Editorial: As Tinubu Unplugs Aso Villa from Power Grid

 

When governments lose faith in their own promises, they do not issue press statements. They install solar panels. The decision by the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration to migrate the Presidential Villa from Nigeria’s creaking, decrepit national grid to a bespoke solar mini-grid is more than an energy choice. It is a confession. A confession that the state cannot guarantee to its citizens what it guarantees to itself. This presidential slap on the face is a collective insult to Nigerians that is devoid of any perfunctory exaggeration. For months, officials have defended the N10bn “Solarization of the Villa” project; plus, another N7bn in fresh allocations, as prudent, forward-looking and environmentally sound. They note that the Villa’s annual electricity bill had ballooned to an eye-watering N47bn. They invoke the White House, which indeed uses solar energy. They speak the language of sustainability. But Nigerians, sitting in darkness, hear something else: abandonment.

 

This was not supposed to be the script. On the campaign trail, Mr Tinubu made electricity a litmus test of his presidency. In rally after rally, he dared voters not to return him for a second term if he failed to deliver stable power. In May 2023, when he assumed office, generation hovered between 4,000 and 5,000 megawatts; miserable for a country of over 200m people, but at least a baseline from which to climb. To his credit, he moved quickly. He assented to the Electricity Act within weeks, decentralizing the sector and empowering states and private actors to generate and distribute power. Licenses for mini-grids followed. There were technical peaks worth boasting about: a record 6,003MW generated on March 4, 2025, with 5,801.8MW transmitted. These are not trivial achievements.

 

Yet for the average Nigerian, these figures are statistical theatre. What matters is not installed capacity of 13,625MW, nor the 36% Plant Availability Factor reported by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission in January 2026. What matters is what arrives in homes and factories. And that stubbornly remains below 5,000MW; roughly where it stood in 2012, when the grid first crept past 4,500MW, and not dramatically better than the fleeting peaks above 5,000MW recorded in 2016. Fourteen years later, Africa’s largest economy is still celebrating numbers that would embarrass a medium-sized European city. And now, rather than fix the transmission bottlenecks that prevent idle capacity from being wheeled across the country, the Presidency has chosen to unplug itself.

 

The symbolism is devastating. The State House Permanent Secretary, Temitope Fashedemi, told senators that the solar installation was completed in late 2025 and is undergoing testing. By this month, Aso Rock will effectively exit the grid. The seat of power will be insulated from the collapses, fluctuations and voltage tantrums that afflict everyone else. This is not leadership by example. It is secession by example. Defenders argue that major institutions exiting the grid will reduce pressure on transmission infrastructure. In theory, yes. In practice, when the Presidency; the nerve centre of the federation, opts out, it signals that the grid is a lost cause. Investors are exquisitely sensitive to such signals. If the government will not rely on its own system, why should they?

 

The privatization of the Power Holding Company of Nigeria in 2013 was sold as a turning point. Critics, including the National Union of Electricity Employees, warned that selling decrepit assets without first strengthening transmission would create private monopolies perched atop public fragility. A decade later, the transmission backbone remains state-owned, underfunded and overwhelmed. Generation companies boast capacity they cannot evacuate. Distribution companies bill customers, often outrageously for darkness. The Presidency’s solar pivot does not solve this structural failure. It sidesteps it. Yes, renewable energy is commendable. Yes, distributed generation is part of the future. But context matters. The White House can afford to flaunt its solar panels because the United States already provides near-universal, reliable electricity. Solar there is augmentation, not escape. In Nigeria, it is evacuation from a system that has failed to keep pace with population growth, industrial demand and basic dignity.

 

When the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company listed the Presidential Villa among top government debtors in 2024, the optics were embarrassing. The debt was later reconciled downward. But the episode underscored a deeper malaise: even the seat of power was entangled in the same billing disputes and inefficiencies that plague ordinary consumers. The appropriate response was reform and enforcement, not retreat.

 

Peter Obi, the Labor Party’s presidential candidate in 2023, has seized on the contradiction. You cannot ask citizens to endure hardship while shielding yourself from it, he argues. The line may be partisan, but the sentiment resonates. Governance is not merely about policy outputs; it is about shared exposure to national conditions. When leaders queue at public hospitals or fly commercial, they send a message. When they install private power plants, they send another. The Tinubu administration insists that exiting the grid will free capacity for others. If so, let it publish the arithmetic. How many megawatts will be liberated? How will they be redistributed? What transmission upgrades accompany this supposed relief? Without answers, the move looks less like burden-sharing and more like burden-shedding.

 

Nigeria’s tragedy is not lack of ideas. It is the chronic inability to align incentives, infrastructure and accountability. Installed capacity has grown; dispatch has stagnated. Load factors are high - 90% of available generation is utilized; meaning the constraint is not demand but delivery. Transmission remains the Achilles heel. Yet instead of pouring political capital into overhauling that spine, the Presidency has chosen self-sufficiency. A nation cannot be run on backup generators and boutique mini-grids for the elite while the masses “pay for darkness”. The social contract frays when public goods become private luxuries. Electricity is not a decorative amenity; it is the bloodstream of modern economies. Factories close, hospitals falter, students read by candlelight.

 

If Aso Rock must go solar, let it do so while simultaneously announcing an emergency, time-bound overhaul of transmission - ring-fenced financing, transparent milestones, ruthless performance metrics. Let ministers and advisers feel every grid collapse as acutely as the market woman in Onitsha or the welder in Kano. That is what shared destiny looks like. Until then, the gleaming panels atop the Villa will not symbolize progress. They will glint as monuments to a state that, faced with a broken system, chose to unplug rather than repair.