No matter how anyone tries to rationalise the obtuse economic reforms of the Tinubu administration, the most searing no confidence vote in their sustainability has been passed by the president himself when the presidency announced that it was no longer sustainable for the Aso Rock Villa to continue paying the yearly N47 billion ‘Band A’ electricity tariff.
Aso Rock’s move which jolted many is coming on the heels of increasingly unreliable public power supply, even as the cost soars for both households and government institutions.
In 2024, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company which said the Presidential Villa owed a bill of N923.87 million issued a 10-day notice to Nigeria’s seat of government and 86 MDAs to pay the combined debt of N47.1 billion or risk disconnection, hence the presidency’s bid to opt out of the national grid.
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This seismic, albeit shameless shift, an abdication of responsibility that only a Tinubu-led government can conjure without batting an eye was announced when the Director-General of the Energy Commission of Nigeria, Mustapha Abdullahi, defended the Federal Government’s decision to install a N10 billion solar power grid at the presidential villa to serve the president’s residence, administrative buildings, and other essential facilities within the Aso Rock complex.
Abdullahi said President Tinubu approved the solar power grid as part of efforts to reduce the cost of governance and promote cleaner, more sustainable energy use.
“It is unsustainable for the Aso Rock Villa to continue paying about N47 billion yearly in power bills. This is why Mr. President approved the deployment of a solar power grid within the Villa… This initiative will not only ensure uninterrupted and clean energy supply to the seat of power but will also stimulate job creation and foster innovation among Nigerian engineers and energy experts,” he said.
He may well say that to the marines. As The Punch newspaper noted in its April 28, 2025 editorial, the decision more than anything else, is the clearest admission so far by the Tinubu government that Nigeria’s power sector is in ruins. Worse still, it advertises the fact that the leaders are more interested in insulating themselves from the consequences of the ruins than fixing it.
Yet, some of the administration’s vuvuzelas, adept at gaslighting fellow citizens, amplified the senseless rhetoric. Shortly after Abdullahi’s disclosure, Bayo Onanuga, Tinubu’s media adviser, said the move was in tandem with global best practices in sustainable energy use for government facilities.
Citing the U.S., Onanuga wrote: “The White House in Washington D.C. uses solar power,” in what amounted to comparing apples and oranges even as he failed to address public concerns about the cost of the project at a time Nigeria is facing, perhaps, its worst economic woes.
But such a needless parallel stretches the limits of falsehood because it goes without saying that while the adoption of renewable energy by the U.S. at the White House is driven by environmental consciousness, the Nigerian equivalence is informed by the collapse of the country’s energy system and, therefore, Aso Rock’s decision to port to solar rather than addressing the country’s existential power crisis holistically smacks of abdication of responsibility.
