President Bola Tinubu has approved a $2.2 billion payment plan to settle decade-long debts crippling Nigeria’s power sector. Announced recently, the bailout aims to pay off gas suppliers and generation companies to restore the national grid’s reliability. While Special Adviser Olu Arowolo-Verheijen maintains the move will restore market confidence, analysts warn that clearing arrears is not a “silver bullet.” Without structural reforms to enforce metering and address a broken tariff system, the sector risks falling back into a cycle of debt and blackouts. As Nigeria loses billions annually to unreliable electricity, the bailout underscores a critical question: Can funding alone fix a deeply broken power system?
DW
