By Prince Charles Dickson (PhD), and Dorcas Bawa

Nigeria’s democratic question is often wrongly framed as if democracy is a foreign garment that we must keep adjusting until it fits our body. We speak of Westminster, Washington, Athens, Paris and every borrowed vocabulary of governance, yet the wound before us is neither Greek nor British nor American. It is Nigerian. Our hunger is Nigerian. Our insecurity is Nigerian. Our broken families are Nigerian. Our abandoned children are Nigerian. Our vote-buying, ethno-religious suspicion, weak local institutions, elite impunity and democratic impatience are Nigerian. Therefore, any democracy that will heal us must be made in Nigeria.

This is not a call for isolation. It is a call for ownership. Democracy cannot survive as imported furniture placed in a burning house. It must grow from our values, culture, history and realities. It must be owned by the people, shaped by our communities, and driven by our collective aspirations for justice, equity and peace. It must answer the question of the farmer in Bassa, the displaced woman in Barkin Ladi, the market woman in Jos, the young person in Mangu, the traditional ruler trying to hold a fractured community together, the child who no longer trusts the home, and the citizen who has voted many times but has not yet felt government as care.

Since 1999, Nigeria has travelled a long and uneven democratic road. The return to civil rule after years of military dictatorship was not a small achievement. It restored constitutional government, reopened civic space, revived political parties, strengthened the press, expanded civil society engagement, and gave citizens the language with which to question power. We have had repeated elections, transitions between administrations, legislative contests, judicial interventions, public protests, investigative journalism and a growing generation of young Nigerians who no longer kneel before authority simply because it wears a title.

These are gains. They must not be dismissed.

But democracy is not merely the presence of elections. It is the presence of dignity. It is not only the counting of votes. It is the counting of lives. It is not complete because politicians campaign, courts sit, governors are sworn in, and budgets are read. Democracy becomes real when the weakest person in the community can say: “This country sees me. This system protects me. This government serves me.”

That is where our democratic journey remains painfully unfinished.

From 1999 to date, Nigeria has built the rituals of democracy faster than the culture of democracy. We have mastered rallies, slogans, posters, primaries, manifestoes, defections and inauguration ceremonies, but we have not sufficiently mastered accountability, inclusion, local ownership, civic discipline and justice. Too much power remains concentrated at the centre. Too many local governments exist more as salary points than as engines of grassroots development. Too many communities are remembered only during elections, condolences or conflict assessment visits. Too many citizens are mobilised as voters but abandoned as human beings.

Democracy made in Nigeria must therefore begin with the people at the centre. Government exists to serve the people, not the other way around. A system that treats citizens as spectators between election cycles is not a democracy. It is a political theatre with ballot boxes. A homegrown democracy insists that the woman, the youth, the person with disability, the displaced, the farmer, the trader, the child, the minority voice and the forgotten community are not footnotes in the national story. They are the story.

To be homegrown, democracy must also be rooted in culture, but not in the abusive misuse of culture. It must respect our languages, traditions, communal memory and ways of life, while refusing every cultural excuse for injustice. Culture should be a bridge, not a cage. It should protect the vulnerable, not silence them. It should teach respect for elders, but also responsibility by elders. It should honour family, but never hide violence inside family walls. It should value community, but never allow community loyalty to bury truth.

The crisis of Nigerian democracy is not only in Abuja. It is also in the home. It is in the family meeting where girls are denied inheritance. It is in the compound where abuse is covered because the offender is related. It is in marriage where responsibility is abandoned. It is in the neighbourhood where everyone knows a child is suffering but waits for the “government” to arrive. It is in the community where young people are recruited into dangerous labour because poverty has become an employer. It is in the silence that violence teaches how to grow teeth.

A recent week in the Plateau State Gender and Equal Opportunities Commission, particularly the Public Complaints and Mediation Department, tells a disturbing story. In one case, a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl became pregnant after alleged abuse within her own home. In another case, an eight-year-old girl from Tudun Wada was brought before the Commission after an alleged sexual assault by a neighbour. Her story was already layered with tragedy: displacement, loss of parents to violence, and dependence on an aged grandmother. Another ten-year-old child had to be reunited with her family in Enugu Agidi after two years of maltreatment while living with a distant relative in Jos. She required psychosocial support before returning home.

In the same week, an illegal commercial motor park around Anguldi in Jos South Local Government Area was reported. The Police were swiftly deployed, and arrests were made. Twelve young people, including three young women, were brought to the Commission. Early interrogation suggested a troubling pattern: the park operated weekly, moving young teenagers from Jos to Ibadan.

These are not isolated moral accidents. They are democratic alarms. But the entire team somehow collectively succeed because they understand the terrain.

Conflict does not end when gunfire stops. It enters homes. It alters parenting. It displaces children. It weakens supervision. It breaks livelihoods. It creates fear, dependency, resentment and desperation. A society that does not heal its conflict will eventually watch that conflict migrate into marriage, childhood, education, labour, politics and faith. The family becomes the first casualty, and later, the polling unit becomes only a mirror of the wounded home.

This is why democracy cannot be discussed only in constitutional language. It must be discussed in human language. When family values erode, democracy suffers. When parental responsibility collapses, democracy suffers. When the culture of respect for human dignity becomes almost non-existent, democracy suffers. When children are unsafe, women are overburdened, fathers disappear from responsibility, mothers are left unsupported, and communities outsource morality to government agencies, democracy becomes a tree without roots.

The problems holding us back are therefore clear. We continue to operate systems that often ignore local realities. We suffer from the concentration of power and the lack of accountability. Our local institutions are weak. Our democratic culture is poor. Tribalism, ethnicity and religious intolerance are too easily weaponised. Many citizens are apathetic because they have been disappointed too often. Others are active only when their group interest is touched. But a person who participates decides their destiny. A person who watches politics from the balcony should not be shocked when decisions are taken in rooms where they are absent.

Homegrown democracy must be community-driven. Decisions must be shaped at the local level through dialogue, consensus and trust. Nigeria cannot continue to pretend that Abuja can understand every stream, shrine, church, mosque, market, grazing route, school, boundary dispute and family wound better than the people who live with them daily. Local problems require local intelligence. But local intelligence must be connected to justice, not captured by local power brokers.

This is why traditional rulers, community heads, women leaders, youth groups, faith leaders, civil society organisations, government agencies, schools, security institutions and families must become democratic actors, not passive observers. Democracy is not INEC alone. It is not the National Assembly alone. It is not the courts alone. Democracy is the mother who protects her child, the father who carries responsibility with honour, the neighbour who reports abuse, the teacher who notices distress, the police officer who acts promptly, the mediator who listens carefully, the traditional ruler who refuses to hide wrongdoing, the pastor and imam who preach dignity, and the citizen who refuses to sell tomorrow for a small envelope today.

Finally, we must rebuild the moral architecture of the family. Mothers, fathers, guardians, relatives and neighbours must rise to nip these issues in the bud. The home is not outside democracy. The home is where citizenship first learns either care or cruelty. If the child learns silence in the face of abuse, she may become an adult who fears power. If the child learns dignity, he may become a citizen who demands justice.

Our country. Our democracy. Our future—May Nigeria win.

By Winston Osuchukwu

Digital transformation has modernised the front end of the credit process in Nigeria, streamlining customer journeys and shortening the path from application to disbursement. However, this progress has not reached the core of the credit process. While digital application flows are now standard, the underlying risk infrastructure remains underdeveloped. Following the withdrawal of the Central Bank of Nigeria’s forbearance measures, the sector’s non-performing loan (NPL) ratio climbed to 8.03% – well above the 5% regulatory limit.

The deeper, structural flaw is that banks still run on legacy risk models and backwards-looking data: an approach that leaves existing portfolios exposed while shutting out the vast retail market. To scale retail and SME credit safely, forward-looking institutions must close three critical gaps in their core credit infrastructure.

1. The Bureau and Data Blind Spot

Many institutions rely on a fragmented view of borrower risk. Internal transaction data offers a deep but narrow view of a borrower’s behaviour within one institution, while periodic credit bureau reports provide a broad but shallow, “negative-only” history across other lenders. Because credit bureau coverage in Nigeria remains relatively low and data sharing is often inconsistent, neither source effectively captures how a borrower actually earns, spends, and repays. Resolving this requires unifying the data architecture, integrating internal behavioural signals with diverse external streams such as payroll, utility, and alternative financial data, to build a continuous, real-time picture of cash flow and true repayment capacity.

2. Static Risk Acceptance Criteria

To assess a borrower’s credit eligibility, banks apply internal risk acceptance criteria that are often static. In a volatile macroeconomic environment marked by shifting interest rates and inflation, a borrower’s financial reality changes rapidly, rendering these rigid, point-in-time benchmarks obsolete. Furthermore, out of caution, these inflexible thresholds often default to conservative rejections for unfamiliar applicants, such as new salaried employees or thin-file borrowers – those with little or no formal credit history for a bureau or bank to draw on – leaving profitable loans on the table. Transitioning to a predictive model changes risk management into a continuous, data-driven cycle. By ingesting high-frequency behavioural data, risk systems can dynamically govern their acceptance criteria in real-time, allowing them to adjust parameters, optimise pricing, and deploy interventions well before a default occurs.

3. The Collections Disconnect

In many institutions, collections teams operate in silos downstream of the credit department, meaning critical recovery performance data rarely gets fed back to front-end risk models. Consequently, underwriting systems fail to learn from actual repayment behaviours – repeating the same structural pricing mistakes. Integrating these functions via a direct data pipeline creates a self-learning loop, routing recovery outcomes back into the origination engine. This empowers the risk engine to dynamically update models, continuously refining underwriting criteria based on real-world results to prevent future defaults and capture lost basis points.

The Bottom Line

Closing these gaps requires intentionality: moving away from ‘set-and-forget’ tools to systems that actively manage risk. It means moving beyond fragmented data toward an integrated intelligence layer that learns from borrower behaviour to govern automated decisions with precision. The lenders that lead over the next year will be those that treat credit not as an isolated transaction, but as a continuous, dynamic process. At Mathesis, we have spent years building the engine that makes this possible, powering over eight million loans for two million Nigerians. The future of credit belongs to those who adopt this predictive approach – and we have the proven tools and expertise to help you get there.

Winston Osuchukwu is the Founder and Chief Executive of Mathesis, a Nigerian credit intelligence company

EBC Financial Group (EBC) notes that Nigeria’s electricity reform is entering a phase where higher tariffs, customer credits and new rules on renewable self-generation will be judged by whether businesses actually receive reliable power and can reduce diesel backup costs. Under the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) Service-Based Tariff (SBT) system, a tariff model that links electricity prices to expected supply levels, Band A customers pay premium electricity tariffs in exchange for an expected minimum supply of 20 hours per day. NERC’s latest compensation order sends a clear signal: if customers are paying a premium rate, they should receive the supply level they are paying for, and if they do not, they should be credited.

Why Power Reliability is Now a Business-Cost Story

Nigeria’s power supply gap remains a direct cost for businesses. NERC’s April 2026 Operational Performance Factsheet showed that grid-connected power plants had a Plant Availability Factor (PAF) of 31 per cent, with an average of 4,286 megawatts (MW) available for dispatch out of 13,625MW of installed capacity. When available grid power falls short of business needs, companies often have to keep backup generators running, adding fuel, maintenance and planning costs to production.

The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Business Expectations Survey for March 2026 identified insufficient power supply with an index reading of 74.5 as a leading business constraint, ahead of insecurity, high or multiple taxes, high interest rates and financial problems. The index ranks the severity of reported business constraints, with higher readings indicating a more pressing concern for firms.

Band A Compensation Tests Tariff Credibility

NERC’s compensation directive does more than reimburse customers for missed supply hours. It sets a precedent that premium tariff bands carry enforceable service obligations. NERC issued Directive No. NERC/2026/002 on the Special Compensation of Band A Customers Arising from Grid Generation Constraints, covering eligible Band A customers affected by power shortfalls between February and March 2026.

Under the framework, smaller electricity users, classified as Non-Maximum Demand (Non-MD) customers, are to receive a credit equal to 20 per cent of the approved February 2026 energy cap for the affected feeder, meaning the electricity line serving those customers. Larger commercial and industrial users, classified as Maximum Demand (MD) customers, are to receive 20 per cent of the average energy billed per MD customer in February 2026. Prepaid customers are to receive token credits, while postpaid customers are to receive bill adjustments, with February compensation due by 31 May 2026 and March compensation due by 30 June 2026. NERC also directed Distribution Companies (DisCos), the companies that deliver electricity to end-users, not to offset compensation credits against existing customer debts.

The cost of unreliable power does not stay inside the electricity bill. When a factory, supermarket, estate, logistics operator or cold-storage facility pays a premium tariff but still runs diesel backup, those costs move into production, inventory protection, food storage, transport pricing and consumer prices. Customer credits help, but the wider sector still has to manage generation limits, revenue collection and payments across the supply chain.

David Precious, Senior Market Analyst at EBC Financial Group, said, “Nigeria’s power reform is moving into an accountability phase. Higher tariffs can only build confidence if customers and businesses receive the level of supply they are paying for. NERC’s Band A compensation order and the rollout of net billing point to the same market test: electricity reform must now be measured by delivery, transparent credit mechanisms and whether businesses can reduce diesel backup costs.”

Net Billing Turns Self-Generation into a Business-Cost Question

Beyond customer credits, NERC’s Net Billing Regulations 2026, published on 3 June 2026, open a separate question for businesses already spending heavily on diesel and backup power: whether renewable self-generation can become a more reliable and cost-effective alternative. The regulation creates a framework for eligible customers to generate renewable electricity, use what they need and export any surplus power to distribution networks.

Many Nigerian businesses already invest in generators, diesel storage, solar systems or hybrid power because grid supply is not reliable enough for production, refrigeration, logistics, retail operations and business continuity. Net billing could make that investment more efficient by allowing eligible users to recover some value from excess renewable power rather than leaving it unused.

The framework is not designed as an instant solution for every household. Qualifying solar or renewable systems must have installed capacity between 50 kilowatt peak (kWp) and 1.5 megawatt peak (MWp), making it more immediately relevant to commercial users, estates, shopping centres, manufacturers, institutions and larger facilities with enough electricity demand and capital to invest. Participants will also need approval from their local distribution company, a technical feasibility review, a Net Billing Agreement and NERC registration. Qualifying systems will require meters that record both electricity consumed and electricity exported.

Whether net billing delivers real savings will come down to implementation. Exported electricity will be credited at an export tariff approved by NERC, which will not necessarily match the price businesses pay for retail electricity purchases. The specific rate and how payments will be settled are still to be confirmed by NERC and DisCos. That export tariff, together with metering, approval timelines and settlement reliability, will determine whether net billing reduces actual costs or remains a regulation that has not yet translated into commercial value.

New Minister Adds an Implementation Test

The appointment of a new Minister of Power adds a wider delivery test to both reforms. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu swore in Joseph Olasunkanmi Tegbe as Minister of Power on 8 June 2026, after the Senate cleared his appointment on 6 May 2026, according to the State House. For businesses and investors, the question is not only whether Nigeria has new rules, but whether the sector can implement them consistently. That means Band A credits must be applied on time, net billing approvals must be workable in practice, export tariffs must be transparent and distribution companies must collect enough revenue to keep paying generators and transmission companies.

What Nigeria’s Electricity Market Will Watch Next

The next phase of Nigeria’s electricity reform may be judged by whether existing rules work in practice, not by new announcements. By 30 June 2026, the March Band A compensation deadline will show whether premium-tariff customers receive visible credits when supply falls short. Net billing faces the same practical test: whether approvals, meters, export tariffs and settlement processes can turn renewable self-generation into a real cost-saving option for eligible businesses. At the same time, both reforms raise the operating bar for DisCos. They must credit customers when service falls short, collect revenue efficiently and keep payments moving to generators and transmission companies. Higher electricity prices may improve sector revenue, but they will not be enough if businesses still have to pay twice: once for premium grid supply and again for diesel backup.