One line was buried near the end of a survey response, almost like an afterthought. A fintech developer had already listed the usual suspects behind Nigeria’s failed transactions, including o
One line was buried near the end of a survey response, almost like an afterthought. A fintech developer had already listed the usual suspects behind Nigeria’s failed transactions, including old banking systems, overloaded switches, weak telecom networks, weak enforcement, when he introduced the conversation on Nigeria’s power crisis.
“Power infrastructure remains an overlooked issue. Every diesel generator that fails, every power cut affecting a data centre or telecom site, increases the risk of payment disruptions. Reliable electricity is payment infrastructure.”
He was the only one of 40 people in the survey to talk about Nigeria’s power crisis. Not because the other 39 disagree, but because none of them was offered the option in the first place. When the same survey asked what needed to change to get Nigeria to zero failed transactions, the checklist ran to upgrading NIBSS, mandatory API standards, cloud-native banking, better telecom infrastructure, smarter fraud detection. Reliable electricity wasn’t on the list. The one developer who raised it had to write it in by hand.
Power crisis is a failure Nigeria stopped counting decades agoThat omission has a history, and it’s older than any of the infrastructure people pointed out. Nigeria’s power crisis has been visible since before most fintech developers working today were born, cycling through the National Electric Power Authority, an agency Nigerians nicknamed Never Expect Power Always, long before it was privatised into today’s Discos and Gencos in 2013.
The diesel generator stopped being a backup sometime in the 1980s and 1990s and became a fixture instead; standard equipment in homes, shops, banks and now data centres, budgeted for the way rent or fuel for a car is budgeted for. A problem that old and that constant stops registering as a discrete infrastructure category and starts reading as background weather, a fact of doing business in Nigeria rather than a line item anyone lists when asked what’s broken. That is precisely why, offered a checklist of fixes, not one of 40 payment professionals reached for electricity. It had already been filed away, decades ago, as something you route around rather than something you fix.
Everything else on the list is comparatively young, which is exactly why people can still imagine solving it. NIBSS itself only launched its instant transfer rail in 2011, years before Nigeria’s cashless policy and the fintech boom that followed pushed transaction volumes past anything that architecture was built for. Nigeria’s telecom networks, the base stations that carry the USSD codes and OTPs behind every transfer, have failed publicly and often enough in the past decade that outages are still treated as news rather than weather.
Bank downtime is newer still, tied to a wave of digital channels most Nigerian banks only built out seriously in the last 10 to 15 years. Each of those failures is recent enough and specific enough to feel solvable with money, policy or better code, which is a large part of why the survey’s blame clustered there instead.
Where the debate happens16 of the 40 respondents, the largest group by far, named NIBSS and switching overload as the single biggest cause of failed transactions, with bank downtime and telecom outages close behind.
“There is something called FASTER PAYMENTS in the western world,” one fintech developer wrote, comparing Nigeria’s rails to markets with stable infrastructure and telco networks. “I believe Nigeria is still lacking this. For example, if you try to initiate payment in a Nigerian bank, it could take you hours to get OTP.”
Notice what’s absent even from that comparison. He reached for telco stability, not power, because in his own frame of reference the generator problem is too old and too settled to count as part of the infrastructure conversation, even while he’s implicitly describing its downstream effects.
The people who watch the system from outside rather than build it reached for a newer villain too. 8 respondents, including 6 journalists, named network and telecom downtime as the main cause, describing “shaky telecom connectivity killing transactions mid-flight” and warning that fixing it “doesn’t happen without sustained investment, not just a press release.”
That framing treats the fix as a matter of will and money, the same way people talk about NIBSS or bank infrastructure, because unlike the power grid, telecom failure in Nigeria still gets covered as a scandal rather than absorbed as a condition. Power, by contrast, has been a condition for so long that it has slipped out of the vocabulary people reach for when they’re asked what’s broken, even when it’s sitting underneath every other answer on the list.
A diesel generator failing at a bank’s data centre and a diesel generator failing at a telecom base station produce the exact same downstream symptom: a failed transaction. But only one of those gets named, because only that one still feels like news.
The Central Bank’s target of zero failed transactions by 2028 is aimed, almost entirely, at the layer people can still see: upgraded switches, API standards, cloud-native banking. None of that reaches the generator humming in the back room of a bank branch or a telecom tower, because nobody wrote it into the target in the first place, the same way nobody wrote it into the survey’s checklist. Reliable electricity is payment infrastructure, one developer said, unprompted, in the only line in 40 responses that named it. Everyone else had already stopped seeing it.
