The Managing Director of Nigeria’s Rural Electrification Agency (REA), Abba Aliyu has warned that Nigeria risks reversing the gains in the renewable energy sector following moves to amend the Electricity act, 2023.
In an opinion piece, Aliyu warned that the proposed Electricity Act (Amendment) Bill, 2025 risks setting back Nigeria’s renewable energy revolution by introducing systemic regulatory fragmentation.
The amendment bill seeks to establish a National Authority for Renewable Energy (NARE), which would strip core renewable-energy responsibilities currently managed by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), the REA, and the Rural Electrification Fund (REF).
Public reports also indicate that the bill proposes carving out 40 per cent of the annual Rural Electrification Fund to finance the new entity.
While acknowledging the National Assembly’s intent to accelerate clean energy deployment, Aliyu argued that the structural change mistakes an institutional fix for a practical solution.
“It risks attempting to solve a coordination problem by creating another coordination problem; attempting to eliminate institutional overlap by establishing overlapping jurisdiction; and attempting to accelerate investment by introducing precisely the kind of regulatory uncertainty that private capital avoids,” Aliyu stated.
He further noted that the energy sector is already navigating a historic decentralisation following the Electricity Act 2023, which empowered states to establish and regulate intrastate electricity markets. By July 2026, regulatory oversight had successfully transitioned to 16 states.
“Introducing NARE into this evolving framework creates a technology-specific federal regulator that overlaps with NERC, State Electricity Regulatory Commissions, and the Nigerian Electricity Management Services Agency. For independent power developers and investors, this generates a maze of bureaucratic hurdles, including unclear lines of authority over licensing and tariffs, unpredictable interconnection rules with existing Distribution Company networks, and heightened project risk that drives up the cost of capital and ultimately hikes electricity tariffs for end-users,” he said.
Rather than dismantling the existing framework, Aliyu proposed that any dedicated national renewable body should focus strictly on underserved auxiliary functions such as green-finance mobilization, resource mapping, supply-chain development, carbon markets, and skills training without acting as a parallel economic regulator.
“The measure of reform is not how many agencies we create.It is how many homes we connect, how many businesses we power, how many megawatts we deploy, how much private capital we mobilise and how much more reliable electricity becomes for Nigerians,” he added.
