The Dues Are Paid, but the Lights Are Still Off.
There is a moment in a now-viral video of Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria's Minister of Power, that deserves more attention than the outrage it generated. Speaking to a gathering of political stakeholders in Oyo State, Adelabu said the following:
"I have been on this journey for a while now. I believe it's not the day you start politics that you begin to reap the benefits. I have now paid my dues."
The anger was immediate and understandable. Here was a man who had presided over one of the most catastrophic stretches in the history of Nigeria's power sector, cheerfully announcing that he had earned his reward. The comments sections filled with bile. The memes followed. The cycle of Nigerian outrage did what it always does — it burned hot, briefly, then moved on.
But before we move on, I want to stay with that sentence a little longer. Because the most important thing about it is not that it was callous. It is that it was sincere.
The Record
Let us, briefly, do the minister the courtesy of examining what he has built during the years he considers payment of dues.
Adelabu assumed office in August 2023. In the time since, Nigeria's national grid has collapsed at least eight times in 2024 alone, with several more in the second half of 2023 under his watch. The World Bank, in its 2025 Energy Progress Report, identified Nigeria as the country with the highest number of people living without electricity access on the planet — 86.8 million human beings. Not the highest per capita. The highest number.
In absolute terms, no country on earth has more people in the dark.
Electricity tariffs were increased dramatically for millions of consumers — myself included — with Band A customers absorbing the sharpest hikes, their rates more than quadrupled in a single year. The promise attached to those increases, as it always is, was better supply.
Supply got worse.
The grid kept collapsing.
The minister kept explaining.
Perhaps the most quietly devastating data point in all of this is what the Presidential Villa did in response: the seat of Nigeria's federal government, unable to rely on the grid that the minister manages, appropriated ₦10 billion in 2025 and an additional ₦7 billion in 2026 to install a private solar mini-grid, effectively seceding from the national electricity infrastructure entirely.
The government's own residence decided that Adelabu's grid was not worth depending on.
In October 2024, President Tinubu dismissed five ministers for underperformance. Adelabu survived. He has since positioned himself as a candidate for the Oyo State governorship in 2027 — his third attempt at that seat, having lost in 2019 under the APC and again in 2023 under the Accord Party. When Tinubu issued a March 31, 2026 deadline requiring all political appointees seeking elected office to resign, a letter claiming Adelabu had done so went viral almost immediately. His office dismissed it as fake news. He remains in his post.
This is the record. These are the dues.
What "Dues" Actually Means
Here is the argument I want to make, and I want to make it carefully, because it is easy to get wrong.
Adebayo Adelabu is not a stupid man. He is not, by most accounts, even a lazy one. He is a former Deputy Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria. He has contested elections, lost, regrouped, and re-entered. He has endured the grinding machinery of Nigerian party politics across multiple cycles, multiple defections, multiple defeats. In his own framework, he has genuinely sacrificed. He genuinely believes he has contributed.
The problem is not that he is lying. The problem is what he believes contribution means.
In Adelabu's framework — based on the dominant operating model of Nigerian political culture — contribution is measured in loyalty, in endurance, in the successful placement of the right people in the right positions, in the survival of one's network. When he says he has "paid his dues," he is making a claim about political capital accumulated within a patronage system. He is not making a claim about electricity delivered to Nigerian households.
In his model, those are entirely different ledgers.
This distinction matters because it explains something that pure cynicism cannot: why someone can preside over systemic failure without experiencing any internal dissonance. Adelabu is not suppressing guilt. He does not believe he has failed, because he is not measuring himself against the mandate the Nigerian public believes he holds.
He is measuring himself against the mandate his network actually gave him: survive, consolidate, position, advance.
In a tribal-patronage governance model, the ministry is not the job. The ministry is the vehicle.
The job is the governorship.
The Pattern Is Not Adelabu
It would be a convenient error to treat this as a story about one man.
Adelabu is not a rogue actor in an otherwise functional system. He is the logical output of a system that has consistently rewarded exactly this behaviour. He occupied a federal appointment. He installed allies in key positions within that apparatus. He used the visibility and the network to build toward his next political move. He did all of this openly, without particular concealment, because concealment was never necessary. The system does not penalise this. In many cases, it celebrates it.
What is usually described as "tribalism" or "corruption" in Nigerian governance discourse is more precisely this: a rational response to a system that offers no meaningful alternative incentive structure.
When institutional design provides no mechanism to punish poor performance and no mechanism to reward genuine service delivery, the only game worth playing is the patronage game. Rational actors play the game in front of them, not the one they are told they are playing.
This is why the anger at individual ministers, however justified emotionally, consistently fails to produce change. You can remove Adelabu and install a successor who arrives at the same calculations, because the calculations are produced by the system, not the man. Nigeria's governance history is littered with ministers who were going to be different. Some of them even meant it — but the system has a way of clarifying priorities.
Now extend this logic beyond one ministry and sit with what you are looking at.
- The Ministry of Power has no reliable electricity.
- The Ministry of Health oversees a healthcare system so broken that the political class it is meant to serve flies abroad for treatment: a quiet, damning confession that they do not trust their own institutions.
- The Ministry of Education administers a system producing graduates that the same government's agencies will not hire without additional training.
- The Ministry of Works overlooks roads that swallow vehicles, contracts that are awarded, abandoned, and re-awarded in cycles that benefit the same networks across administrations.
In ministry after ministry, the same structure replicates: a political appointment made on patronage logic, a mandate defined loosely enough to evade accountability, targets that exist on paper and nowhere else, and an exit path that leads not to consequence but to the next political position.
This is not a collection of individual failures happening to coincide. This is a system performing exactly as designed, across the full width of government, simultaneously. When you understand that, you understand fully why the country is the way it is. It is not bad luck. It is not a resource curse. It is not the legacy of colonialism acting alone. It is the predictable, daily output of an architecture that has never been seriously redesigned.
The 86.8 million Nigerians without electricity are not the victims of a series of individual failures. They are the victims of a pattern — and the pattern has jurisdiction over everything.
The System Built on Goodwill It Cannot Guarantee
What almost no one says out loud in Nigerian political commentary is that the current governance model is essentially a bet.
With every ministerial appointment, with every political posting, the country places a wager on the ethics and competence of an individual human being. It hopes — sincerely, desperately — that this one will be different. That this one will care enough. That this one will know enough.
This is merely prayer with paperwork. And the prayer fails systematically because it is structurally required to.
The knowledge gap alone is disqualifying. Adelabu came to the Ministry of Power as a banker and a politician. The power sector is a technically complex, financially intricate, infrastructure-dependent system that routinely defeats people who have spent entire careers inside it.
Dropping an untrained political appointee into that chair and then hoping he figures it out is abdication dressed as an appointment. He was never put there to fix anything.
But even setting aside competence, the ethical gap is equally unaddressed. Adelabu's tribal and political ambitions did not appear after he took office. They walked in with him on his first day. The system had no mechanism to price those conflicts, contain them, or override them.
There was no architecture that said: here is your mandate, precisely defined; here are your targets, independently measured; here are the consequences of missing them; here are the checks that make it structurally difficult to subordinate the office to your personal network.
None of that existed. He was handed a ministry and a prayer.
What a serious governance system would look like is not complicated in theory, though it is difficult in execution. It looks like a minister who arrives at a job that is already mostly designed:
- Where the mandate is codified in specific, measurable deliverables, not vague aspirations.
- Where an independent body — not the appointing executive — tracks those deliverables on a published timeline.
- Where failure to meet targets triggers automatic, visible, and costly consequences — not a cabinet reshuffle that may or may not come, at the discretion of a president who has his own political calculus to manage.
- Where the placement of allies in key positions without transparent justification is an auditable breach with defined penalties.
In such a system, the political appointee still arrives with ambitions. Human nature does not change — but the system routes those ambitions differently.
The only viable path to the next political prize becomes: do the job visibly well, because the record is public and the metrics are not yours to manipulate. The alternative path of extraction and consolidating positions becomes visibly costly rather than quietly rewarded. You begin to select, over time, for a different kind of person: one willing to operate under accountability, because those are the ones who stay.
This is engineering. Every functional public institution in every country that has managed to build one is built on this principle: the system must be robust enough to produce acceptable outcomes regardless of who occupies it.
You do not build a bridge and then hope the engineer was in a good mood. You build load tolerances into the structure itself.
Nigeria keeps building bridges out of hope.
The Darkness Is Not a Power Crisis
Let us end where we began: with a man who paid his dues.
Adebayo Adelabu did not fail Nigeria because he is uniquely corrupt, uniquely incompetent, or uniquely indifferent to suffering. He failed Nigeria because the system handed him a vehicle, pointed him at a destination, removed every obstacle from his personal advancement, and never once made the actual job — electricity to 86.8 million people — something he was compelled to treat as the measure of his success.
At its root, the darkness is a basic design crisis. Nigeria's governance architecture is optimized for the wrong outcome.
It rewards loyalty over delivery, network over competence, endurance over performance. It produces Adelabu the way a factory produces output — reliably, at scale, with fidelity to its actual specifications.
Until the architecture changes, the output will not.
The dues will keep being paid, and the lights will stay off.