Nigeria’s Energy Transition: Who Decides, Who Benefits and Who Pays?

Nigeria’s energy transition is presented as a flashy billion dollar investment project, with new age technology. But who actually captures the benefits? And what happens to the communities left in the wake of “progress”?

​A recent study by renewable energy expert Excel Obumneme Amaefule and his team of researchers, Ros Taplin and Chinedu Nsude, exposes the political and institutional dynamics driving Nigeria’s renewable agenda. Amaefule is an interdisciplinary researcher and practitioner specialising in energy justice, climate justice, water governance and sustainable development. He is the founder of Eden Resilience Action Lab (ERA-Lab), a youth-based research organization that bridges data and implementation gaps across energy, water, environmental justice, climate resilience and public health. He also acts as a Topic Coordinator for a research collection in Frontiers, a scientific journal publisher, overseeing work on renewable energy transitions.

The study draws on interviews with 10 experts, including government officials, journalists, private energy project leads, and current and former UN and Nigerian energy leaders. All participants were granted anonymity in line with research ethics, meaning individual identities are not disclosed. However, their professional and industry information is documented in the appendix and results section of the paper.

By reframing the energy transition as not only a climate issue but also one of equity and accountability, the study examines whether Nigeria’s transition is benefiting its people or simply changing the source of energy production without addressing the country’s deeper inequalities.

In this exclusive conversation with The Energy Pioneer, Amaefule unpacks findings from the study and reflects on what it will take to ensure Nigeria’s energy transition leaves no one behind. 

Q: Where does the most significant governance gap currently lie in Nigeria’s energy transition?

A: The governance gaps in Nigeria’s energy transition are multiple and interlocking and I would highlight five that our research points to most clearly. The first is institutional fragmentation and regulatory weakness. Nigeria’s energy transition involves multiple agencies including the National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA), the National Oil Spill Detection and Response Agency (NOSDRA), and the Rural Electrification Agency (REA). However, their mandates overlap and are often unclear or poorly coordinated. This fragmentation means regulatory oversight frequently falls through the cracks, with no single body holding comprehensive authority or accountability. Compounding this is a deeper coordination failure between federal, state and local governance levels, and between government and international financiers who often set the terms of project implementation. When everyone is responsible, no one is truly responsible.

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The second gap is the absence of robust monitoring and evaluation frameworks. There are no clearly outlined, publicly accessible mechanisms for measuring the progress and impact of renewable energy projects, whether successful or failed. Without transparent data subject to technical and expert scrutiny, there is no meaningful feedback loop for learning and improvement. This opacity also makes it impossible for communities, civil society and researchers to hold developers and government to account. Accountability without evidence is ultimately performative.

The third gap is around whose voices are integrated and at what stages. Our findings show that community participation is largely confined to the project implementation phase, and even then it is primarily instrumental, designed to secure social licence rather than to genuinely shape decisions. What is needed is a fundamental rethinking of agency: communities should be brought in not merely as recipients of energy projects, but as co-creators and, where possible, as co-owners. The Hapcheon Dam floating solar farm in South Korea is a compelling example of community ownership generating both sustainability and genuine long-term buy-in. Nigeria’s transition needs to move towards models like this, where communities have a real stake in outcomes rather than a consultative footnote in project documentation.

The fourth gap is reparative: how are past harms acknowledged and addressed, and how are present and future burdens on communities anticipated, mitigated and compensated? Our research consistently found reparative justice to be the weakest dimension of Nigeria’s transition. Legacy harms from fossil fuel extraction, particularly in the Niger Delta, remain largely unresolved, and mechanisms for addressing new harms from renewable energy projects are fragmented, inadequately enforced and frequently captured by corruption before they reach the communities they are meant to serve. There is also a deeper structural contradiction worth naming: between 2021 and 2022, Nigeria mobilised approximately USD 2.5 billion for climate action while simultaneously spending over USD 9.3 billion subsidising fossil fuels, a fiscal imbalance that reflects persistent institutional prioritisation of economic mechanisms over social and ecological ones. A just transition cannot be built on unhealed foundations.

The fifth, and perhaps most structurally significant gap, is enforcement and penalties for those in positions of power. Until there are meaningful, consistently applied consequences for public officials who misuse office, abuse regulatory authority or divert funds meant for affected communities, no governance framework, however well designed, will deliver justice in practice. Nigeria does not lack policies; it lacks the institutional will and enforcement architecture to make those policies bite. Credible penalties for misconduct in public office are not peripheral to the energy transition. They are foundational to it. Without accountability at the top, the transition will continue to reproduce the same extractive patterns it is meant to replace.

Q: To what extent are local communities in Nigeria meaningfully involved in decision-making processes, as opposed to participation being largely symbolic?

A: Based on our research, community involvement is overwhelmingly tokenistic rather than substantive. Across the anonymous expert interviews we conducted, a recurring finding was that communities are typically brought into processes at the project implementation phase, primarily to satisfy regulatory requirements, rather than to genuinely shape project direction or policy design. As one expert put it, communities are “brought in at the project phase because, at that level, it is necessary… at the policy level, they are ignored.” Policy design, meanwhile, continues to happen in Abuja, the capital city of Nigeria, far removed from the communities most affected by its consequences.

One project supervisor in our study noted that community engagement was important to ensure communities feel a sense of ownership, to avoid vandalising projects. While this is a pragmatic concern, it exposes something important: consultation in this framing is primarily oriented towards protecting investment and ensuring infrastructure survives, rather than towards genuinely integrating community voices or building shared ownership. Engagement as a vandalism-prevention strategy is fundamentally different from engagement as a justice imperative. The former treats communities as a risk to be managed; the latter treats them as rights-holders with legitimate claims over decisions that shape their lives and landscapes.

When participation is instrumentalised, designed to secure social licence rather than to redistribute decision-making power, it leaves underlying grievances unaddressed. Our findings show this helps explain tangible downstream consequences: citing conflicts, community resistance, project vandalism and, in some cases, outright abandonment of infrastructure after significant public investment. The Katsina wind farm, on which four billion naira was spent before being abandoned, is one such example.

Meaningful participation would look fundamentally different. It would require communities, especially marginalised and vulnerable groups, to be involved upstream from the earliest stages of project conception and siting, with documented inclusion and genuine decision-making power rather than a consultative footnote.

Until participation is reoriented around agency and rights rather than risk management and investment protection, it will remain largely symbolic regardless of how extensively it is documented in policy frameworks.

Q: What would “procedural justice” look like in practice within a Nigerian renewable energy project?

A: Procedural justice in practice would look fundamentally different from what currently exists in Nigeria’s renewable energy landscape. At its core, it would require a wholesale shift in how, when and why communities are brought into energy decision-making, moving from late-stage, instrumental consultation towards early, structured and legally binding participation that carries real consequences when ignored.

Procedural justice would mean communities and vulnerable groups being involved in high-level decision making from the outset, not invited in at the point when a project is already designed and developers need sign-off, but present at the stages where siting decisions, benefit sharing arrangements and project parameters are actually being determined. 

These consultations need to be made statutory. Currently, community engagement exists largely at the discretion of developers and is often driven by investment protection rather than genuine inclusion. Making consultation a legal requirement, with clearly defined standards for what meaningful engagement looks like, would shift it from a goodwill gesture to an enforceable obligation. Crucially, there must also be clearly laid out mechanisms for how community feedback is actually embedded into policy and project design, not collected and shelved, but demonstrably integrated and traceable. Communities should be able to see where their input went and what it changed.

Affected communities must have clear, low-barrier channels through which they can raise concerns, challenge decisions and seek redress, mechanisms that operate transparently and are insulated from political interference. Our findings showed that legal systems are frequently inaccessible to communities, with cases lingering for up to a decade, and that regulatory bodies like NESREA lack genuine enforcement authority. A grievance mechanism that communities cannot realistically use is no mechanism at all.

There must also be clearly defined, consistently enforced consequences for public officials and developers who violate procedural obligations, whether through bypassing consultations, suppressing community feedback, misrepresenting Environmental Impact Assessments or abusing positions of authority. Until misconduct in the management of energy projects carries real professional and legal consequences, procedural justice will remain aspirational language in policy documents rather than a lived reality for communities navigating Nigeria’s energy transition.

Nigeria has the policy language; what it needs is the institutional architecture and political will to make that language operational.

Q: Do current policies sufficiently protect vulnerable communities affected by energy projects in Nigeria?

In short, no. While some policies reference protection for affected communities, including resettlement plans, livelihood restoration provisions and community development agreements, our research shows that these measures are inconsistently enforced, frequently inadequate and sometimes corrupted before they reach the communities they are meant to serve. Compensation is widely described by the anonymous expert commentaries as insufficient, with one noting that communities “have to fight for their compensation… even when compensated, the money is taken away.”

Beyond compensation, the protections that do exist are primarily economic in framing. They give insufficient attention to non-economic harms such as cultural disruption, loss of farmland, displacement-related trauma and gender-based vulnerabilities. Vulnerable groups beyond women, including Indigenous communities, youth and persons with disabilities, are largely absent from policy design and protection frameworks entirely. 

Q: How do you see the future of renewable energy development in Nigeria evolving over the next decade?

A: There is genuine reason for cautious optimism. Nigeria possesses vast renewable energy potential, particularly solar, and there is growing momentum at both policy and project levels. Most experts we interviewed expressed hope for the trajectory of the transition. However, optimism must be tempered by realism, and the future of renewable energy development in Nigeria needs to be understood within a broader and more honest framing.

Nigeria, like many African nations, needs an energy mix more than a full and immediate transition. Calling for rapid decarbonisation of a country that contributed minimally to the historical appropriation of the atmospheric commons is neither fair nor realistic. The burden of transition cannot be distributed as though all nations arrived at this moment equally. Reparative systems and mitigation measures need to be designed not only for renewable energy projects but across fossil, clean and renewable energy systems simultaneously, acknowledging the complexity of Nigeria’s energy reality rather than imposing externally driven transition timelines that do not reflect it.

For renewable energy development specifically to be genuinely transformative over the next decade, Nigeria must move beyond being a site of resource extraction within the global energy value chain. The country has significant mineral and natural resource endowments that are critical to the global energy transition, yet these are currently mined, exported cheaply and re-imported at much higher value after processing and manufacturing elsewhere. This must change. Nigeria needs to develop the skills, intellectual property, manufacturing capacity and technological infrastructure to ensure that its resources contribute meaningfully to its own economic growth. Local value addition is not optional; it is central to whether the energy transition serves Nigerian development or simply serves global markets at Nigeria’s expense.

Equally important is the need for deep, strategic partnerships across African nations. Africa’s energy and resource challenges are interconnected, and Nigeria, given its scale and influence, has a particular responsibility to help build shared continental frameworks. In the context of ongoing global energy, natural resource and governance crises, African nations cannot afford to negotiate individually or in isolation. A collective approach to energy development, technology partnerships, skills transfer and policy advocacy would give Africa, and Nigeria specifically, far greater leverage in shaping the terms of the global transition than any single nation could achieve alone.

The question for the next decade, therefore, is not simply whether Nigeria will expand its renewable energy capacity. It is whether it will do so on its own terms, justly, with communities as genuine stakeholders rather than passive recipients, with local industries and skills as the backbone of the transition, and with Africa as a unified voice in global energy conversations. That remains an open but urgent question.