When Two Leaders Call, Who Picks Up the Tab in Nigeria?

The phone call lasted less than an hour. But if the promises made on that February 2026 line between Abuja and Berlin actually hold, Nigerians might finally sleep with their fans running through the night.

President Bola Ahmed Tinubu and newly elected German Chancellor Friedrich Merz spoke by phone in what the presidency described as a “productive bilateral exchange”. The topics covered three of Nigeria’s most festering wounds: power, security, and economic growth, and at the centre of it all sat a Siemens electricity project that Nigerians had been hearing about since 2020.

The Deal That Will Not Die

The Nigeria-Germany power sector cooperation is not new. It was born under the Presidential Power Initiative, a grand agreement between the Nigerian government and Siemens AG to rehabilitate and upgrade the country’s battered electricity grid in three phases. Phase one alone promised to raise generation capacity to 7 gigawatts by 2021.

Nigeria’s current electricity supply hovers around a humiliating 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts for a population of over 220 million people, according to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission. By comparison, South Africa, with roughly a quarter of Nigeria’s population, generates more than 44,000 megawatts. The numbers are not just embarrassing; they are economically catastrophic.

The Manufacturers Association of Nigeria estimates that businesses spend over ₦17 trillion annually on self-generated power through diesel generators. For small businesses across Lagos, Kano, Aba, and Port Harcourt, that figure is not abstract. It is the reason margins collapse, prices climb, and jobs disappear.

The Siemens project stalled. Financing disputes, bureaucratic tangles, and shifting political priorities ground it to a halt. Now, with Deutsche Bank reportedly being positioned as a financial partner alongside Siemens, the Tinubu-Merz conversation has breathed fresh oxygen into a project that many Nigerians had quietly buried.

In Ikeja, Lagos, Comfort Adeyemi runs a small tailoring business from a zinc-roofed shop on Adeniyi Jones Avenue. She owns four industrial sewing machines, each a small fortune she paid for with years of savings. On most days, only one machine runs at a time.

“Light comes maybe for three hours, then goes again”, she told The Gazette News during a visit last month. Generator fuel has finished my profit since then. If they fix the light, I can employ two more people.”

In Kano, a retired civil servant who asked to be identified only as Alhaji Musa described how his household budget had been hollowed out. His family of seven spends an average of ₦45,000 monthly on fuel for a generator they never wanted to buy.

“We were promised light in 2015. We were promised light in 2019. Now they say Germany is coming again,” he said, his voice carrying the particular weariness of someone who has been disappointed in the same way too many times. “In God we trust now. Not government.”

Their stories are not outliers. According to the World Bank’s 2023 Nigeria Economic Update, unreliable electricity costs Nigeria an estimated 2 to 4 per cent of GDP annually, a loss that compounds every single year nothing is fixed.

The accountability trail runs through multiple administrations and multiple broken promises. By 2024, the Transmission Company of Nigeria acknowledged that grid wheeling capacity remained below 6,000 megawatts, meaning generation capacity is useless if the wires cannot carry the current. BudgIT’s 2024 State of States report documented that capital releases for power infrastructure projects had been consistently inconsistent, with allocations frequently failing to match actual disbursements.

“What Nigeria needs is not just money from Germany,” said Dr Emeka Eze, an energy economist and fellow at the Centre for Energy Policy Research in Abuja. “We need transparent procurement, strong project monitoring, and a government willing to enforce contracts without political interference. Without governance reform, the best partnership in the world will not fix our grid.”

Deutsche Bank’s potential role as a financing partner is significant. But bankers follow governance signals. Nigeria has signed energy cooperation frameworks with Germany before, in 2010, in 2016, and, most visibly, in 2020. Each time, the language was nearly identical: partnership, mutual benefit, technical support, and investment. What changed each time was not the rhetoric; it was whether Nigeria created the enabling conditions for investment to actually land.

The Federal Ministry of Power did not respond to The Gazette News’ requests for an update on the current status of the Presidential Power Initiative as of press time.

The Security Side Nobody Is Talking About Loudly

The power discussion got the headlines. The security conversation got the quiet nods.

Merz and Tinubu also discussed the possibility of Germany providing aerial surveillance capabilities to support Nigeria’s counter-terrorism operations in the northeast and northwest. Nigeria’s security crisis, driven by Boko Haram remnants, the Islamic State West Africa Province, and armed bandit networks, has displaced more than 2.2 million people in the northeast alone, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs as of late 2024.

Germany’s involvement in security cooperation is not unprecedented; Berlin has historically supported African Union peacekeeping frameworks and provided logistical assistance through EU defence partnerships. But direct bilateral cooperation involving surveillance technology enters sensitive territory.

“Any security partnership must be grounded in clear agreements that respect Nigeria’s sovereignty and establish accountability,” said Hauwa Ibrahim, a human rights lawyer who has spent two decades working in conflict-affected communities in Borno and Zamfara states. “We have seen in other regions that when foreign surveillance tools arrive without proper civilian oversight frameworks, the harm can fall on communities rather than on the armed actors.”

The Tinubu administration has not released formal details of what reconnaissance cooperation would look like in practice. The Ministry of Defence did not respond to The Gazette News‘ request for comment on the security discussions as of press time.

For the groundnut seller in Sabon Gari, the frozen foods vendor in Nnewi, and the barber in Surulere who cannot run clippers without a generator, this call is only as real as the next NEPA bill and the hours of light that come, or do not come, after it. If the Siemens project is truly revived with credible financing and enforceable timelines, the downstream effect on small businesses, cold chain logistics, healthcare facilities, and household budgets could be enormous. If the security cooperation translates into more effective disruption of bandit networks that have razed farms and emptied villages across the northwest, it could mean families returning home, markets reopening, and children going back to school.

These are not small stakes. They are the difference between a country that functions and one that merely persists.

Comfort Adeyemi in Ikeja put it plainly, the way ordinary Nigerians often do when they are tired of being spoken at and just want to be heard.

“Tell them we are not asking for plenty,” she said, straightening a bolt of fabric on her worktable. “Just give us light. Everything else, we’ll go handle.”