The $2.3 billion Siemens power agreement signed under former President Muhammadu Buhari failed to gain momentum and remained largely dormant until President Bola Tinubu revived it upon assuming office, Germany’s Deputy Head of Mission in Nigeria, Johannes Lehne, has disclosed.
Speaking on the second day of the Sub-Saharan Africa International Petroleum Exhibition and Conference (SAIPEC) in Lagos, Lehne said the bilateral power partnership between Nigeria and Germany stalled for years before being reactivated under Tinubu’s administration.
The Siemens deal, conceived during Buhari’s tenure, was structured as a government-to-government initiative aimed at overhauling Nigeria’s transmission and distribution systems, stabilising the national grid and significantly boosting electricity supply. Under the plan, Siemens outlined phased targets to raise available capacity from about 4,000 megawatts (MW) to 7,000 MW by 2021, 11,000 MW by 2023, and ultimately 25,000 MW by 2025.
However, despite the ambitious projections, the project failed to record meaningful progress during the previous administration, with no official explanation provided for the delays.
“The strange thing was that this partnership was dormant until the beginning of President Tinubu’s time, where actually we revived this,” Lehne said in a report by ThisDay newspaper. “We are in the power sector. We have a Presidential Power Initiative with President Tinubu for the reactivation of the Nigerian transmission system and electricity to everybody.”
Under Tinubu, the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI) has been repositioned as a central pillar of efforts to modernise Nigeria’s power infrastructure and address longstanding transmission bottlenecks.
Beyond the Siemens project, Lehne said Germany has expanded its broader energy cooperation with Nigeria through an Energy Support Programme, drawing from Berlin’s experience in energy transition and diversification.
He noted that between 2021 and 2024, Germany accelerated investments in renewable energy sources such as solar, wind and geothermal as part of efforts to reduce carbon emissions and hydrocarbon dependence. However, he argued that what many countries describe as “energy transition” is more accurately an “energy addition,” involving a diversified mix of energy sources rather than a total replacement of fossil fuels.