ABUJA, Nigeria (AP) — Nigeria’s major cities including Abuja, Lagos and Kano suffered power outages Thursday as the country’s power grid collapsed, the 10th time the power system has been hit by such a failure this year.
A “partial system disruption” caused the latest round of power outages, the Transmission Company of Nigeria said in a statement, without elaborating.
Grid outages are common in Nigeria, where the energy sector suffers from a lack of investment. The national electricity grid has collapsed ten times this year, the first time on February 4 and the last time before that on Tuesday.
Africa’s most populous country has the potential to generate 13,000 megawatts but can only transmit 4,000 megawatts due to weak infrastructure, the transmission company said last year. That amount is not enough for a population of more than 200 million people.
According to Adebayo Adelabu, Nigeria’s Minister of Energy, Nigeria gets about 40,000 megawatts from gasoline generators for households and businesses.
In addition to the weak infrastructure, armed groups have also sabotaged the power supply. Last month, the northern part of the country was without power for more than seven days after insurgents destroyed transmission lines, the Transmission Company of Nigeria said.
Last year, Nigeria passed a law allowing states to generate and transmit energy – a way to ease the burden on the aging national grid and attract investors to the sector.
