Nigeria’s electricity distribution companies has left a N1.36tn hole in the power market’s revenue chain in 2025 after failing to bill consumers for electricity worth N694.8bn and collecting only part of the N2.99tn they charged customers, figures from the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) have shown.
NERC disclosed this in its 2025 Annual Report, where it exposed a sizeable gap between electricity supplied to consumers, the value captured through billing, and the money eventually recovered by the 11 distribution companies.
The DisCos received electricity valued at N3.68tn during the year but billed customers for N2.99tn. That left N694.8bn worth of supplied power outside the billing system.
Of the amount billed, only N2.32tn was collected, leaving another N669.49bn unpaid. NERC put the DisCos’ collection efficiency at 77.60 per cent, while their gross billing efficiency stood at 81.14 per cent.
The regulator also recorded a significant energy accounting gap. DisCos received 31,251.77 gigawatt-hours at their trading points but billed customers for 25,867.86GWh, producing an energy accounting efficiency of 82.77 per cent.
Ibadan Electricity Distribution Company (IBEDC) recorded the strongest performance on that measure at 88.84 per cent, while Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) posted the lowest figure at 72.18 per cent.
The financial weakness was reflected in the sector’s overall losses. NERC reported that the weighted average aggregate technical, commercial, and collection loss among the DisCos stood at 37.03 per cent, 16.49 percentage points above the 20.54 per cent target set under the 2025 Multi-Year Tariff Order.
The report also showed that the distribution side of the market was not the only pressure point. The Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Company (NBETC) and the market operator raised gross invoices totalling N1.72tn against the DisCos for energy and administrative services, but only N1.632tn was remitted, leaving an N89.58bn shortfall.
Government intervention also ran into trillions of naira. NERC put the Federal Government’s 2025 tariff subsidy obligation at N1.93tn, representing 57.44 per cent of the N3.357tn NBET invoice for the year.
The regulator attributed the subsidy largely to the government’s policy of keeping customer tariffs below cost-reflective levels despite rising costs.
The revenue figures have renewed scrutiny of the viability of Nigeria’s privatised electricity model. Former senator and businessman Ben Murray-Bruce said the structure had failed to deliver the investment and reliability expected from privatisation.
“The 2013 privatisation was not a reform. It was a transfer of custody,” Murray-Bruce wrote in an open letter to President Bola Tinubu.
He also criticised the continued prevalence of estimated billing noting that only 6.97 million of the 12.16 million active registered electricity customers had meters by December 2025.
That left 5.20 million customers, or 42.73 per cent, without meters, according to NERC.
Murray-Bruce said the sector required a fundamental rethink, including greater participation by communities and states in electricity generation and distribution.
The former senator also pointed to two grid collapse incidents recorded by NERC in 2025, one full and one partial, as evidence of the sector’s continuing structural difficulties.
The figures present a market struggling at several points simultaneously: electricity supplied is not fully billed, bills issued are not fully collected, market invoices are partly unpaid, and government subsidies continue to carry a substantial share of the cost.
The revenue problem is thus compounded by incomplete metering which has left millions of customers outside a system capable of accurately matching electricity consumed with bills issued.
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