Nigeria in Darkness As National Grid Collapses Again

By: Abdulwasiu Akintunde 

Nigeria, Africa's most populous country has again experienced a nationwide power outage on Monday evening following another collapse of the national grid, multiple sources confirmed.  

OPEN TELEVISION NAIJA (OTN) News gathered that the Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) spokesperson, Emeka Ezeh, announced the incident, revealing that the system failure occurred at exactly 6:48 pm. 

The disruption has left areas across EEDC’s coverage, including Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu, and Imo states without power.  

Ezeh explained, “Due to this development, all our interface TCN stations are currently out of supply, making it impossible to serve our customers. We await further information from the National Control Centre (NCC) in Osogbo regarding the cause and timeline for restoration.”  

Similarly, the Eko Distribution Company also confirmed the outage in a statement to customers on Tuesday which reads “Dear Valued Customer, there was a grid collapse at 18:48hrs, resulting in power loss across our network. We are working with partners to restore supply as soon as possible and will keep you updated.”  

OTN News reports that the latest power disruptions were widely reported from 6:50 pm across many regions on Monday evening.

This latest collapse adds to a troubling pattern, with the grid having failed multiple times in 2024 alone. 

OTN News recalls that a partial collapse occurred in August, following another significant failure in July. Over the past 14 years, data from the Transmission Company of Nigeria indicates that the grid has collapsed 227 times.  

The outage comes amid mounting public frustration after an April tariff hike of 240%, which has exacerbated economic hardships for many Nigerians.