The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) disbursed at least $155 million to bridge the metering gap in Nigeria between 2020 and 2023. Still, data suggests that the gap has only grown wider.

In October 2020, the CBN released N58.9 billion out of a seed capital of N200 billion to fund the first phase of the National Mass Metering Programme (NMMP). Given the dollar-naira exchange rate at the time, this figure would amount to about $155 million.

The amount was released to fund the production and distribution of one million meter for the first phase of the project. In October 2021, the federal government announced the success of the programme’s first phase.

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In 2022, the federal government announced the commencement of the second phase of the programme with a target of four million meters. However, nothing was said about the amount allotted to fund the meters.

There have also been no impact assessment reports for this second phase since the launch was announced. In July 2023, the federal government announced the launch of the third phase of the NMMP. The World Bank approved a $500 million loan to fund this phase in 2021.

Since the third phase was announced, it is safe to assume that the first and second phases of the projects were successful. By implication, the NMMP should have supplied electricity meters to at least 2.5 million people by the end of 2023.

An FIJ analysis of the quarterly Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) reports since 2020, however, revealed that only about 900,000 customers have been metered through the NMMP since 2020.

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Per the available data, only 1.5 million people have been metered in Nigeria since 2020. However, not all of these meters were purchased by the government under the NMMP.

An FIJ analysis of the NERC quarterly metering reports since 2020 revealed that about a million Nigerians purchased meters with their money under the Meter Asset Provider Scheme (MAP) from the fourth quarter of 2020 to the third quarter of 2023.

According to data from the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS), there were only about 6.2 million unmetered Nigerians in 2020, but the electricity report recently published by the same organisation revealed that as of the last three months of 2023, Nigeria had about 6.51 million unmetered people. This means that there have been 310,000 more people without a meter across the 11 operating distribution companies in the country.

Although the number of power subscribers has increased from 10.3 million to 12.12 million since 2020, the metering gap would not be as wide if the federal government successfully implemented the first two phases of the NMMP. Considering the target, according to NERC, between 8.7 million and 10.2 million people would have been metered under the programme by now.

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But beyond the mysterious decrease in the number of metered people in Nigeria, the cost of metering also threatens to widen the metering gap even further. Very recently, NERC put the cost of the cheapest available meter at N81,975.16. This is more than twice the minimum wage paid to workers in Nigeria.