By Saheed Ibrahim
Claim: The Nigerian Minister of Power, Adebayo Adelabu, claims that under the administration of President Bola Tinubu, Nigeria has increased its electricity generation by 2,000 megawatts, rising from 4,000MW to 6,000MW in less than two years.
Full Text
Nigeria has long grappled with erratic electricity supply, a challenge that costs the country an estimated $29 billion annually, according to the World Bank. Power generation in Nigeria has fluctuated between 4,000MW and 4,900MW, with frequent grid collapses further compounding the problem.
Adebayo Adelabu was appointed Minister of Power on 21 September 2023. Since his appointment, he has consistently stated that the Federal Government was committed to improving electricity generation, aiming to reach 6,000 megawatts by December 2024. However, our previous fact-check revealed that the ministry failed to meet this target by the end of 2024, with Adelabu attributing the shortfall to vandalism.
Despite this, on April 2, 2025, Adelabu claimed that Nigeria had successfully increased power generation by 2000MW to 6,000MW under the Tinubu administration, stating:
“In 1984, the country generated 2000MW of electricity, and this was not increased to 4000MW until about 40 years later, around 2022 or so. We are about two years now, but we have been able to increase it to 6000 megawatts and this can be attributed to the efforts of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and the realisation of the importance of the sector as a major factor to galvanise the economy,” the minister said through a statement by his spokesman.
The reports of Adelabu’s claim can be found here, here and here.
We conducted this fact-check to verify the minister’s claim.
Verification
Using a Google keyword search, we found that several reports revealed that Nigeria’s power generation rose by 3% in January 2025, reaching 4,681MW, but remains below 6,000MW.
We further checked the National Energy System Operator (NESO), a semi-autonomous sector under the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), for the latest update on power generation in the country.
The NESO’s reports between March 25 and April 14, 2025, when the minister made the claim, showed some actual increase but no record of 6,000MW power generation.
For instance, the March 30 peak generation was 5398.05MW, while the April 12 peak generation stood at 5457.06MW.
As of May 29, 2023, when President Tinubu assumed office, the peak power generation was 4735.1MW. We subtracted it from 5401.77MW peak generation on April 13, 20225, when this fact-check was done.
The result, 666.67MW indicates that Nigeria has not generated up to 2000MW in less than two years of Tinubu’s administration as claimed.
As of 14 April 2025, NESO operational report shows that the “All Time Peak Generation Ever Attained” remains 5801.6MW ever since President Tinubu assumed office.
According to the quarterly reports from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), the average available generation capacity in the third quarter of 2024 was 5,100.90MW. This increased to 5,296.98MW in the fourth quarter.
Conclusion
The claim is inaccurate. Although there has been an increase in Nigeria’s power generation since the Tinubu administration began in May 2023, available data from the National Energy System Operator (NESO) shows that the all-time peak generation as of 14 April 2025 was 5,801.6MW – still below the 6,000MW claimed by the Minister.
The increase from the 4,735.1MW recorded at the start of Tinubu’s administration to a recent peak of 5,401.77MW reflects an improvement of approximately 666.67MW, not the 2,000MW claimed.