Power supply so good; and then so bad

I don’t know if it’s just my end alone but of recent the electricity supply from PHCN has been pretty good. In fact too good to be true. But who can satisfy Nigerians? Trust that I still need to gripe about it. Why? Well, it is a bit complicated. I use a prepaid meter and the non-stop electricity supply is zapping my “credit” so fast you could think that the utility meter is a stop watch. To get me even more annoyed, government announced that they are upgrading the prices to N25/KwH soon. Why do we always benchmark cost to other countries but we never do same for minimum wage or roads or rails or [*insert your gripe here*].

The following table shows the price of electricity per Kilowatt Hour across different countries. This should serve as a quick reference to what other guys pay in these countries.

Country$/KwHN/KwH
Kingdom of Tonga0.457073.12
Denmark0.428968.62
Italy0.372359.57
Netherlands0.347055.52
Germany0.306649.06
Philippines0.288046.08
Sweden0.273443.74
Ireland0.238938.22
Spain0.195031.20
France0.192530.80
UK0.185929.74
Croatia0.175528.08
Singapore0.173427.74
Portugal0.163926.22
Nigeria (Proposed)0.156325.00
Hong Kong0.123019.68
Iceland0.116118.58
Belgium0.114318.29
Perú0.104416.70
South Africa0.101516.24
USA0.092814.85
Malaysia0.074211.87
Australia0.071111.38
Finland0.069511.12
Nigeria (Currently)0.062510.00
Canada0.0618  9.89

Author: Adedeji Olowe

Adédèjì is the founder of Lendsqr, the loan infrastructure fintech powering lenders at scale. Before this, he led Trium Limited, the corporate VC of the Coronation Group, which invested in Woven Finance, Sparkle Bank, Clane, and L1ght, amongst others. He has almost two decades of banking experience, including stints as the Divisional Head of Electronic Banking at Fidelity Bank Plc. He drove the turnaround of the bank’s digital business. He was previously responsible for United Bank for Africa Group’s payment card business across 19 countries. Alongside other industry veterans, he founded Open Banking Nigeria, the nonprofit driving the development and adoption of a common API standard for the Nigerian financial industry. Beyond open APIs, Adédèjì works deeply within the fintech ecosystem; he’s the board chairman at Paystack. Adédèjì is a renowned fintech pundit and has been blogging on technology and payments at dejiolowe.com since 2001.

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