President Bola Tinubu’s official residence will fully disconnect from the national grid by March 2026 as a result of overbilling “for electricity not supplied,” State House permanent secretary, Temitope Fashedemi, said.
Mr Fashedemi, while defending the State House 2026 budget before the Senate Committee on Special Duties on Wednesday, disclosed that the solar system installation at the villa had been completed last December and was undergoing technical testing.
He told the committee, chaired by Senator Kaka Lawan, representing Borno Central, that a full transition to the solar power system would ease the cost of electricity utilised by the villa.
“What we have discovered in the course of all of this, especially during the testing phase, is that there has been a lot of overbilling,” said the permanent secretary.
“When we’re testing it, we saw that they were billing for electricity not supplied. So we are using that period now to point it out to them and hopefully do some reconciliation about this legacy liability,” Mr Fashedemi stated.
Mr Fashedemi said that the shift to solar systems at the State House Medical Centre in May 2025 provided a sustainable electricity supply for the facility.
“We are hopeful that maybe by March we’ll be able to do a full cutover. I have to say that since that time, the generator in that State House Medical Centre has not been put on for one minute since May last year,” Mr Fashedemi.
He added, “Only a couple of months, we used three per cent from AEDC (Abuja Electricity Distribution Company), so the rest has been strictly from solar and from the battery electric storage system.”
In 2025, Mr Tinubu’s administration budgeted N10 billion for the “solarisation of the villa with solar mini-grid.” In the 2026 Appropriation Bill, an extra N7 billion was allocated for the same project.
In February 2024, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC), in a public notice, decried the spate of debts owed by government departments and ministries.
The distribution company at the time stated that N923.87 million debt was owed by the presidential villa.
It listed the Federal Capital Territory Administration (FCTA), the finance ministry and other government ministries and departments as some of its major debtors.
Leave a Reply