Nigeria experienced a national electrical blackout for 10 hours on Thursday, the fifth such outage in the last 24 months.
According to local authorities, the collapse was caused by a fire in a power station. This reportedly overloaded the grid, forcing a shutdown.
Nigeria generates an average of 4 000 megawatts a day. In contrast, South Africa’s Eskom – serving a quarter of Nigeria’s population –produces between 25 000 and 30 000 megawatts a day.
As a result, millions of Nigerians do not rely on the power grid at all and instead use diesel generators or solar panels.