The Federal Government’s effort to subsidise electricity tariff for Nigerians has seen it cough out over N5 trillion in the last 10 years amounting to over 664 per cent growth, data from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission has shown.
The data also revealed that the amount the government paid from 2015 to 2024 had a spike of 171 per cent from what it would pay the 11 Electricity Distribution Companies (DisCos) from 2023 to 2024.
A breakdown of the data showed that the government paid N225bn in 2015, which increased to N302bn in 2016. In 2017 it went up to N351bn, N440bn in 2018 and N528bn in 2019.
While the subsidy came down in 2020 to N501bn, the introduction of Multi Year Tariff Order (MYTO) by the government reduced the subsidy in 2021 to N251bn.
The order also made the tariff to fall to N144bn in 2022, but the rising inflation and the devaluation of the dollar in 2023 pushed the subsidy up to N618bn.
