By Abubakar Yunusa
Nigeria’s renewable energy sector has created only about 70,000 jobs despite attracting more than $2 billion in cumulative investment, the Managing Director of the Rural Electrification Agency, Abba Aliyu, has said.
Aliyu described the figure as far below the industry’s employment potential, noting that the global solar sector alone supports about 16.2 million jobs.
Speaking at the 2026 Oriental News Conference in Lagos through the agency’s Executive Director of Corporate Services, Gboyega Ayoade, Aliyu said the wide gap underscored the urgent need for Nigeria to build local capacity instead of depending on imported technologies and foreign expertise.
He said the country’s energy policy must also serve as an industrial policy by encouraging local participation across the renewable energy value chain.
According to him, Nigeria must expand local assembly, manufacturing, installation, operations, maintenance, recycling and skills development as renewable energy deployment increases.
Aliyu said the Federal Government’s Nigeria First policy provides an opportunity to make clean energy a catalyst for local content development, job creation and industrial growth.
He added that renewable energy projects should no longer be measured solely by the amount of electricity generated but by their ability to create jobs for Nigerian engineers and technicians, strengthen local supply chains, support indigenous firms and promote technology transfer.
The REA boss disclosed that the agency was restructuring its programmes to support local manufacturing and skills development through large-scale renewable energy projects capable of creating predictable demand for manufacturers.
Aliyu also identified poor project bankability as the biggest obstacle to attracting investment into the sector, rather than Nigeria’s abundant renewable energy resources.
He said many projects struggle to secure financing because of weak feasibility studies, poor demand assessments, inadequate payment structures and insufficient risk mitigation measures.
To address the challenge, he said the agency was collaborating with development partners, financial institutions and private developers to improve project preparation through performance-based grants, blended finance, public-private partnerships and green finance platforms.
On Nigeria’s decarbonisation drive, Aliyu stressed that the country’s energy transition must simultaneously expand electricity access, drive industrialisation, stimulate economic growth and reduce carbon emissions.
He added that REA programmes, including the Nigeria Electrification Project, the Renewable Energy Scale-up Programme, the Energising Education Programme and the National Public Sector Solarisation Initiative, were helping to build a stronger renewable energy market driven by private sector participation.
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