In 2024, Nigeria’s national electricity grid collapsed eleven times. Not eleven incidents of reduced supply or localised outages. Eleven total or near-total collapses of the system responsible for generating and distributing power across Africa’s most populous nation. In January 2026, the grid collapsed three times within a single month. On January 27, it went down twice within four days. As of March 2026, sixteen of Nigeria’s thirty-three power plants were not generating any electricity at all. The operational ones were producing a combined 3,705 megawatts, which is roughly the output required to power a mid-sized American city, distributed across 220 million people.
In the same period, the Nigerian government released a National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, announced plans for AI innovation hubs across six geopolitical zones, launched the 3 Million Technical Talent program to train AI-ready workers, and described the country as positioned to become a continental leader in artificial intelligence by 2030.
These two things cannot both be true at the same time. A country whose grid collapses eleven times in a year cannot also be building AI leadership. The infrastructure required for artificial intelligence begins with consistent, reliable electricity. Data centres, the physical facilities where AI systems live and operate, are among the most energy-intensive buildings humanity has ever constructed. Training a large language model consumes more electricity in a single week than a Nigerian household sees in a year. Running AI applications in real time requires clean, stable power at scale. Nigeria does not have clean, stable power at any scale.
This is not a critique of ambition. There is nothing wrong with Nigeria wanting to be a leader in artificial intelligence. The critique is of the dishonesty embedded in announcing that ambition without acknowledging the foundational work that would need to happen first. A strategy document is not a strategy. A roadmap is not a road.
Nigeria’s electricity crisis is not a new problem that arrived alongside the AI conversation. It is a structural failure that predates every tech hub announcement, every digital economy initiative, and every innovation strategy by at least three decades. Successive governments have promised reforms, privatised parts of the sector, attracted foreign investment promises, signed new generation contracts, and published new roadmaps. The grid still collapsed eleven times in 2024. The power plants are still offline. The 86 million Nigerians who have no electricity connection still have no electricity connection.
The National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, developed by the National Centre for AI Research under the National Information Technology Development Agency, is a technically considered document in several respects. It addresses responsible AI development, data governance frameworks, capacity building across sectors, and the application of AI to health, agriculture, financial services, and education. The people who wrote it understand the subject matter.
What the document does not adequately address is the infrastructure gap between what it proposes and the country it is being proposed for. It is a strategy written as if the foundational problems were already solved, or could be treated as background conditions rather than central obstacles. The gap between the document and the reality of Nigeria in 2026 is enormous, and the government’s habit of treating that gap as something that speeches and announcements can bridge is one of the more consistent features of Nigerian governance across administrations.
A government serious about AI development would be building power first. It would be stabilising the grid, electrifying rural communities where more than 86 million people currently have no access, and creating the energy infrastructure that every other element of a digital economy depends on. It would measure progress in megawatts generated and grid stability, not in strategy documents published and hubs announced.
That work is slow, expensive, unglamorous, and technically demanding. It does not generate the kind of international attention that announcing an AI strategy does. It does not position any minister as a visionary in the way that speaking about the future of machine learning does. But it is the work that would actually change what is possible for Nigeria in technology, because without it, the AI strategy is a document about a country that does not yet exist.
The grid will collapse again. The strategy will be updated. And the 2030 target for AI leadership will be quietly moved to 2035 when the time comes.