By Deborah Nnamdi
Nigeria’s National Grid on Tuesday suffered its second system collapse in 2026, leading to a total shutdown of electricity supply across the country.
As of the time of filing this report, available data indicated that power supply to all 11 electricity distribution companies had dropped to zero megawatts. Electricity generation, which stood at over 4,500 megawatts earlier in the day, fell sharply to 0 megawatts by about 11:00 a.m.
The latest incident comes just days after the grid recorded its first collapse of the year last Friday, and barely weeks after a similar nationwide outage on December 29, 2025.
Checks showed that all 23 power generation plants connected to the national grid reportedly lost output during the collapse, resulting in zero power allocation to the distribution companies.
Grid collapses in Nigeria have often been linked to a mix of technical faults, inadequate maintenance of transmission infrastructure, and fluctuations in generation capacity. However, the exact cause of Tuesday’s incident could not be immediately determined.
Officials of the Transmission Company of Nigeria had yet to issue a detailed statement on the collapse as of the time of filing this report.
