Enough Is Enough: You Will Not Disconnect What You Did Not Supply: Lagos Neighbourhood Stands Up to Power Officials

A video circulating widely on social media shows a group of women in a Lagos neighbourhood physically confronting officials from the Eko Electricity Distribution Company who had arrived to disconnect their power supply. The women, visibly angry, blocked the workers and refused to allow the disconnection to proceed. Their grievance was straightforward. They had endured months without reliable electricity yet continued to receive bills they considered unjust. Being cut off from a service they were barely receiving was the final provocation.

The video struck a nerve because the experience it captured is far from unique. Across Lagos and virtually every other city in Nigeria, residents share the same complaint. Power supply is erratic at best and absent at worst, but estimated billing continues regardless. Households that receive a few hours of electricity per week are handed bills that suggest round-the-clock service. When they fail to pay for power they never consumed, disconnection teams arrive. The cycle breeds the kind of anger the video laid bare.

Nigeria’s power sector remains in deep crisis. As of March 2026, national electricity generation sits at roughly four thousand megawatts, a figure that serves barely ten percent of actual demand in a country of over two hundred million people. Distribution companies collectively report losses exceeding two point four trillion naira, losses they attempt to recover by enforcing payments and disconnections on the very consumers they have failed to serve. The arithmetic does not add up, and Nigerians know it.

Reactions online overwhelmingly sided with the women. Many users described the confrontation as a justified response to years of exploitation by distribution companies that bill aggressively while delivering almost nothing. Some, however, noted that the frontline workers sent to carry out disconnections are not the ones making policy. They are low-level employees doing a job that puts them directly in the path of public anger meant for people far above them.

That anger increasingly has a specific target. Minister of Power Adebayo Adelabu has faced sustained criticism since taking office, with many Nigerians pointing to his early promise of delivering twenty-four-hour electricity supply. That pledge, made in 2023, has aged poorly. Nearly three years later, the country’s power situation has shown no meaningful improvement, and the promise has become a punchline repeated under every post about blackouts, billing disputes, and disconnections…..See More