YEDC’s Six-Week Power Blackout Plan Is a Body Blow to North-East Businesses Already on Their Knees

Fatima Usman had just finished counting her week’s earnings when the lights went out. Again. The fabric trader in Yola’s Karewa market did not even flinch. She reached for her phone’s torch, the way she reaches for it every other evening, and kept counting. But this time, the darkness is not arriving without notice. It has a schedule.

The Yola Electricity Distribution Company has announced that customers across Adamawa, Taraba, and Yobe states should prepare for significant, repeated power interruptions from April 9 to May 22, 2026, a six-week stretch during which electricity will be cut for up to nine hours on at least four days every week. The reason, according to YEDC, is maintenance work on a critical transmission line. The consequence, for millions of people who were already living at the edge of what the national grid could offer, is something closer to an extended crisis.

What YEDC Said and What It Means on the Ground

In a statement released on Wednesday, YEDC announced that the outage would affect the Jos-Bauchi-Gombe 330kV transmission line between April 9 and May 22, 2026. Contractors from the Transmission Company of Nigeria will carry out maintenance work across the 276-kilometre stretch of the power line, aimed at improving the reliability of electricity supply in the region.

Residents of Adamawa, Taraba, and Yobe states will experience intermittent daytime outages for at least four days weekly. The disruptions will occur between 9:00am and 6:00pm throughout the maintenance period.

Run the arithmetic. The schedule consists of four days a week, nine hours each day, over a period of six weeks. That is a minimum of 216 hours of scheduled blackout during peak business and school hours, falling on communities that were already receiving some of the most unreliable electricity supply in the entire country.

According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the North East lags the rest of the country significantly, with only 29.5 percent of households having access to electricity, the lowest of any geopolitical zone in Nigeria. The national average stands at 53.6 percent. Even within that grim statistic, the average Nigerian household already experiences 6.7 blackouts per week, each lasting approximately 12 hours, amounting to roughly 67.2 hours of darkness every seven days.

What YEDC is announcing is not an interruption of good service. It is an interruption of already broken service in a region that can least afford it.

Beyond the logistical challenges of the power cuts, YEDC has expressed serious concern regarding the security of electrical infrastructure during these periods, encouraging all customers to remain vigilant and work together to safeguard community transformers and other critical assets against the threat of vandalism while the lines are inactive.

That last point deserves attention. The company is, in effect, asking residents to guard equipment that the state has failed to protect during an outage the residents did not choose, in a security environment that is already stretched thin across the North East.

The People Who Will Pay the Real Price

Across Yola, Jalingo, and Damaturu, the announcement has landed differently depending on what you do for a living.

For traders like Fatima, the ice block supplier will stop coming, the refrigerated drinks will go warm, and customers will drift to better-lit competitors on the next street. For hospital staff, the question is how long the generator fuel will last and who pays when it runs out. For students preparing for examinations, it is nine hours every school day without a fan, without a reading lamp, and without the ability to charge the phone that connects them to learning materials.

A small business owner in Jimeta who processes raw groundnuts for sale and asked not to be named told The Gazette News plainly: Electricity powers my machine. When there is no light from 9am to 6pm, that is my entire working day gone. They say it is for maintenance. Maintenance of what? The light was not even working properly before.”

This is not a new story. Earlier in January 2026, residents of Jalingo, the Taraba State capital, expressed fear and anxiety when TCN announced a separate planned outage, coming barely a month after the state had been plunged into darkness for several days ahead of the yuletide, disrupting economic and social activities. That January outage was subsequently extended beyond its original end date because stringing and remedial works on the transmission line could not be completed as planned, leaving residents and businesses in limbo with no confirmed restoration date.

The pattern is important. Planned outages in Nigeria’s North East have a track record of lasting longer than announced, of being extended without adequate notice, and of arriving on top of unplanned outages that were never resolved in the first place.

The Accountability Question

YEDC’s notice frames the disruption as a necessary investment in the region’s future electricity reliability. That framing is not dishonest; transmission infrastructure genuinely does need maintenance, and the 276-kilometre Jos-Bauchi-Gombe line is a vital power artery for the region. In 2025 alone, Nigeria recorded four major grid disturbances, with one in December seeing power generation drop sharply from 2,052.37 megawatts to just 139.92 megawatts within a single hour. Deferred maintenance on ageing infrastructure is a real and documented problem.

But the questions that accountability demands are not about whether the maintenance is necessary. They are about why the same people always pay the cost.

Why are there no government-backed mitigation measures, such as subsidised generator fuel or extended banking hours, announced alongside the outage schedule? Why has the North East, after decades of receiving the worst electricity access figures in the country, still not attracted a single dedicated intervention to reduce its dependence on a single vulnerable transmission corridor? And why does YEDC’s notice, courteous as it is, carry no commitment on what happens if the maintenance, as it did in January, runs beyond May 22?

YEDC did not respond to questions from The Gazette News about contingency plans or compensation mechanisms for businesses that will lose revenue during the six-week disruption period. The TCN press office also did not respond to a request for comment on the timeline guarantees for the maintenance work.

What Comes After the Maintenance

YEDC has appealed for patience, emphasising that the maintenance is necessary to ensure an improved and more stable electricity supply in the long term. That is a reasonable ask. But patience is a resource that can be depleted.

The woman who runs the cold room in Mubi, the ICT centre in Ngurore, and the welding workshop in Song have all been patient through grid collapses, extended outages, and announcements that overpromised and underdelivered. An energy specialist, Adetoyi Adedeji, has noted that achieving Nigeria’s electricity targets would require stronger coordination between the government and the private sector, warning that fragmented approaches across the power sector could undermine progress.

‘Fragmented’ is exactly the right word. Six weeks of planned outages, on top of existing chronic supply failures, on top of an announced vandalism risk, with no accompanying government support package, is not a coordinated plan. It is a maintenance window dressed as one.

The lights will eventually come back on. They always do. But in the North East, where only 29.5 percent of households have electricity access to begin with, the people who lose the most during these six weeks are those who had the least to begin with.

Fatima will keep counting her earnings by torchlight. What she deserves is a government that counts the cost of that too.