GAMCO: Addressing the Wrong Bottleneck in NESI?

Chief Adebayo Adelabu, Minister of Power 

By Haruna Ahmed

On Wednesday March 4, 2026, the Federal Executive Council approved the establishment of a new entity in the Nigerian power sector called the Grid Asset Management Company (GAMCO), following a memo presented directly by President Bola Tinubu. The Council also set up an inter-ministerial committee, comprising the Ministers of Power, Finance, Works, and others to develop the company’s legal and operational framework. 

According to the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris, who briefed journalists after the meeting, transmission remains the weakest link in the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI), plagued by frequent grid collapses and bottlenecks despite the sector’s unbundling into generation, transmission, and distribution. The proposed GAMCO is intended to manage and strengthen the national grid to improve overall power delivery.

While it is commendable that President Tinubu has driven meaningful reforms, including the constitutional amendment moving electricity to the concurrent list to enable greater state participation, the unbundling of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), and the creation of independent entities to address past conflicts of interest, with the benefit of hindsight, the characterization of the transmission sub-sector as the weakest link in NESI is debatable or even outrightly wrong. 

Without mincing words, establishing yet another government-owned company to take over grid assets or parts or all of transmission functions from TCN, under the pretext that transmission is the weakest link, is not the right solution for Nigeria’s power sector at this stage. The facts are very clear; while TCN certainly needs to keep evolving and scaling up its efforts, the transmission sub-sector has demonstrably been the strongest performer over the past decade in terms of sustained investment, capacity expansion, and reliability. 

On March 4, 2025, coincidentally, exactly one before GAMCO was announced, TCN achieved the nation’s all-time peak generation transmission of 5,801.84 MW, alongside a record daily energy sendout of 128,370.75 MWh, the highest ever recorded. That’s, TCN evacuated the entire available power without any stress or constraint on the grid.

Similarly, public records  show that the TCN’s wheeling capacity has increased from approximately 5,000 MW in 2015 to 8,700 MW by late 2025, a 74% rise equivalent to an additional 3,700 MW. This growth resulted from over $1.16 billion in partner funding, the commissioning of 82 new power transformers adding more than 8,500 MVA to the grid, and sustained rehabilitation of ageing assets. 

Meanwhile, installed generation capacity has grown only modestly from around 12,000 MW in 2015 to about 13,000 MW currently, an increase of roughly 8% or 1,000 MW. Transmission has consistently outpaced generation growth and has never been the limiter preventing higher output; the grid has always been able to wheel everything produced.

On the distribution side, many Distribution Companies (Discos) have effectively gone bankrupt, prompting government takeovers in several cases, and they have largely failed to meet their privatization commitments on infrastructure investment. This has severely limited their ability to accept and distribute their allocated load, leading to persistent load rejections despite clear sanctions defined by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). 

From generation through transmission to distribution, it is evident that the transmission sub-sector, managed by TCN, has delivered the most substantial improvements and cannot fairly be described as the weakest. While transmission can and should continue to improve, particularly in areas like redundancy, anti-vandalism measures, and modernization, the evidence shows it has outperformed the other segments significantly.

Compounding the concern is the fundamental overlap with an existing entity created under the Electricity Act 2023. In 2024, TCN was unbundled, with its system and market operations functions transferred to the newly independent Nigerian Independent System Operator (NISO). NISO was formally inaugurated by Vice President Kashim Shettima, on behalf of the President, on April 8, 2025, complete with a governing board and management team. 

NISO core tripartite responsibilities explicitly include managing the national grid (as system operator), administering the electricity market, enforcing the grid code and market rules, and coordinating sector-wide planning. It serves as the independent coordinator-in-chief and overseer of the entire value chain, designed precisely to eliminate previous conflicts where TCN handled both asset ownership and system/market operations.

Media reports position GAMCO to take over or share responsibility for managing the national grid, which is already NISO’s primary mandate. This raises serious practical questions; Will GAMCO and NISO jointly manage the grid, potentially creating confusion over authority and decision-making? Who will issue instructions to whom, and how will accountability be maintained? 

Introducing such duplication risks bureaucratic turf wars, diluted enforcement, and higher operational costs, outcomes that run counter to the current national emphasis on cost-cutting, reduced governance overhead, and fiscal discipline. Unless GAMCO is strictly limited to asset ownership and physical upgrades (leaving actual grid operations and market administration to NISO), the proposal as described appears to undermine the very reforms the Electricity Act 2023 sought to achieve.

Ostensibly, the real challenges in NESI lie elsewhere; stagnant generation growth requiring accelerated gas-to-power and renewable investments, chronic Disco under-investment and viability issues, ongoing debt cycles (including the questionable renewal of NBET’s license when NISO’s market operations directorate should cover those functions), and persistent enforcement gaps around load rejection and infrastructure protection. 

These are not solved by proliferating new companies but by fully empowering and streamlining existing institutions, operationalizing NISO to enforce discipline across the chain, accelerating TCN’s redundancy projects, imposing stricter Disco sanctions, promoting metering and cost-reflective tariffs, and focusing policies on strengthening the current framework rather than duplicating mandates.

At this critical juncture, when the sector desperately needs stability, investor confidence, and efficient resource use, creating confusion through overlapping entities may prove counterproductive to President Tinubu’s vision for a resilient power sector. Reforms should build on demonstrated progress like TCN’s capacity gains and NISO’s fresh mandate rather than risk exacerbating volatility. 

However, unless there are undisclosed strategic reasons for this move, the facts indicate that TCN is far from the weakest link, and the priority should be targeted policies to optimize what already exists instead of introducing new layers of complexity.