Ahmad Farroukh, MTN Nigeria’s chief executive officer, recently explained the magnitude of the power supply problem. “We have to have two generators at a base station, dubbed master and slave, [and] guards to man the stations. [We must] construct our own access roads, we sometimes can’t get fuel to the generators or effect repairs because of community relation issues at different base stations, we have to deploy portable cabins with two air conditioners at every base station, and they are regularly vandalized after [attacks on] our guards.”

MTN has to generate its own power because Nigeria’s state-owned power company can only supply electricity for about five hours per day – and even that’s not reliable.

The problems were recognized by Umaru YarA’dua, Nigeria’s new president, who said that “there is no better evidence of our narrow focus than our nation’s dismal power sector, even with our prodigious gas reserves.” YarA’dua has created a taskforce to address the problem. Its job is to add an additional 6,000 MW of capacity to the national grid over the next 18 months. The group is also supposed to increase Nigeria’s total capacity to 17,000 MW by 2011. At present, Nigeria has only about 5,912 MW of capacity, according to the Energy Information Administration. The actual capacity is likely far lower.

Analysts have scoffed at YarA’dua’s plan, calling it a “grand illusion” because of the time it will take to build the plants, and other challenges such as corruption, poor planning, antiquated technology, lack of competent workers, rapid population growth, and lack of sector oversight.

Corruption at the state-owned Power Corporation of Nigeria is endemic. Political appointees there have embezzled funds and then disappeared. One of the failed projects is the Egbin Thermal Plant near Lagos. Built to serve 10 million residents, its initial six turbines were commissioned in 1986 and it has total installed capacity of 1,320 MW. However, only four of the turbines are operating. Two of the units have been cannibalized for spare parts.

Nenadi Usman, Nigeria’s former finance minister, underscored the problem recently when he said, “South Africa generates 40,000 MW of electricity for her 45 million population.” Meanwhile Nigeria, which has 140 million people, has barely 4,000 MW of capacity, and “her production costs are five times higher.”

This is all the more remarkable because Nigeria is sitting atop some $56 billion of foreign reserves – a cache that is the largest on the continent. Last year, Nigeria earned $55 billion from oil exports, the fourth largest earner in OPEC. But Nigeria’s ragged electricity infrastructure makes it a laggard among its OPEC brethren. Nigeria’s per-capita electric consumption is 72 kilowatt-hours per year. Meanwhile, the top three members of OPEC use far more electric power. Saudi Arabia, the dominant member of the cartel, consumes 6,103 kWh/capita, the United Arab Emirates uses 11,920 kWh/capita, and Iran consumes 1,801 kWh/capita, according to E.I.A. data.

The political turmoil of recent years has taken a big toll on Nigeria’s power sector. The country used to have 79 power plants. Today, a decade after returning to civilian rule, only 19 of the plants are working. And keeping the natural gas flowing to the plants is a major problem, due in part to ongoing pipeline sabotage by militants in the Niger Delta region.

The problems in Nigeria are abundantly evident at the Computer Village in Ikeja, just outside of Lagos. Widely known as West Africa’s Silicon Valley, it’s a sprawling open market with over 10,000 stalls where computers, laptops, and associated products are sold and repaired. Nearly every stall is powered by a small generator. “Electricity supply is our only challenge in this market, as my profits go to buying diesel to power my Yamaha generator,” says John Okechukwu, who sells pirated copies of the Windows Vista Premium edition for $3.

The power shortage is occurring all over sub-Saharan Africa. Consider the Southern African Power Pool, created in 1995 to link southern African countries into a single electricity grid. There are 12 members, but 85 percent of the pool’s electric capacity – some 38,384 MW – is located in South Africa. Other member countries have only nominal power capacity. Zimbabwe has nearly 13 million people but just 1,125 MW of capacity.

Paul Nickson, a former World Bank energy chief, heads Nigeria’s most ambitious independent power producer, Geometric Power Ltd. The company has a budget of $250 million and hopes to build plants capable of generating 140 MW. General Electric will provide the turbines, and Geometric plans to build four new substations and run more than 100 kilometers of distribution lines.

Other projects are planned, including the Omotosho Plant, a 335 MW station being built by China National Machinery and Equipment Import and Export Corp. for about $200 million.

But it remains to be seen whether outside investors will ever flock to Nigeria. A key problem is regulated prices. Nigerians currently pay less than $0.056 per kilowatt per hour – far less than in the U.S. “What we want is regular power supply, I am ready to pay the tariffs,” said Isola Ajiboye, a welding technician in Ibadan.

In addition to the regulated prices, Nigeria lacks homegrown engineering talent. Most qualified engineers ignore the power sector in favor of jobs in consulting, banking, and telecommunications. Contract awards are done haphazardly, and some construction efforts have taken an almost comic turn. Consider the Alaoji River Power plant, where a 300 ton gas turbine is stranded across the river from its destination. The bridge spanning the river cannot support the turbine’s weight.

Nigerian authorities are considering using the country’s abundant coal reserves. But that idea remains just that: an idea. (In neighboring South Africa, Eskom, the state-owned power producer, generates 90 percent of its power from coal.)

Joking about the potential use of Nigerian coal, Oluwole Omilabu, a Lagos pundit, quipped, “Nigeria has abundant gas reserves, too.”

Most Nigerians need to laugh – for if they didn’t, they’d have to cry. Over the past decade, Nigeria has spent some $16 billion on its power sector. But it still can’t keep the lights on.