Nigeria electricity regulation passes to 16 subnational commissions two years into the Act
Ikeja Electric and Eko Disco were directed to incorporate Lagos subsidiaries when oversight transferred in 2025, a structure now repeating across the country. NERC chairman Musiliu Oseni confirmed this month that 16 states regulate their own markets, licensing suppliers and setting tariffs inside their borders.
When the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission transferred oversight of the Lagos market, it directed Ikeja Electric and Eko Disco to incorporate subsidiaries to run intrastate supply and distribution, each licensed by the new Lagos State Electricity Regulatory Commission within 60 days. The transition completed on 4 June 2025. The order has since become the template.
Speaking at a seminar for Lagos High Court judges on 7 July, NERC chairman Musiliu Oseni confirmed the commission has now transferred electricity market regulation to 16 states. The commission’s own published sequence runs from Enugu, Ekiti and Ondo in October 2024 through Imo, Oyo, Edo, Kogi, Lagos, Ogun, Niger, Plateau and Abia, to Anambra, Nasarawa and Bayelsa in the first weeks of this year.
The legal machinery behind the handover is the Electricity Act of 2023, which followed a constitutional amendment removing electricity from the exclusive federal list. A state that passes its own electricity law, establishes a regulator and formally notifies NERC receives an order transferring oversight of everything generated, distributed and consumed inside its borders. NERC keeps authority over interstate operations and the national grid.
What a state does with the power varies. The new commissions license providers, set tariffs and handle consumer complaints, which for residents of the 16 means disputed bills and metering failures now go to a state regulator rather than to Abuja. Bayelsa’s order, completed in February, required the Port Harcourt distribution company to carve out a subsidiary for the state on the Lagos pattern.
For an investor the change is structural rather than cosmetic. A generation or distribution licence for a project serving one state now comes from that state’s commission, under that state’s law, at that state’s tariff. The market that was regulated from one office has become 16 jurisdictions with 20 more still to transition, each moving at the speed of its own legislature.
Oseni told the Lagos judges the transfers usher in what he called “a new era of multi-level regulation”, and the seminar itself points at where the friction will surface next, since the disputes arising between state and federal oversight will be settled in court.
