Is Joseph Tegbe fixing the grid or merely managing the darkness?

First half of the article

WHEN Adebayo Adelabu was appointed Nigeria’s Minister of Power, I publicly congratulated him and offered advice to a fellow indigene of Oyo State. I had intended to do the same for his successor, Joseph Tegbe, who now represents Oyo State in President Tinubu’s cabinet. That intention was interrupted. My attention shifted to unabated insecurity following the beheading of mathematics teacher Mr. Michael Oyedokun and the continued abduction of schoolchildren and teachers by Northern terrorists at Ahoro Esiele, Oriire Local Government Area.  When I eventually turned to the new minister, I encountered an interesting political story. His late father reportedly owned a bookshop in Oyo town, where Tegbe also grew up. His emergence revived an old question in Nigerian federalism: when does long-term residency become political belonging in a society where ancestry remains politically significant in competition for limited political space?

When the late Governor Abiola Ajimobi sought to make Tegbe the APC governorship candidate, opposition emerged despite being constitutionally eligible through residence. Politicians native to Oyo reportedly claimed that Tegbe remained an Itsekiri from Delta State. Adelabu became the party’s candidate. A similar debate reportedly resurfaced years later when Governor Makinde considered Tegbe for the PDP Oyo Central Senatorial District before he contested the Oyo South seat, which he lost to Sharafadeen Alli. He has served as Mogaji of Tegbe Compound in Ibadan for about a decade without progressing to Jagun in the Olubadan succession line. While I would welcome Tegbe’s perspective on this matter, the debate about ancestry, residency and political belonging in a federal republic is an important conversation for another day.

Today, however, the focus is on the electricity system. The question is not where Tegbe comes from, but whether the electricity system he now leads is being reformed at the level its structural failures demand.

The case for unbundling the national grid

Tegbe inherited a sector weakened by decades of decay and repeated grid collapses. He resisted making grand promises, cautioning that there was no “magic wand” for immediate 24-hour electricity. As he put it, “The challenges that have kept this sector below its potential were decades in the making. They will not be fully reversed in weeks or months.”The question is whether his reforms match that diagnosis.

His early achievements, though technically sound, remain localized and administrative. They have yet to address Nigeria’s greatest electricity bottleneck: the centralized and fragile national grid. The ministry’s examples illustrate this distinction. They emphasize fixing components rather than redesigning the system. The Ministry cited interventions such as the 24-hour restoration of the Katampe feeder station and the revival of a Niger Delta Power Holding Company (NDPHC) facility that had sat dormant for three years. While these quick wins are useful, they constitute firefighting rather than systemic overhaul. The singly governed national grid remains a single point of failure, demonstrating that Nigeria’s greatest vulnerability lies less in generation than in transmission architecture.

To transform the sector, he must move beyond repairs. Microgrids and isolated state-level projects are insufficient; Nigeria needs regional unbundling of its primary transmission network. A structural solution would involve breaking the national grid into three distinct, interconnected regional units: East, Central, and West. Each regional grid should be co-owned by the Federal Government and adjoining state governments, but managed by independent, private transmission companies. This structure would localize disruptions, encourage regional capital injection, and mirror the global shift toward interconnected regional transmission systems rather than dependence on one national control structure.

Bureaucracy versus blueprints: Discos’ debts and recapitalization

Tegbe’s institutional coordination has been largely bureaucratic. His meetings with the heads of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), NERC, and the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) to demand “collaboration, governance, and accountability” represent a sensible first step, but they remain strictly administrative. Nigeria’s problem is not a shortage of meetings but a shortage of enforceable implementation blueprints, execution discipline, institutional coherence, and measurable public accountability. His calls for synergy raise questions about existing executive mechanisms. Is he leveraging the Presidential Committee—the Gas Monitoring and Clearance Committee (GAMCO)—and the gas-to-power committees initiated by his predecessor, Adebayo Adelabu? If these bodies languish, “collaboration across the value chain” remains rhetoric. Tegbe must use them to resolve commercial and infrastructural friction between gas suppliers and thermal generators.

The ministry has heavily emphasized NERC’s directive forcing Electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) to compensate Band A customers for…

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