The opposition has found its sharpest campaign weapon yet — the President’s own 2023 words about electricity. The ADC Presidential Campaign Council has thrown Tinubu’s old pledge back at him, declaring that if he failed to deliver reliable power, he has no business asking Nigerians for a second term — and daring the ruling party to defend the record with something other than legislation.
The Pledge Being Recycled Against Its Author
In a statement signed by the council’s Director of Media and Publicity, Kola Ologbondiyan, the ADC-PCC recalled what the President promised on the campaign trail in 2023: “Don’t vote for me for second term if I fail to deliver electricity.” More than three years later, the council argues, the receipt has come due — persistent outages, repeated national grid collapses and unreliable supply defining daily life for households and factories alike.
Laws Are Not Megawatts
The statement’s most quotable passage was aimed at APC spokesperson Dele Alake’s defence of the administration’s record: “An Act is not electricity. A bond prospectus does not power homes and factories. Nigerians cannot eat statutes. What Nigerians need is electricity that works, not another round of explanations and publicity.” The ADC-PCC also accused the administration of raising tariffs without matching reliability, cited hospitality businesses now rationing power for guests to cut costs, and questioned the Presidential Metering Initiative’s impact, alleging Discos still issue estimated bills despite it.
The Uncomfortable Context for Both Sides
Here is the awkward part for the attack: the government’s power-sector scoreboard is not empty. This same week, the Transmission Company commissioned six substations in Kano and Katsina, adding 640MW of wheeling capacity to the grid — real progress on the transmission layer. But wheeling capacity is not hours of light, as anyone following the TCN maintenance cutting power to Abuja communities knows, and the tariff-versus-reliability grievance is the wound the ADC is pressing, including through fights like the planned special electricity tariffs for renewable assets at universities. Households, meanwhile, have learned to protect themselves where the grid fails — from understanding their prepaid meter rights to budgeting around the 2026 cost squeeze.
Final Word
Electricity was the President’s own chosen benchmark in 2023 — which is precisely why the opposition will keep quoting it back, rally after rally. The 2027 argument now has its star witness: the national grid. It testifies nightly, and every household is on the jury.
