By :Ademola Wakeel

Every stolen electricity cable is a vote against Nigerian development. The numbers prove it.

Somewhere in Nigeria right now, a man is wielding a hacksaw at the base of a transmission tower. He is not a terrorist. He is probably hungry, almost certainly unemployed, and entirely focused on the few thousand naira he will pocket from selling the aluminium conductors to a scrap dealer down the road.

He does not think about the factory that will go dark when the tower falls. He does not think about the hospital that will switch to a generator it can barely afford to run. He does not think about the ₦15 billion that Nigeria loses in economic output every single day that major sections of the grid remain down.

He cannot afford to think that far ahead. But we must.

The 2025 data from Nigeria’s electricity sector should shock every Nigerian into paying attention. Eighteen transmission towers were deliberately brought down across the country in a single year — from Shiroro to Port Harcourt, from Kaduna to Benin.

The combined replacement cost exceeded ₦3.6 billion. Underground cables in Abuja were attacked multiple times, with replacement costs surpassing ₦5 billion. Across the country’s 12 Distribution Companies (DisCos), revenue losses ran into hundreds of millions of naira each. When the broader economic impact is calculated using the standard Value of Lost Load (VoLL) metric — the output Nigeria fails to produce because electricity is unavailable — the daily GDP loss reaches ₦15 billion.

Let that number sink in: ₦15 billion every day.

That is not a power sector problem. It is a national emergency.

We have grown so accustomed to generator noise and darkness that we have stopped asking what it actually costs us. We calculate the price of diesel. We budget for inverter batteries. We accept, with a shrug, that Nigeria cannot keep its lights on. What we rarely stop to calculate is what this persistent darkness is doing to our economic potential — and how much of it is not the result of underfunding or mismanagement alone, but of outright sabotage.

Consider what happens when the Benin–Ughelli/Sapele line goes down — as it did in December 2025, when five towers were toppled in a single incident, wiping out 274 megawatts of load. That is not a technical fault. It is a calculated act of destruction that cost the sector more than ₦738 million in daily revenue. It shut down homes, businesses, hospitals, and markets across an entire region. It forced factory managers to run diesel generators at four times the cost of grid power. It pushed small businesses closer to closure and forced consumers to pay higher tariffs to cover repair costs.

The person who sold those tower components as scrap metal earned perhaps ₦50,000. Nigeria lost billions.

This grotesque imbalance is at the heart of why vandalism is not merely a criminal justice issue — it is an economic policy emergency.

The causes are not mysterious. Poverty and unemployment make the copper in a transmission cable look like buried treasure to someone with no income and no prospects. Unregulated scrap metal markets provide ready buyers, with no questions asked. Criminal networks have professionalised the operation, identifying high-value targets and systematically stripping conductors and tower components along entire transmission corridors. In some cases, the attacks are political — deliberate acts of sabotage designed to embarrass the government or settle scores.

But whatever the motive, the consequences fall hardest on ordinary Nigerians. The costs of repairs are ultimately recovered through tariff adjustments, meaning electricity consumers pay for the vandal’s payday. DisCos, unable to remit revenue they never collected, default on payments to power generation companies, worsening the sector’s chronic liquidity crisis. Investors, weighing the risks of a grid that can be brought down by a hacksaw, redirect their capital elsewhere. The jobs that could have existed in industries that never set up shop in Nigeria are the invisible casualties — never counted, never mourned.

There are solutions, and they are well known. Anti-vandal technologies, drone surveillance, and Internet of Things (IoT) sensors along high-risk corridors can raise the cost and difficulty of attacks. The Electricity Act 2023 already provides for stiffer penalties; what is needed is consistent enforcement and the public prosecution of offenders. Most critically, scrap metal dealers must be licensed, regulated, and held accountable for the materials they purchase. A conductor ripped from a live transmission tower does not become legitimate commerce the moment money changes hands.

Communities must also be part of the solution. Traditional rulers, local government councils, and vigilante groups in high-vandalism zones are valuable partners who have barely been engaged. Economic empowerment programmes in the most affected areas can address the desperation that makes infrastructure theft attractive in the first place. Treating the symptom without addressing the underlying poverty is a strategy doomed to fail.

Nigeria cannot industrialise on a vandalised grid. It cannot attract serious investment to a network that criminals dismantle at will. It cannot build a modern economy while ₦15 billion in productive capacity evaporates every day the lights remain off.

The man with the hacksaw is destroying his own future. So are the scrap dealer who buys from him, the official who looks the other way, and the policymaker who treats this as someone else’s problem.

The grid belongs to all of us. So does the responsibility to protect it.

Ademola Wakeel is an Abuja-based media consultant and publisher.