Nigeria installed more meters in the first half of 2026 than ever before and the gap barely moved. A Stransact deals director says the problem was never hardware.
On 11 August the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission dissolved the board of Kaduna Electric and began looking for a new core investor. The company owed the market ₦456.5 billion, most of it to NBET. In the first quarter of the year it had metered 36.43 per cent of its customers, collected 45.81 kobo of every naira it billed, and lost 69.66 per cent of the energy it received to technical, commercial and collection losses. The worst numbers in the industry, in every column.
Kalu Uwagwu did not mention the takeover at Stransact's webinar on 30 September. He did not need to. Director of Deals and Advisory at Stransact, and before that involved in the National Mass Metering Programme and in setting up meter manufacturing in Nigeria, he gave the regulator's own metering figures and then said the thing the sector has been circling for a decade.
"The metering gap is not really a hardware problem. It is more of a financing and incentive problem."
The gap moves faster than the installers
At the end of June 2026, NERC counted 7.74 million metered customers out of 12.59 million, a rate of 61.51 per cent and up from roughly five million metered in 2024. DisCos installed 707,765 meters in the first half, 71 per cent more than the same period of 2025. It was the best half-year on record. The unmetered population still stands at 4.85 million.
The arithmetic is simple. Installations run at 100,000 to 200,000 a month. New connections keep adding to the base. At that pace the gap does not close; it migrates. And it migrates unevenly. Eko and Ikeja are close to 85 per cent metered, by Uwagwu's figures. Jos, Yola and Kaduna sit below 40 per cent, where population density is lower and security is worse. Kaduna's 36.43 per cent is now on NERC's record.
Who has actually been paying for meters
Look at who funded the second quarter's installations and the "financing problem" becomes visible. DISREP, the World Bank's $500 million programme, paid for 205,486 meters. The Meter Asset Provider framework, under which customers effectively pay, covered 123,833. The Meter Asset Fund added 13,028. The DisCos themselves financed 7,643. Vendors financed 280.
A World Bank loan is paying for six in ten meters going into Nigerian homes, and the Bank is not happy about the pace. By July, 365,000 DISREP meters had been installed across nine DisCos and another 685,000 had arrived in the country and were waiting. The Bank's review flagged legal disputes and procurement bottlenecks, among them a court injunction on 30 April that halted the opening of bids for 1.55 million imported meters after a complaint from the local manufacturers' association, and it noted that installation had stalled at Ikeja and Enugu. It has proposed a further $308 million for 1.7 million more meters and an extension of the programme to June 2030. Useful, and still a loan that someone has to repay.
Each earlier scheme fixed a piece. MAP brought private capital to the meter but loaded the cost onto customers. The NMMP, backed by a Central Bank guarantee, let local assemblers borrow against orders and built a manufacturing base. When the guarantee went, so did the bank appetite. The Meter Asset Fund is NERC's own pool and has just completed a tranche. Each was a project. None was a business.
The manufacturers show why. Meter components are priced in dollars and bought mostly in China. When the exchange rate was liberalised, the capacity of local assemblers to hold inventory collapsed, and everyone went back to waiting for the next intervention. The DisCos, meanwhile, own the networks but not the balance sheets. The post-privatisation reviews of their finances, Uwagwu said, concluded that they cannot fund universal metering themselves. Kaduna is the proof.
Finance the meter. Don't buy it.
A meter, properly deployed, is a revenue-protection asset. It tells the DisCo what was consumed, tightens billing, raises collections and exposes theft and commercial losses. People in the industry call it the ATM of the power sector because it is the only point at which the whole value chain gets paid. The right question, Uwagwu argued, is not where to find money to buy more meters. It is how to finance metering against the extra revenue the meters produce.
His model is metering as a service, backed by long-term infrastructure finance. A dedicated metering SPV or infrastructure fund raises long-dated capital from banks, pension funds, institutional investors and development finance institutions. It owns or manages the meters and contracts with DisCos and qualified metering companies for deployment and maintenance. Repayment comes from a defined, regulated portion of the incremental revenue that better metering, billing and collection generate.
"Instead of government or the DisCo having to first find money to buy the meter, let us finance the meter, because the meter itself will generate additional, measurable cash flow. That changes the economics completely."
India has run a version of this at scale. Its Revamped Distribution Sector Scheme contracts private metering operators to design, finance, install and run prepaid smart meters, paid a fixed fee per meter per month over roughly eight years, with a central grant covering part of the cost. By early 2026 the scheme had passed 52.8 million meters installed against a target of 250 million. The model has had its disputes over tariffs and data, but the financing principle is the one Uwagwu described: the meter is paid for out of what it collects.
Commissioner Dafe Akpeneye of NERC added the regulator's angle. In a cost-reflective tariff, the cost of the meter, its replacement and its maintenance are already inside the tariff, so a utility can afford its own. Metering as a service is needed precisely because tariffs are not yet cost-reflective. It is a bridge, and the bridge only carries weight if the repayment line is written into the tariff order as a regulated pass-through that survives the next review.
Where the naira would come from
Victor Athe, Tax and Strategy Partner at Stransact, set the constraint. Match the currency of funding to the currency of earnings. Meters earn naira. DFIs have the deepest pockets and lend in dollars. The obvious naira pool is pension money: ₦31.32 trillion of assets at May 2026, of which about ₦318 billion, roughly one per cent, sits in infrastructure. PenCom's proposed Pension Industry Infrastructure Fund, a pooled vehicle expected later this year, is the kind of structure that could hold a metering SPV's paper. Pension trustees will not buy a DisCo's promise. They might buy a regulated, ring-fenced collection stream with a NERC order behind it.
The prize is large enough to justify the structuring. Sola Arifayan of Vios Energy estimated, with his own caveat that the figure is rough, that the Lagos DisCos lose 18 to 20 per cent of the roughly 1,000 MW delivered into the state, which he values at north of $100 million a year. He cited Scandinavian utilities at about 3 per cent losses and China at about 5. "We are sub-optimising the use of technology that exists across the world," he said. "And that is not even new tech."
What this means for you
If you manage pension or insurance money: a metering SPV is the first naira-denominated power asset with a measurable, metered cash flow. Ask NERC and the DisCo for the regulated repayment mechanism before you ask for the yield.
If you run a DisCo or a state subsidiary: Kaduna shows the end of the road for metering as an annual budget line. Your metering plan is now your credit story.
If you manufacture or assemble meters: an SPV with long-dated funding is the first buyer that could place a multi-year order and let you hedge components.
The Stransact view
Nigeria does not have a meter shortage. It has 4.85 million unmetered customers because nobody has yet turned the meter into a financeable asset with a regulated repayment line. "Who finances the metering gap" is the deal-lab question at Energy in Africa 2026 in Nairobi on Wednesday 2 December. If you hold a view, or a balance sheet, bring it.
