Ninety-eight containers, out of more than three hundred, are finally moving. The Nigeria Customs Service has begun clearing electricity transmission equipment that has been sitting abandoned at Lagos ports for up to two decades, a backlog so old that some of the cargo predates the smartphones in our pockets.
The scale of what was left to rot at the ports is striking. Over three hundred containers of power equipment, the kind Nigeria desperately needs to keep the lights on, spent years locked in bureaucratic limbo while the country endured some of the worst electricity shortages on the continent.
This clearance is a small but telling moment. Whether the released equipment is still functional after twenty years in port storage, and whether it will actually reach the grid, are the questions worth watching now.
Originally published by BusinessDay.