There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

Tegbe

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end. The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability. A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand. The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements. A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change. If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage. If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn. The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market. But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office. It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness. For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out. But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough. Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.

● Sufuyan Ojeifo is the Publisher/Editor-in-Chief of THE CONCLAVE online newspaper.