By Danjuma Amodu | January 23, 2026
Nigeria’s national electricity grid suffered a total collapse on Friday, 23 January 2026, leaving large swathes of the country without power.
By 13:30 p.m., generation had plummeted from more than 4,500 MW to just 24 MW, and all 23 connected generation plants reported zero output. Consequently, every one of the 11 distribution companies received no allocation, resulting in widespread blackouts for households and businesses across the country.
The Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) has yet to release a detailed explanation, and the exact cause remains unknown. This marks the first grid failure of 2026, following a similar incident on 29 December 2025, and adds to a pattern of repeated collapses in recent years.
Analysts attribute such outages to technical faults, ageing transmission infrastructure, inadequate maintenance, and volatile generation capacity.
Stakeholders are urging the government and power operators to adopt robust contingency measures to prevent future disruptions and to strengthen the nation’s electricity infrastructure.
Nigeria’s power sector has long struggled with under‑investment and a fragile transmission network. Despite reforms that privatised generation and distribution, the grid remains a single point of failure, with capacity often hovering between 4,000 MW and 5,000 MW, well below the estimated 30,000 MW needed to meet demands.
Past collapses have been linked to equipment failures, line overloads, insufficient reserve capacity, prompting calls for modernisation, better maintenance, and diversified, decentralised energy solutions.
