In Nairobi’s Kayole district, a small furniture maker named Mwangi Kamau starts his day before sunrise, not because business is booming, but because the electricity usually disappears by noon. His workshop sits between two apartment blocks, both wired with improvised cables that hang like tired ropes across the street.
When the power cuts, Mwangi rolls up his sleeves, pulls out a manual hand-plane, and works in silence. He says the electricity bill is cheap — “too cheap to be reliable,” as he puts it — and every outage means more unfinished chairs, more late orders, and more income lost. Last year, he spent more on generator fuel than on wood.
Hundreds of miles away in Kaduna, a key northen city in Nigeria, Aisha Bello runs a small frozen food store, packing ice into her freezers every evening. Not because she wants to — but because she has to gamble on when the electricity might disappear overnight.
Twice this year, she’s lost entire batches of stock after 48-hour blackouts. The “NEPA bill,” she says, doesn’t reflect reality: she pays for electricity she rarely receives, and spends the rest of her money powering a noisy generator that drinks diesel faster than her shop makes profit.
When the generator broke down in October, she closed for five days. Customers left. Some never returned.
Across the continent, stories like Mwangi’s and Aisha’s are not exceptions — they are the rule. They reveal something deeper about Africa’s energy struggle: the crisis is not only technical or political; it is commercial. And the cost is borne daily by people trying to build small lives and small businesses in the dark.
These everyday realities paint a clearer picture of a much bigger problem across the continent.
Africa’s electricity crisis
Africa’s electricity problem is not going away anytime soon.
When it comes to electricity generation in Africa, there are very few options to explore. It’s either gas thermal, coal, renewable, and in some rare cases, nuclear plants. Narrowing down, the options are even fewer.
Take renewable, for example. Most African nations have only adopted solar energy as their green energy solution to the electricity crisis. There are very few African countries — mostly in the northern part — that have adopted options such as wind, biomass, or geothermal infrastructure.
Even most solar energy adoption in Africa has been that of mini-grid and rooftop solar panels, with little large solar farm development in existence.
With over 600 million people without electricity and about half of that lacking access to clean energy cooking, Africa remains the continent with the largest energy deficit in the world.
New York City, for instance, produces more electricity than all of Sub-Saharan Africa put together. And there are more power plants in Wyoming than there are in Uganda.
Africa’s electricity crisis also comes with a domino effect on trade, economic growth, human capital development, and even widespread poverty.
Small-scale businesses rely heavily on diesel-powered generators which emit huge carbon and add to the cost of doing business.
No doubt, countries like South Africa, Ghana, and Morocco have made great strides in electricity generation capacity, but not enough compared to their counterparts in other emerging markets.
Take Ghana, for instance. The country has 100% electricity coverage with a generation capacity of about 3,000 MW. Naturally, this meagre form of electricity shouldn’t be enough to power an industrial city, let alone a country.
But Ghana’s limited industrial sector and low population make its small electricity generation sufficient for its consumption.
South Africa, on the other hand, has the largest electricity capacity in Africa. Boasting more than 50,000 MW in generation, the nation has more electricity access than all of Sub-Saharan Africa.
South Africa also has the largest economy by GDP on the continent. With over $400 billion in gross domestic product, the country is home to huge industrial companies, manufacturing hubs, and even data centers.
But for a country whose economy is projected to hit $1 trillion by 2030 and a burgeoning population that may double within the decade, South Africa needs to triple its electricity capacity within the next few years.
Point is, even countries that are seemingly doing well on the continent still have enough energy deficit to hamper economic growth and make industrialisation out of reach.
The obligation, therefore, is that the continent needs to generate more power. But for Sub-Saharan Africa, the call is even more urgent given how expansive its young population is becoming.
Cheap electricity comes at a high cost
Countries like Nigeria, Mozambique, and Niger have a bulging youth population that is bigger than Western Europe, and it’s growing at an accelerated rate compared to the rest of the world.
A high young population means the need to create more jobs, kick off more startups, open more factories, and build more industries — all of which will be reliant on electricity growth.
The challenge for most African countries in electricity development is multifaceted. On the one hand, there’s the issue of green energy transition which attracts most of the international funding for power projects. On the other hand, electricity isn’t cheap and paying a premium price for consumption might be a tall order for people still battling low purchasing power.
Africa still has some of the lowest pay per kilowatt globally. On average, most Africans pay half of what the rest of the world pays for the electricity they consume.
This means high government subsidies, absence of cost-reflective tariffs for investors to break even, and the inability to expand infrastructure and thermal plants to increase access and coverage.
South Africa’s Eskom, the biggest utility firm on the continent by market valuation, only returned to profit last year after eight years of losses and underinvestment. Till now, the utility giant is burdened by municipal debts, highly subsidized tariffs, and a record book that is sustained heavily by government intervention.
According to Eskom’s CEO, Dan Markone, all these make it difficult for the company to revamp old coal plants, expand its renewable target, or turn a corner on how it operates its business. The result is continued load rejection, limited access coverage, and a debt burden that weighs on the balance sheet.
Eskom is not alone in this bureaucratic rut. In Uganda, the state-backed utility firm, Umeme, has faced challenges including government-owed debt, inability to charge appropriate tariffs that are reflective of usage, and inability to recover the cost of investment.
Umeme was a private company issued a monopoly license by the Ugandan government in 2005. The utility was supposed to make electricity available to the East African nation, fix broken transmission lines, boost capacity, and ensure that no one is left in the dark.
But with debt piling up, a tough business terrain, and an inability to recover promised return on investment, Umeme has been at odds with the Ugandan government.
In March 2025, its monopoly license was revoked, and the federal government took over electricity operations.
Umeme said the government still owes it almost $300 million in legacy debt. The company now plans to take the case to international arbitration in London.
Electricity business in Africa is challenging
No one says the electricity business is easy in Africa.
The odds are high, and the risks are even higher. In the absence of a liberalised market that allows for profit and competitiveness, electricity becomes hard to deliver.
For the rest of the world, electricity is considered a business, with a sophisticated model that allows for cost recovery and profit-making.
In Africa, however, the story is different. Governments still run utilities as a form of charity or political benefaction to the populace. Cheap electricity is better than an expensive lit bulb even though it means unavailability of power altogether.
In Nigeria, the companies within the electricity value chain all suffer from legacy debt from unpaid light bills, years of underinvestment, and losses.
The government recently settled a $2.6 billion debt owed to gas companies. Distribution firms also have debts owed to them that are yet to be paid.
Most people consider Africa’s electricity problem as a moral crisis when in reality it’s a crisis of commerce. While there are exceptions, for most of the countries on the continent the economics of running their utilities just doesn’t make sense.
Industralisation in the dark
For Africa to emerge from the doldrums of its electricity crisis, utilities must be treated as real businesses, not political favours or subsidised relief schemes.
Whether run by private firms, state entities, or public-private partnerships, the priority must shift toward cost recovery, transparent pricing, competitive investment, and long-term infrastructure planning.
Industrialisation cannot happen in the dark.
The continent’s economic future — its factories, its startups, its digital hubs, its millions of young workers — depends on the simple but urgent truth that electricity must stop being charity and start being a functioning market.
