The Transmission Company of Nigeria transmitted a historic peak of 5,801.84 megawatts on March 4, 2025, marking the highest electricity generation ever recorded in the country's history. Within the same period, criminals vandalised TCN infrastructure 131 times across the national grid.
These two facts, announced by the company's Managing Director, Sule Abdulaziz, tell the full story of Nigeria's electricity sector: genuine progress persistently undermined by criminal sabotage that continues unabated despite decades of awareness, multiple interventions, and countless promises from security agencies.
The question is no longer whether we understand the problem but why we have failed to stop it.
Infrastructure vandalism in Nigeria has become so routine that a figure like 131 incidents in eleven months barely registers as shocking. We have normalised what should be treated as economic treason. These are not petty crimes or opportunistic theft.
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Every vandalised transmission tower, every stolen cable, every destroyed transformer represents a deliberate assault on national development that affects millions of citizens and undermines billions of naira in public investment.
When TCN invests in expanding wheeling capability to 8,700MW and commissions 82 new power transformers worth over 8,500 megavolt-amperes, only to watch criminals systematically destroy this infrastructure, we are witnessing the collapse of state authority in real time.
The response from TCN management reveals the depth of our institutional failure. Abdulaziz announced that the company is "working closely with the Office of the National Security Adviser, security agencies, and community vigilante groups to curb this menace."
This is the same formula Nigerian authorities have repeated for two decades with minimal results. Working closely with security agencies has not prevented 131 incidents. Sensitisation campaigns and community engagement have not stopped the vandals. The truth that no one wants to confront is that our approach to infrastructure protection has failed comprehensively, and repeating the same strategies while expecting different outcomes is the definition of institutional delusion.
Consider the mathematics of this failure. TCN recorded more than one vandalism incident every three days throughout 2025. Despite knowing that these attacks are coming, despite having the National Security Adviser's office involved, despite deploying community vigilante groups, criminals continue to access critical infrastructure with apparent ease.
In our view, this is not a security challenge. It is a security surrender. Somewhere in the chain from policy formulation to ground-level implementation, there is a complete breakdown that allows organised criminals to repeatedly target the same types of infrastructure without facing meaningful consequences.
The economic implications extend far beyond the immediate cost of replacing stolen equipment. Every vandalism incident disrupts electricity supply to homes, hospitals, factories, and businesses. Manufacturers lose production hours, hospitals cannot power essential equipment, students cannot study, and small businesses cannot operate.
The cumulative effect of 131 such disruptions across eleven months represents billions of naira in lost economic activity, reduced productivity, and diminished quality of life for ordinary Nigerians.
The involvement of community vigilante groups, which TCN now relies on, is itself an admission of state failure. In a functioning system, protecting national infrastructure would be the exclusive responsibility of law enforcement and security agencies with the training, equipment, and legal authority to do so. When a federal agency must depend on volunteer community watchmen to guard transmission towers, we have already lost the battle.
This is not to diminish the valuable role communities can play in security, but it exposes how thoroughly our official security architecture has failed in its basic mandate.
What makes this failure particularly frustrating is that the solutions are not mysterious. Other countries with similar challenges have successfully protected critical infrastructure through a combination of technology, enforcement, and punishment. Surveillance systems, rapid response teams, and severe penalties for vandalism have proven effective everywhere they have been seriously implemented.
Nigeria possesses the resources and technical capacity to deploy these measures. What we lack is the political will to treat infrastructure vandals as the economic terrorists they are and to hold security agencies accountable when they fail to prevent these crimes.
The pattern extends beyond electricity to telecommunications, rail, and oil infrastructure, where vandalism has become so pervasive that companies now build it into their operational budgets.
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This acceptance of criminality as a normal cost of doing business in Nigeria represents a profound failure of governance. We are essentially subsidising criminal enterprises by absorbing their impact rather than eliminating them.
Until infrastructure vandalism attracts penalties severe enough to deter would-be criminals, and until security agencies face consequences for failing to prevent these crimes, the situation will not improve.
The federal government must reclassify infrastructure vandalism as economic sabotage subject to terrorism penalties. Security agencies responsible for protecting transmission infrastructure should face public accountability for every successful attack in their jurisdictions.
Nigeria has proven it can generate and transmit more electricity than ever before. The 5,801.84MW peak represents genuine technical progress. What we have not proven is that we can protect this progress from criminals who recognise that infrastructure vandalism in Nigeria carries minimal risk and maximum reward. Until we address this failure with the seriousness it deserves, every megawatt we add to the grid remains vulnerable, and every investment in power infrastructure remains provisional. The vandals are winning because we have allowed them to. That must change.
