a power generating capacity of 7,000MW. When Fashola in his Monday, July 9, 2018 press briefing made similar claims as an indication of progress, the eleven distribution companies under their Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors, ANED, issued a statement accusing the government of lying as the country had almost hit that mark before Buhari came to power on May 29, 2015.
So, Minister Adelabu’s claims ten years later, that due to hard work the Tinubu administration had significantly increased power generation to 6,003 MW, cannot but be a fallacy. Generally, contrary to the claims of Adelabu, our power sector is in a sorry state and urgent steps need to be taken. One of them is the overdue review of the demonstrably fraudulent 2013 privatisation which handed over the sector to mainly incompetent distribution companies some of which have gone bankrupt. The review has statutorily been due since 2018.
If need be, the privatisation should be reversed. The Dominican Republic did so in 2003, the German cities of Berlin and Hamburg also did, and California with a $3 trillion economy equally did. This led to the liquidation of Enron on July 16, 2005. Nigeria which began to generate and distribute electricity in 1896, has one of the best experiences in the world. Along with public power supply, we also had an independent or private power company called Nasco which was established in 1925. The latter was quite efficient and reliable. But the Federal Government smashed Nasco on the basis that no company should compete with NEPA/PHCN. Along with the reversal of the privatisation swindle, the Nasco model remains a viable one. Anybody interested in further reading can pick a copy of the 2020 book: “The light in the tunnel may be an oncoming train: A Research on Privatisation in Nigeria focusing on electricity”, which I co-authored with Ahmed Aminu Yusuf.
