By Sufuyan Ojeifo,

There is a point at which a country’s electricity problem ceases to be merely an electricity problem. It becomes a problem of economic geography.

Also read: What Emmanuel Emefienim’s story teaches us about Nigeria’s possibilities

Where can factories operate with confidence? Where can businesses plan beyond the next appearance of a generator? Where can hospitals, schools, technology companies, markets and households begin to organise their lives around the reasonable expectation that electricity will be there?

This is the thinking behind the latest initiative from the Minister of Power, Joseph Tegbe, to develop what the Federal Government calls Energy Zones – defined corridors where homes, businesses and industries could receive stable, 24-hour electricity.

The proposed zones cover the Lagos axis, the Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor and the Enugu-Port Harcourt corridor. Tegbe’s latest move is a meeting with selected electricity distribution companies to begin working through what it would take to make the idea real.

At first glance, it sounds like another promise of uninterrupted electricity in a country that has heard too many such promises. However, there is something more consequential in the architecture of the proposal.

Tegbe is asking Nigerians to look at the power problem differently.

For years, the national conversation has been dominated by generation. How many megawatts are being produced? How much can the transmission grid carry? How many generating plants are working? These are important questions. But electricity does not become useful simply because it has been generated.

It must travel. It must be received. It must be distributed. And ultimately, somebody must be able to use it. That last part has often been treated as the end of the conversation when, in reality, it is where the economic value of electricity begins.

Tegbe has put the point plainly. The constraint is not limited to generation and transmission; it also includes how much electricity can be taken up and delivered at the distribution end.

The proposed Energy Zones are intended to address precisely that gap while improving commercial demand and the revenue performance of the distribution companies.

There is an important idea here.

Nigeria does not necessarily have to wait for every weakness in the electricity value chain to be solved simultaneously before beginning to create pockets of reliability.

A country of more than 200 million people, with enormous differences in industrial activity, population density and commercial demand, may have to proceed through carefully selected economic corridors while the wider system is repaired.

This is not an argument for abandoning the national grid. It is an argument for making the grid more economically purposeful.

The three corridors selected by the Ministry are revealing. Lagos and its adjoining industrial axis represent perhaps the country’s most concentrated commercial and industrial demand.

The Abuja-Kaduna-Kano corridor connects the political capital with major commercial and industrial centres in the North. Enugu-Port Harcourt links important commercial, manufacturing and energy-producing communities in the South-East and South-South.

These are not simply lines on a power map. They are lines on Nigeria’s economic map. That distinction matters.

For too long, Nigerians have experienced electricity largely as a household inconvenience. The light goes off. The generator comes on. A business buys diesel. A manufacturer factors self-generation into production costs. A hospital makes contingency arrangements.

A young entrepreneur learns, often painfully, that the real price of electricity is not what appears on the bill but what it costs to keep the business alive when the supply fails.

A reliable electricity corridor changes that equation.

If a factory knows that a particular industrial cluster has dependable power, investment decisions begin to change.

If a commercial district can plan around predictable electricity, operating costs become easier to manage.

If businesses can depend on supply for most of the day, generators can move from being the first line of defence to being what they were always supposed to be: backup.

This is where Tegbe’s technocratic instincts may prove significant.

His background is not that of a career power-sector operator. His professional experience has largely been in consulting, fiscal and economic reform, institutional transformation and advisory work. That background has been visible in his early approach to the ministry – diagnosis, audits, financial questions, infrastructure bottlenecks, and attempts to identify where one part of the system is preventing another from functioning properly.

His Energy Zones proposal fits that pattern. It treats the electricity market less as a single machine waiting for one dramatic repair and more as a system of interconnected constraints that can be isolated, diagnosed and addressed.

Tegbe had already identified the three corridors as priorities for grid stabilisation, with technical audits intended to establish the condition of critical infrastructure. The latest engagement with DisCos suggests that the idea is now moving beyond technical diagnosis towards the more difficult question of how distribution will work within those corridors.

That is where the hard work begins.

A 24-hour power zone cannot be created by a press statement. It requires generation that is available when needed, transmission capacity that can carry it, distribution infrastructure capable of receiving it, transformers and feeders that can withstand the load, metering that properly captures consumption, customers willing and able to pay, and a commercial structure in which the various participants have an incentive to keep the system working.

It also requires protection. Vandalism and energy theft do not respect administrative boundaries. Neither do faulty equipment, unpaid bills or poor collection practices. Tegbe himself has acknowledged that the sector’s problems reinforce one another. Weak collections affect the market. Market weakness affects maintenance and gas payments. Unreliable supply in turn depresses collections.

This is why the Energy Zone experiment, if it is to succeed, must be judged by more than the number of hours electricity is available.

The real test will be whether reliability begins to produce economic consequences. Does industrial output increase? Do businesses spend less on self-generation? Does investment respond? Do DisCos collect more because customers are receiving a service they can trust? Does the government recover enough value from improved commercial activity to justify further infrastructure investment?

Those are the questions that should eventually accompany the glossy language of 24-hour power.

And there is another question that Tegbe and the Federal Government will have to confront: what happens outside the zones?

Nigeria cannot become a collection of electrically privileged corridors surrounded by communities waiting indefinitely for their turn.

The logic of concentrating investment in high-demand areas can be defended economically, especially if the resulting commercial activity strengthens the wider electricity market.

But the strategy will ultimately have to demonstrate how successful zones become stepping stones towards broader reliability.

That is the difference between an experiment and a system.

There is also a danger in admiring the architecture of reform from the comfort of an office.

It has to be said here that the statement issued by the minister’s media aide was long on ambition and conspicuously short on the details that matter. No timeline. No capacity targets. No specific investment figures. It is the kind of announcement that has, historically, been the precursor to nothing at all.

So Nigerians should watch the idea with interest, but also with the healthy scepticism that comes from decades of promises about electricity.

The minister deserves a measure of credit for at least diagnosing an important part of the illness.

For once, the conversation has shifted from the head to the feet – from generation to distribution, from megawatts to money.

At the same time, the Nigerian people have been given blueprints before. They have learned to admire the drawings while the building crumbles.

The Energy Zones remain a proposal. The government has not yet announced the detailed capacity requirements, implementation timetable or precise infrastructure investments that would make 24-hour supply possible.

That is not necessarily a fatal flaw. It may simply mean the idea is still being worked out.

But it does mean that the language of 24-hour power should be treated as an aspiration until it is matched by the machinery of implementation.

Yet the proposal deserves attention because it reflects a potentially important shift in the way the power problem is being conceived.

Nigeria may not fix its electricity crisis in one heroic sweep. It may have to build reliability corridor by corridor, demand centre by demand centre, and economic cluster by economic cluster.

There is nothing inherently glamorous about such work. It is engineering, finance, regulation, distribution and relentless attention to the weak link in the chain. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

The country has spent decades waiting for the great national electricity breakthrough.

Tegbe’s emerging approach suggests something less dramatic and potentially more practical: make a few economically critical parts of the system work properly, learn from them, strengthen the model, and expand it.

The success of that approach will ultimately be measured not in speeches or megawatts, but in what Nigerians can do with the electricity when it arrives.

Does the factory run a second shift? Does the business hire more workers? Does the hospital keep its equipment running through the night? Does the young entrepreneur stop budgeting for diesel and start budgeting for growth?

Also read: What Emmanuel Emefienim’s story teaches us about Nigeria’s possibilities

That is where the real power story begins. And that is the standard against which Tegbe’s Energy Zones should ultimately be judged: not by whether 24-hour power sounds impressive in a press release, but by whether the lights stay on long enough for Nigerians to build something with them.

By Ehi Braimah,

I joined The Platform live on Channels Television on Thursday October 1 to listen to inspiring conversations about Nigeria. What I heard from Dr. Emmanuel Emefienim, Founder and Managing Director/CEO of Premium Trust Bank, was much more than a motivational speech.

Also read: Nigeria @66: Obasa Says Tinubu’s 2027 Re-election Will Secure Reform Gains

It was a masterclass in resilience, ambition, leadership, relationships, knowledge, faith and the power of refusing to give up.

The Platform, organised by The Covenant Place under the leadership of Senior Paster Poju Oyemade, has become an important public conversation that brings Nigerians together around ideas, experiences and possibilities.

Held on May 1 and October 1 in a town-hall setting and televised live, it has consistently provided a platform for Nigerians to share stories that can inspire particularly the younger generation to believe in themselves and in their country.

Dr. Emefienim’s story deserves to be told beyond the walls of The Platform because it is not simply the story of one successful banker; it is a Nigerian story about what can happen when adversity meets determination. After completing his NYSC, Emefienim applied for 70 jobs.

Only four organisations, according to him, responded. He eventually joined Oceanic Bank at the age of 22.

At some point, he was transferred from Lagos to Asaba. His career subsequently took him to Savannah Bank in Port Harcourt, where he became a regional manager.

Then came the shock that could have destroyed everything. I mean, everything: his plans, big dreams and bright future.

One weekend, Emefienim travelled to Warri to spend time with his family. When he returned to work on Monday, he discovered that Savannah Bank had been liquidated. There were no members of staff waiting for him.

Instead, officials of the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation were there. There had been no warning.

Suddenly, the man who had an official car and driver was without a job. He was married, in his 30s, and his wife was a civil servant. His professional world had collapsed almost overnight. What did he do? He did not give up.

His driver took him to Benin City. From there, he travelled to Lagos, using a public transport service, to see a manager at FSB, a bank that had previously offered him a job while he was still at Savannah Bank. He had declined the offer then.

Now, Emefienim needed the job, but the manager, obviously angry and wanted to have his pound of flesh back, ignored him and kept him waiting for three days.

It would have been easy to interpret the experience as humiliation and walk away. But Emefienim remained focused. Eventually, the manager saw him and offered him a job – but at a lower level.

He moved from senior manager to deputy manager and was posted to Yenagoa in Bayelsa State which he accepted as he had no choice at the time.

That decision contains a profound lesson: sometimes, starting again is not failure; it is strategy. There are moments in life when circumstances force us to take a step backwards so that we can eventually move forward.

The important thing is not the temporary position we occupy, or feelings of rejection experienced or disappointments that we face, but whether we can continue moving towards the destination.

Emefienim had a big dream. He recalled telling the Managing Director of Oceanic Bank and some colleagues that one day he would become the managing director of a bank himself. While the MD encouraged him to pursue his goal, his colleagues laughed at him.

His response is one of the most memorable lines from his presentation: when people don’t laugh at your dream, perhaps the dream is not big enough. That is a message Nigeria’s young people need to hear.

Too many young people allow their current circumstances to define their future, but the future does not necessarily resemble the present.

A young person who is struggling today may become an employer tomorrow, and someone rejected for a job may eventually build an institution that employs hundreds or thousands of people.

Emefienim’s own journey demonstrates this. He continued to rise through Equatorial Trust Bank and later Sterling Bank, following mergers and acquisitions in the Nigerian banking industry.

He rose through the ranks – AGM, DGM, GM and Executive Director – while continuing to acquire knowledge.

He attended Harvard Business School several times. But perhaps more importantly, he did not keep the knowledge to himself – he invested in people.

He personally sponsored some of his managers to also attend Harvard. When the time came for him to leave Sterling Bank and establish Premium Trust Bank, six of the seven managers he had trained agreed to join him.

That is a powerful definition of leadership. A leader is someone who reaches the top and helps others rise.

This is particularly important in Nigeria, where the quality of human capital will ultimately determine how competitive our economy becomes. Buildings, technology, capital and infrastructure matter, but people make institutions work.

Emefienim also spoke about relationships and networks as critical elements of success.

This is another lesson worth emphasising. Knowledge is important, but relationships create opportunities for knowledge to be applied.

Networks create access, partnerships and possibilities because nobody succeeds entirely alone.

His story also contains an important lesson about family resilience. After experiencing the trauma of losing his job without warning, he empowered his wife to start a business.

He wanted to ensure that his family would never again be placed in such a vulnerable position because one person’s employment had suddenly disappeared resulting in loss of income.

That was more than a financial decision – it was an act of foresight. Today, the story has come full circle. The young man who once submitted 70 applications looking for employment is now the founder and owner of a bank.

Premium Trust Bank, which commenced commercial banking operations as a regional bank in April 2022, has grown into a national banking institution with 35 branches.

Emefienim spoke proudly about its growth and profitability and its successful participation in the banking industry’s recapitalisation programme, raising N200 billion, the threshold for national banks, and achieving a historic milestone as one of Nigeria’s 10 most profitable banks.

There is something profoundly Nigerian about this story. Nigeria is often described in terms of its problems – unemployment, infrastructure deficits, insecurity, poverty, weak institutions and other challenges. These problems are real and should not be minimised.

But Nigeria is also a country of extraordinary human possibilities. Our greatest resource is not oil neither is it our large population; it is the capacity of Nigerians to create, innovate, adapt, build businesses, solve problems and compete. This is one of the central ideas behind my forthcoming book, How Naija can conquer the world.

The book is about Nigeria’s economic potential, global ambition and the strategies required to achieve greater prosperity. I argue that Nigeria’s success should not be measured simply by the size of its economy.

Instead, we should be concerned about rising incomes, productivity, exports, globally competitive companies, human capital and the ability to create value for the world.

Emefienim’s story illustrates several of these principles. He acquired knowledge, built relationships, invested in people, remained focused, executed consistently, understood his environment, adapted when circumstances changed, dreamed beyond his immediate reality, and remained anchored in faith.

His reference to what he calls “revelational knowledge” – spiritual insight and instruction he believes come from God – adds another dimension to his philosophy.

For him, formal education and professional experience are important, but they exist alongside faith and spiritual guidance.

There is another lesson here for Nigeria: we need more people who are prepared to build institutions rather than merely look for opportunities. When Nigerians build strong companies, they create jobs, and when they invest in people, they create human capital.

We have the capacity to develop globally competitive products and services for exports. Clearly, the moral of Emefienim’s story is that we should build institutions that survive beyond their founders and contribute to national prosperity.

This is how a nation moves from potential to prosperity.

Listening to Dr. Emefienim, I was reminded that Nigeria does not lack stories of courage, enterprise and achievement.

Perhaps what we lack is a sufficiently organised effort to tell these stories and convert them into a powerful national narrative.

We need to tell young Nigerians that setbacks are not destinies. An entrepreneur’s small business today can become tomorrow’s major institution.

We need to tell professionals that continuous learning matters; tell leaders that investing in people is one of the highest forms of leadership, and also tell the world that Nigeria is much more than the challenges that frequently dominate international headlines. Dr. Emmanuel Emefienim has done well.

From a young graduate searching for his first job, to a banker who survived the collapse of a major institution, got another job within four days, to a senior executive, and an entrepreneur who built his own bank, his journey is a powerful reminder of what determination can accomplish.

His story is not an invitation to ignore Nigeria’s problems, but he is simply saying we should confront them with courage.

Nigeria needs more dreamers – but also more doers. We need people who can dream big, acquire knowledge, build relationships, invest in others and execute with consistency.

That is how nations are built.

Also read: Nigeria @66: Obasa Says Tinubu’s 2027 Re-election Will Secure Reform Gains

Perhaps that is the deeper message of The Platform: Nigeria’s future will be created by Nigerians who believe that something better is possible – and then roll up their sleeves and build it.

By Zubair, M.O,

The article by Kunle Adesanya is eloquently written but fundamentally misrepresents how state creation works in Nigeria and what H.E Senator Otunba Gbenga Daniel is actually doing.

Also read: GFF Holds Free Medical Screening Ahead of October Surgeries

It accuses H.E Senator Otunba Gbenga Justus Daniel of deception for doing exactly what the Constitution expects a sponsor of a state creation bill to do.

1. The Senator Never Claimed He Can Create a State Alone

No serious person, and certainly not a two-term Governor and current Senator who is a trained Engineer, believes he can create a state by fiat.

Section 8 of the 1999 Constitution places the responsibility for state creation on multiple institutions, but someone must initiate and drive the process. That is the role of the sponsor.