More than 85 million Nigerians still lack reliable electricity despite decades of policy announcements and energy plans. Under Abba Aliyu's leadership, the Rural Electrification Agency (REA) has shifted focus from strategy to execution, delivering tangible progress in off-grid power access. In 2025, the REA secured $1.2 billion in private financing commitments and an additional $2.65 billion in funding pipeline, while taking charge of the Federal Government's N500 billion National Public Sector Solarisation Initiative.
The $750 million Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-Up (DARES) programme, backed by the World Bank, aims to connect 17.5 million Nigerians through mini-grids and standalone solar systems. That year, the REA signed over 30 grant agreements covering more than 390 communities. This builds on the earlier Nigeria Electrification Project (NEP), a $550 million initiative by the World Bank and African Development Bank, which facilitated nearly 200 mini-grids serving over 164,000 customers and deployed more than 1.4 million solar home systems, reaching over 8 million people.
The NEP also installed about 35MW of hybrid renewable energy infrastructure in federal universities and institutions, and helped create over 150 Renewable Energy Service Companies (RESCOs). In 2025 alone, the project delivered over 400 new electricity connections, benefiting more than 2 million Nigerians across healthcare facilities, schools and small businesses. To improve coordination, the REA launched the State-by-State Strategic Roundtable, engaging 23 state governors directly, with 13 more states in advanced talks.
The Interconnected Mini-grid Accelerated Scheme (IMAS), supported by a €9.3 million fund from the European Union and Germany via GIZ, identified 131 agricultural energy sites across 25 states, revealing over 50MW of productive energy demand and a $40 million project pipeline. Forty percent of these projects are now tracked on a GPS-enabled digital system introduced under Aliyu's leadership for real-time monitoring. The Energy Efficiency Project (EEP) Phase III, over 90 percent complete, will add 36MW of renewable energy across eight federal universities and one teaching hospital.
Abba Aliyu leads an agency delivering electricity numbers once thought impossible in Nigeria's public sector, yet over 85 million people still wait. The REA's progress exposes a long-standing truth: the bottleneck was never ideas or funding, but the will to implement. If execution at this scale can happen in rural electrification, the expectation is now set for every other failed government project. The real test is whether this model spreads beyond one agency's success.
Editorial note: AI-assisted opinion, not established fact. Full disclaimer →
