Let it not turn out to be what I am thinking: that former Ekiti State governor and newly appointed Chairman of the Board of the Rural Electrification Agency (REA), Ayo Fayose, has already found an alibi for explaining away the possible failure of the agency under his watch.
Because if the remarks attributed to him at the inauguration of the new REA board are anything to go by, the former governor may have discovered a rather unusual connection between Nigeria’s electricity crisis and its population explosion.
According to reports, Fayose told the gathering that poor electricity supply was partly responsible for Nigeria’s rapid population growth. His reasoning was simple: in communities where darkness descends around 7pm, people have little to do at night except go home and spend more time with their spouses.
- FAYOSE
“After 7 o’clock, it gets dark there. Everybody is engaging their wives. And the population simply becomes double,” he was quoted as saying. His prescription was equally colourful: provide electricity, create nightlife and recreation, and perhaps Nigerians would spend less time in their bedrooms.
One can laugh at the imagery. But the more one reflects on it, the more troubling the argument becomes.
The problem is not that Fayose joked. Nigerian politicians are allowed their moments of humour. The problem is that he was speaking in his capacity as chairman of an agency whose mandate is far too important to be reduced to keeping rural husbands away from their wives after sunset.
The REA was established under Section 127 of the Electricity Act 2023 as the Federal Government’s implementing agency for electrifying unserved and underserved communities. Its official mandate goes considerably beyond illumination. It is expected to use electricity to catalyse economic growth, improve quality of life, promote renewable energy, support productive activities and expand economic opportunities in rural communities.
That is the real conversation Nigeria should be having.
Not whether darkness gives husbands more time with their wives, but why, after decades of electricity policies, projects and promises, millions of Nigerians still live without dependable electricity.
And the numbers are sobering.
The World Bank’s latest available data put Nigeria’s electricity access at only 61.2 per cent in 2023. That means that roughly four out of every ten Nigerians were still without access to electricity by that measure. The rural situation is considerably worse: rural electricity access was about 32.9 per cent in 2023.
That is the problem Fayose has been appointed to help solve.
There is therefore a danger in looking at the REA primarily through the prism of nightlife and bedroom activities. Electricity is not merely about keeping people awake after dark. It is about keeping businesses alive, children studying, clinics functioning, farms productive and rural economies connected to the modern world.
A village with reliable electricity can have a cold-storage facility for farm produce. A welder can work beyond sunset. A barber can keep his shop open. A woman can operate a small food-processing machine. A health centre can preserve vaccines. Students can read without the fumes of kerosene lamps. A communications tower can remain operational. A small enterprise can extend its working hours.
That is what rural electrification means.
Indeed, the REA itself says its mission is to provide reliable power to rural dwellers in ways that improve economic opportunities and quality of life. Its statutory functions include encouraging economic growth in rural communities through electrification projects and promoting productive use of renewable energy.
So, if Fayose wants to leave a mark at the agency, he should perhaps worry less about what rural Nigerians do after 7pm and more about what they could be doing if they had dependable power.
But does electricity really cause population explosion?
This is where Fayose’s argument becomes particularly difficult to sustain.
If darkness were a significant driver of population growth, then countries with near-universal electricity access should logically be experiencing extraordinary population explosions.
The evidence says otherwise.
India, the world’s most populous country, had about 1.45 billion people in 2024, yet electricity access was already 99.5 per cent. China, with about 1.41 billion people, had achieved 100 per cent electricity access. The United States also had 100 per cent access. Indonesia stood at 99.4 per cent and Pakistan at 95.6 per cent, while Nigeria’s access rate was only 61.2 per cent.
Yet population growth in these countries does not follow Fayose’s proposed relationship.
India’s population growth rate was about 0.9 per cent in 2024, China’s was negative 0.1 per cent, Indonesia’s was 0.8 per cent, Pakistan’s 1.5 per cent and Nigeria’s 2.1 per cent.
If electricity were the decisive contraceptive, China should be the world’s least populous country rather than the second most populous. India, with virtually universal electricity access, should not have 1.45 billion people.
And perhaps the most devastating evidence against the argument is found in China itself. A country can have electricity in virtually every household and still experience a demographic slowdown so severe that its population actually begins to decline.
The relationship between electricity and population is therefore much more complicated than Fayose’s bedroom arithmetic suggests.
Nigeria’s demographic problem has deeper roots
Nigeria’s population growth is driven by a combination of factors including high fertility, a very young population, early marriage in some communities, limited access to reproductive health services, educational inequalities, poverty and regional disparities.
The United Nations Population Fund has previously estimated Nigeria’s fertility rate at 5.3 births per woman, with the rate higher among rural households at 5.9 and among the poorest and least educated households at 6.7. The World Bank’s 2023 figure puts Nigeria’s overall fertility rate at about 4.5 births per woman.
Those figures point in an entirely different direction from the darkness hypothesis.
The question is not whether electricity affects people’s social lives. Of course it does.
The question is whether the absence of electricity is a principal explanation for Nigeria’s fertility rate.
There is simply no compelling evidence for that proposition.
If anything, some of the most important demographic determinants are what policymakers have known for years: girls’ education, women’s economic opportunities, access to healthcare, reproductive health information, family planning, household income, child survival and the age at which women marry and begin having children.
In other words, Nigeria’s population challenge cannot be solved by keeping the lights on and hoping husbands suddenly discover television, football viewing centres and nightlife.
Darkness is actually costing us much more
There is, however, one part of Fayose’s argument with which I readily agree: electricity can transform what happens after sunset.
But the transformation should be economic and social, not merely recreational.
Consider a rural community without electricity. At dusk, economic activity begins to shut down. Shops close early. Small businesses stop operating. Students struggle to study. Medical facilities face serious limitations. Farmers cannot process or preserve their produce efficiently. Communication and digital services become more difficult.
Now imagine the same community with dependable electricity.
The difference is not simply that people can see each other after dark.
The entire economic rhythm of the community changes.
That is why the World Bank-backed Nigeria Distributed Access through Renewable Energy Scale-up programme is designed to expand electricity access to more than 17.5 million Nigerians through distributed renewable energy solutions. The programme was approved with a $750 million World Bank financing package expected to leverage more than $1 billion in private capital.
That is the scale of the problem.
And that is also the scale of the opportunity.
A functioning rural electrification programme can help move Nigeria from an economy where people merely survive to one where rural communities produce, process, trade and create wealth.
There are already examples of what decentralised electricity can do. Studies of solar mini-grids in rural African communities, including Nigeria, have reported improvements in productivity, economic activity, health, safety and household welfare following electrification.
That is the kind of evidence the REA should be building its policies around.
Fayose should be worried about the electricity gap, not the bedroom gap
There is another reason the former governor’s statement deserves scrutiny.
Nigeria does not merely suffer from low electricity access. It suffers from an enormous urban-rural electricity divide.
The World Bank data show the national access rate at 61.2 per cent, while rural access was only about 32.9 per cent in 2023.
That is an indictment of development policy.
The child in a rural Nigerian community should not have to compete educationally with a child in Abuja or Lagos while studying under a rechargeable lamp.
The rural entrepreneur should not have to run a generator before producing a block of ice.
The rural health worker should not have to worry about whether the refrigerator storing essential medicines will remain powered.
And the farmer should not have to watch his produce rot because there is no electricity for preservation and processing.
These are the battles awaiting the new REA board.
Not the battle to prevent rural husbands from “engaging their wives”.
When did darkness become a population policy?
Perhaps Fayose’s comment was intended simply to provoke laughter.
If so, it succeeded.
But it has also inadvertently opened a much more important conversation.
When did darkness become a population policy?
When did the Nigerian rural household begin using marital intimacy as its principal form of entertainment?
And when did the absence of electricity become a more convincing explanation for population growth than poverty, education, healthcare, reproductive choices and the demographic structure of the country?
Nigeria has been producing children through periods of darkness and periods of relative illumination. It has produced large families when electricity was a luxury, and it continues to do so in communities where generators, solar systems and mini-grids have increasingly brought artificial light into homes.
The population question is therefore much bigger than whether the lights are on at 7pm.
Indeed, Nigeria’s demographic trajectory is not necessarily a curse. A young and growing population can become a tremendous economic asset if properly educated, healthy, skilled and productively employed.
But without those investments, a demographic dividend can easily become a demographic burden.
That is where electricity becomes critical.
Reliable power can help create jobs. It can make businesses competitive. It can support digital learning. It can improve healthcare delivery. It can stimulate rural industries. It can reduce dependence on expensive diesel and petrol generators. It can help keep young people economically engaged rather than idle.
And, perhaps ironically, that may eventually give them much better things to do at night than what Fayose imagines.
So, Mr Chairman, by all means, let there be light.
But let the light be for the farmer, the student, the entrepreneur, the doctor, the artisan and the rural community.
Let it power factories rather than merely illuminate bedrooms.
Let it drive production rather than merely provide recreation.
Let it reduce poverty rather than simply postpone bedtime.
And when your tenure at the REA is eventually assessed, Nigerians should not be asking whether you succeeded in keeping rural husbands out of their bedrooms after 7pm.
They should be asking a much more consequential question:
Did Ayo Fayose help bring light—and with it, economic opportunity, dignity and development—to the millions of Nigerians who have lived in darkness for far too long?
