In Nigeria, an estimated 170 million people depend on less than 4,000 megawatts of electricity from the grid for economic and social needs. Since 2000 the country has embarked on an ambitious power sector reform programme, the main objective of which is to ensure adequate, available, and reliable electricity. The power sector reform adopts a neo-liberal development model that is based on the triple strategy of liberalization, commercialization, and privatization. This strategy has relied heavily on the reform of the existing legal regime of state institutions so as to attract foreign private capital to increase capacity, expand connection, and improve reliability. This chapter reviews the incompletely theorized neo-liberal assumptions in the reform policies and shows how these assumptions have undermined the efficacy of legal reform in the electricity industry and resulted in failed expectation.
