again. A nurse in a primary health centre is checking, for the third time this week, whether the vaccine fridge still has power. A trader is doing quiet arithmetic on how much of today’s profit just went to diesel. None of these people have read the Energy Transition Plan. None of them have opinions on blended finance or naira-denominated debt instruments. But their lives are the actual scoreboard for whether Nigeria’s energy transition is working, and by that scoreboard, we are not winning.
This is the uncomfortable truth that came out of the Sustainable Energy Summit in Abuja, where BudgIT Foundation, along with its partners, brought government officials, regulators, investors, civil society organisations and young entrepreneurs into one room to ask a simple but overdue question: why hasn’t Nigeria’s energy ambition turned into investment?
The answer, delivered by the keynote speaker, was refreshingly honest but equally concerning. Nigeria is not short of policy. We have the Energy Transition Plan. We have Nationally Determined Contributions. We have the Electricity Act. We have, by the ETP’s own estimate, identified that we need roughly $1.9 trillion to reach net-zero by 2060. What we don’t have is a reliable bridge between the policy documents sitting in ministries and the bankable projects that would actually get built. Capital, as one panelist put it plainly, is not the problem. The problem is that we have not made it easy, or safe, or predictable enough for that money to choose Nigeria.
This is where it gets personal for anyone who has ever waited for the government to keep a promise. Predictability is not an abstract investment term. It is the same thing citizens want when they ask whether a policy will still exist next year, whether a contract signed today will be honoured tomorrow, whether the rules will change halfway through the game. Investors want it for the same reason ordinary Nigerians want it: nobody commits serious money, or serious hope, to a system they cannot read.
BudgIT’s budget analysis makes the scale of the disconnect uncomfortably concrete. Climate-related capital allocation is roughly fifteen to twenty times smaller than Nigeria’s overall capital budget, a rounding error next to the scale of the problem it is meant to solve. And even within that small envelope, the money does not always go where the need is greatest.
According to the analysis, between 2021-2026, Nigeria allocated approximately N1.7 trillion to solar street lighting. Mini-grids, the kind of decentralised power that could actually electrify underserved communities and keep small businesses running, received roughly N218 billion. Streetlights matter for safety. But when the country’s most visible climate-budget line is illumination for roads rather than power for homes, clinics and workshops, it is worth asking who these budgets are really designed to serve, and who gets to decide.
This disproportion underscores the importance for a deliberate policy floor. Nigeria should commit to allocating at least 10% of its national capital budget to climate related projects and ensure that funds are weighted towards high-impact decentralized projects rather than low-impact, high-visibility projects. The target must be paired with criteria for where the money goes.
Then there is the question of who gets left out of energy transition entirely. At the summit’s youth panel, a recurring theme emerged that should embarrass a country with Nigeria’s demographic window of opportunity: young Nigerians building genuine renewable-energy businesses, properly registered, properly certified, doing everything the rulebook asks of them still cannot get financiers to take them seriously.
Commercial lenders offer terms built for oil and gas majors, not for a 26-year-old running a solar mini-grid startup: interest rates near 30%, repayment windows of three to five years, for businesses that need a decade to mature. One young entrepreneur asked, with quiet frustration, whether a person who does everything right will ever be trusted enough to be called bankable or whether Nigeria will keep demanding collateral, connections and a track record from people it has never given the chance to build one.
That is not a financing gap. That is a trust gap, and it is one Nigeria is imposing on its own most energetic generation.
Nigeria’s gas debate deserves the same honesty. Gas can be part of the transition, but some experts argue otherwise. Gas expansion is not automatically the same thing as energy transition, and reducing flaring is not automatically the same thing as reducing emissions. Building more gas infrastructure without markets, pipelines and buyers waiting at the other end simply produces the next generation of stranded assets, paid for by Nigerians who will still be waiting for the electricity that was promised.
None of this requires new committees or another convening/conference to diagnose. What it requires is a government willing to be measured by outcomes rather than announcements: transparent, trackable pipelines of actual projects, not just pledges; one coordinated system for tracking climate and energy spending across every ministry that touches it, not just the obvious two; a financing window that treats young entrepreneurs as a market to be developed rather than a box to be ticked; and a digital, public record of energy contracts and obligations that any citizen, not just an investor, can actually read.
The child studying by lamplight does not care about the elegance of Nigeria’s Energy Transition Plan. She cares whether the promise made still holds when she needs it. Nigeria has spent years being credible on paper. It is time to be credible in practice and that choice belongs to the government now, not to another convening.