By Simeon Shagba
Drive through almost any Nigerian town after dark and you will hear the country’s real power grid before you see it: the low, constant growl of diesel generators, running block by block, compound by compound, because the grid a few metres away cannot be trusted to stay on. It is among the most expensive ways anywhere to keep the lights on, purchased one litre at a time, by households, hospitals, welders and water plants that have simply stopped waiting for anything else to arrive.
In three states, Oyo, Kano and Plateau, rivers that have carried enough energy to power whole communities for the better part of a century are running past dams that barely work, generating a fraction of what they could. One of those dams has been standing since 1929. It has outlived the colonial administration that built it, every republic Nigeria has had since independence, and every energy plan written in between. It still turns. It is just tired.
On Wednesday, 28 October, in Abuja, the country gets a chance to change that, not with a new mega-project or another decade-long transmission line, but by finishing what has already been started. The UK PACT Catalysing Energy Transition programme will convene a Stakeholder & Investor Roundtable to present the technical case for three small hydropower projects and unveil Nigeria’s first National Small Hydropower Policy. Whether the event amounts to more than that is, honestly, an open question, and one worth asking before the details of the pitch.
Why Past Conferences Give Reason for Caution
Nigeria’s power sector has heard ambitious announcements before. The 2013 privatization of the national grid was meant to unlock private capital and end the diesel economy; more than a decade later, that economy is bigger than ever, and the generation and distribution companies that emerged from privatization have struggled with debt, vandalism, gas supply shortages and tariff disputes. Small hydro itself is not a new idea in Nigeria’s energy strategy documents; it has been mentioned, in passing, in nearly everyone written over the past twenty years and acted on in almost none. Anyone assessing this Roundtable’s chances should start from that record, not from the programme’s own account of its readiness.
What the organisers – AP3 Advisory and Ratio Consulting who are implementing partners for UKPACT CET Small Hydropower project – argue is different this time is the depth of preparatory work and the legal shift underlying it. The 2023 Electricity Act gave state governments the authority to license and regulate their own power markets, meaning a governor no longer needs federal permission to develop the river running through their own territory. And, according to figures the programme has compiled, two years of technical work, including feasibility studies, dam safety assessments, and demand studies, sit behind each of the three pilot sites. Whether that preparatory work is sufficient to break the pattern of stalled Nigerian power projects is precisely what the Roundtable will test.
The Pitch: Three Rivers, Three Different Problems
The programme’s own case rests on three sites that, it says, cover the range of the opportunity.
A federal dam on the Ogun River in Oyo State was engineered in the 1960s for a modest 6.6 megawatts. Newer engineering studies at Ikere Gorge, commissioned under the programme, put its potential at up to 37 megawatts, with more than 70 additional megawatts of co-located solar possible on the same footprint. It became Nigeria’s first brownfield hydro-solar hybrid concession under the 2023 Act in 2025, awarded to private developer Quaint Energy. A grid interconnection study is reportedly complete and an environmental and social impact assessment is underway.
Ghari Dam in Kano State, standing since 1980, is presented as closer to shovel-ready: dam safety reports are filed, the federal Minimum Subsidy Tender pathway has endorsed it, and UNIDO has expressed interest in funding part of the build. If completed, it would deliver 2 to 4 megawatts, primarily to a water treatment plant currently running on diesel, and grid electricity for the first time to roughly a thousand households.
Then there is Plateau State, where the case is most visible because the infrastructure already works, just badly. The NESCO cascade, eight dams and eight power stations totalling 25.5 megawatts of installed capacity, has operated since 1929 and already serves more than 10,000 paying customers. The programme’s figures suggest it currently runs at less than half its rated output for want of modern equipment, and that rehabilitating the Kurra cascade alone, about 11.5 megawatts, could generate power at 5 to 8 US cents per kilowatt-hour against a diesel alternative several times that cost. These cost comparisons come from the programme’s own technical studies rather than an independent audit and are worth treating as an opening claim for negotiation rather than a settled fact.
What Would Make This Different from the Last Conference
The organisers – AP3 Advisory and Ratio Consulting who are implementing partners for UKPACT CET Small Hydropower project – say the agenda is structured around closed-door deal rooms for each project, sponsors and financiers negotiating specific closing conditions rather than delivering speeches. That structural choice is a reasonable response to the failure mode that has swallowed past initiatives: announcements that generate applause and communiqués but no signed paper.
Whether it works depends on commitments that can’t be judged from a press release. State governors hold the licensing authority the 2023 Act granted them, and their attendance, or absence, at the event is one signal worth watching. Development finance institutions named in connection with the programme, including UNIDO, EBRD, BII, InfraCredit and AFC, are said to be engaged across the portfolio; the meaningful test is whether any of them move from expressions of interest to signed term sheets during or shortly after the event, not whether they attend. Federal ministries are expected to formally endorse the draft small hydropower policy; endorsement without a funding or implementation follow-through would arguably do more harm than no endorsement at all, since it would reinforce the perception that Nigerian policy signals are cheap.
Community engagement is also worth watching skeptically rather than taking as settled. The programme reports that structured engagement with traditional authorities at Ikere Gorge converted early resistance into support, and that a “first-beneficiary” model at NESCO makes local electricity access contractually binding. Those are the kinds of claims that are easy to make in a communications brief and harder to verify without speaking to the communities directly; independent reporting on how those agreements hold up over the following year would be more useful than a press-day toplines.
A Modest Bar for Judging Success
It would be easy for 28 October to be remembered as a well-attended, well-photographed day in Abuja that changes nothing. Given Nigeria’s track record, that is arguably the more likely outcome, not because the technical work described here is weak, but because technical readiness has rarely been the actual bottleneck in Nigerian power projects; financing structure, political follow-through, and continuity across administrations have been.
A fairer, narrower test of success might be does Ghari move to a signed letter of intent within weeks, not months, of the event; does at least one DFI convert from “interested” to a term sheet on any of the three sites within the following quarter; and does a state government commit to a public, dated licensing timeline rather than a general statement of support. Those benchmarks are unglamorous, but they are the kind a reader could actually check on later, which is more than most coverage of Nigerian energy announcements offers.
The dam at NESCO will still be standing next year whether or not this Roundtable succeeds, still capable of the same 25.5 megawatts, still waiting. The rivers are not the uncertain part of this story. Whether the institutions with the capital and the licensing authority are finally willing to act on evidence already assembled for them is the only question left.
The author works as a communication specialist for AP3 Advisory, the implementation partner delivering the UK PACT Catalysing Energy Transition programme discussed below. The views and framing here are the author’s own.
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