Samuel Ogundipe
Nigeria plunged into darkness as national grid collapses again
DISCOs blame repeated system collapse on TCN's 'poor' equipment
Grid collapse worsens electricity supply in parts of Nigeria
Nigeria appears to have been hit by system collapse to the national grid, according to reports from across the country.
Several social media users reported seizures of electricity to their areas starting Friday night. It was unclear when the collapse first occurred, but some of the earliest posts on Twitter were at about 11:30 p.m. Friday.
Users from Lagos, Abuja, Kaduna, Ile-Ife reported power failures in those cities around the same time — an indication typical of a national grid downtime. A user from Owerri, however, reported power availability as of 12:25 a.m. Saturday.
What triggered the massive failures could also not be confirmed as of 6:00 a.m. Saturday. A spokesperson for the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) did not immediately return a request seeking comments.
The Abuja Electricity Distribution Company acknowledged the breakdown in a tweetstorm to a barrage of complaints on its Twitter handle Saturday morning, pleading with consumers to be patient.
Good day Oluwadamilare, our apologies for the outage. The loss of power supply is due to a grid system outage. We sincerely regret this and hope for quick restoration. We will keep you updated as time goes by. We appreciate your understanding.
The outage marks the later reminder that the Nigeria’s power infrastructure remained largely precarious, despite decades of huge investments and policy revamps. At least eight major collapses that plunged substantial parts of the country into darkness have occurred in 2019 alone.
In May, a system collapse that affected most parts of the country took about 72 hours to restore. The collapse saw power generation output drop to 230 megawatts nationwide, down significantly from the 4,032 megawatts the day before the collapse on May 8.
The TCN said the outage was unavoidable at the time and promised a better management of the electricity infrastructure that would prevent future collapses. But several outages have been reported since then.
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