By Peter Egwuatu

Every night in Lagos, generator fans whirr to life as homeowners resign to kerosene lamps and darkness. For Akpevwe Theophilus Erhieyovwe, a Nigerian-born scientist, currently a commissioning and energy engineer and based in the USA, this weekly ritual is a painful memory. He recalls his childhood home drifting into darkness “so often,” he says, that Nigerians coined the phrase “NEPA don bring light”. It’s a refrain he still hears today, even from afar. In recent years, data has made this grim reality undeniable: in one study, each local feeder in a Nigerian city averaged about 640 outages per year, roughly 160 days of blackout annually. In other words, households connected to the grid go without power about 40% of the time. And it’s getting worse: experts report outages rising from 157 to 168 days per year between 2019 and 2020. “No one has reliable electricity,” the report bluntly concludes.

In practice, those outages come from load-shedding and breakdowns, not conspiracy. 60% of interruptions are intentional cuts (load-shedding) and 30% are sudden failures of ageing cables, transformers or vegetation faults. “You can’t predict it,” an engineer in Nigeria told researchers. “One minute your power is on, the next the feeder snaps and you’re in the dark.” For ordinary Nigerians like Erhieyovwe’s relatives, that means weeks of night-lights, spoiled food and cold showers. Unable to trust the national grid, 40% of Nigerian households have bought their generators. Together, they burn roughly $14 billion a year on fuel money that could build new plants, if it weren’t flushed out the exhaust pipe.

This daily struggle for power hangs over every aspect of life in Nigeria. Factories halt production, doctors back up surgery with battery lamps, and students study by candlelight. Industrial and middle-class families often tally monthly “electricity” bills in the tens of thousands of naira, just for fuel and maintenance on private generators. It’s ironic, Erhieyovwe notes, that Nigeria is rich in oil and sunlight, yet most people pay the highest cost per kilowatt by running diesel units. “We spend more to keep lights on than in the U.S.,” he says, “but still our buildings sweat and fail because we never got the engineering right.”

Now, on top of that frustration, the government wants Nigerians to pay even more. This spring, the power ministry announced that subsidies and tariffs are unsustainable; 85% of customers currently pay below cost, and the treasury is shoulder-deep in a ₦4 trillion power-debt. Consumers already stretched by daily blackouts reacted angrily to hints of a 200+% tariff increase. Labour unions have threatened mass protests, calling it “unfair to ask people to pay full price for fake light.” Energy insiders counter that Nigeria’s tariffs are among the lowest in Africa and that cost-reflective pricing is needed to fund the creaking grid. Yet even a cautious move toward higher rates has been met with stark warnings. As Minister Adebayo Adelabu put it bluntly, “our economy cannot sustain subsidies indefinitely – citizens must pay the appropriate price for the energy consumed”. Erhieyovwe shakes his head at the politics. “Either way, we pay – one way with fuel, another with bills – and nothing improves,” he sighs.

The energy crunch is compounded by Nigeria’s real estate boom on shaky ground. Rows of new apartment blocks and malls sprout in Abuja, Lagos and beyond, often with barely a building inspector in sight. Experts warn that Nigeria’s construction sector is “vibrant” yet dangerously undercooked by regulation. In the last two years alone, some reports estimate 135 building collapses in Nigeria, many causing dozens of deaths. Investigations invariably point to the same culprits: flimsy materials, informal builders ignoring codes, and officials who look the other way. “Our houses are falling apart—literally—because nobody checks the work,” Erhieyovwe notes. He describes a familiar scene: contractors buy the cheapest air-conditioners and generators, slap them onto the building, then run the wiring without proper design. “That may save money upfront, but five years later equipment breaks and the whole system fails,” he says. It’s a similar moral: if structures aren’t tested for safety, the electrical and mechanical systems inside them are rarely tested for efficiency or reliability.

Enter MEP commissioning. It’s a term unknown to most Nigerians, but a standard practice across the U.S. and Europe. “MEP” stands for mechanical, electrical and plumbing — the heartbeat of any building. Commissioning is a science-based process of validating that those complex systems perform as intended, from the design blueprints through construction to occupancy. In practice, commissioning teams methodically test everything: they measure airflow from each vent, check that chillers and boilers respond to controls, verify that lighting and power circuits meet the design loads, and even simulate the hottest day of summer to see if the AC can cope. They compare all results against the owner’s requirements and specifications, then tune or fix what’s off. “Commissioning isn’t voodoo,” Erhieyovwe explains. “It’s like a doctor’s check-up for a building. We catch problems on the chart, not when someone trips over a loose wire or when an office overheats.” In technical terms, he says, commissioning “verifies and documents that all MEP systems are designed, installed, tested, operated and maintained” as intended — a step that’s baked into Western building standards but often skipped at home.

The benefits are tangible. U.S. consultants call commissioning “low-hanging fruit” for saving energy and extending equipment life. For example, a meta-study of 1,500 North American buildings found that properly commissioning existing facilities yielded median energy savings of about 14%, with payback on the costs in under two years. In Chicago, Erhieyovwe has helped on high-rise buildings and hospitals where commissioning uncovered grave mismatches: pumps were oversized, ductwork was leaking, or control sensors were mis-calibrated. One memory stands out: an office tower’s air-handling unit had been manually set to full blast on cooling but never adjusted to the actual load. The result was massive energy waste. After the commissioning team reprogrammed the controls and balanced the system, the building’s power draw dropped by nearly a quarter, he says. “If that had been in Abuja, the owners would never know — they’d just pay for it forever,” he notes.

Across the U.S, commissioning is often required by codes and green building programs: standards like ASHRAE Guideline 0-2019 and Standard 202-2024 explicitly define a commissioning process, ensuring owners “receive the equipment and building systems they paid for, exactly as designed”. In other words, it protects infrastructure investments. “We make sure the light isn’t just switched on in theory, but at the right brightness and efficiency in reality,” says Erhieyovwe. Commissioning also flags problems early when they’re cheap to fix: “Finding a wiring error on paper costs nothing, but fixing it after tenants move in can cost millions,” he explains. In Nigeria’s context, this would mean checking a generator and inverter size against the building’s actual needs, or making sure newly-installed solar panels match their performance specs — steps that hardly ever happen now.

Erhieyovwe is convinced Nigeria needs commissioning badly. He points to the pending National Building Energy Efficiency Code (BEEC) as a possible entry point. Launched by the Federal Ministry of Housing, the BEEC would impose minimum efficiency standards on new buildings and is touted to cut building energy use by 40%. “It’s a great blueprint on paper,” he says, “but without enforcement and commissioning, it’s like having ingredients for soup and then never cooking it.” Indeed, the BEEC is slated to be voluntary for two years while people adapt, before becoming mandatory. That window could be used to pilot commissioning requirements for big projects. Erhieyovwe suggests Nigerian professional bodies and regulators incorporate commissioning clauses into the national code and contractors’ approvals. He also stresses education: “Our engineers and builders need training. We can’t import a system blind; we must own it locally.”

As a Nigerian abroad, he feels a personal mission. “I love my country, and I know people here can design great systems,” he says. “But we have to move from intuition to quantification.” He has started giving talks to student chapters of professional groups (via Zoom), sharing how he and his diaspora colleagues test buildings step by step. He even consults informally for friends building homes back home. “If someone in Chicago can pilot-test an inverter, so can someone in Ibadan or Port Harcourt,” he insists. He thinks diaspora engineers can assemble in think-tanks or partner with universities to draft Nigerian best practices. “We have a Nigerians-in-Diaspora Commission, but we need something like a Diaspora Engineering Council,” he laughs. “Experts don’t just send money — they send knowledge.”

Nigeria’s long-term power and infrastructure challenges, he argues, are fixable but only through technical rigour. No amount of prayer or policy bluster will make worn-out transformers last or slapdash buildings hold together. At the close of our interview, Erhieyovwe looks ahead with cautious optimism. “I believe Nigeria can leapfrog,” he says. “Imagine if every skyscraper here was commissioned to run efficiently, if every power plant output was measured against its specs — we would stop wasting billions.” He sums up with a challenge: “Our future lights, and the safety of our homes, should not be left to chance. We can build them on the blueprint of science, not guesswork.” The task is immense, but with diaspora engineers like him advocating for standards and training, Nigeria’s next generation of infrastructure could finally be performance-tested from day one.

By bringing MEP commissioning into the conversation, Erhieyovwe is doing more than proposing an engineering tweak — he is articulating a new mindset. “Nigeria’s potential is huge,” he reminds us. “What’s missing are the systems to harness it smartly.” With that conviction, he hopes policymakers, educators and fellow Nigerians at home and abroad will join him in turning that potential into reality.