Nigeria Engr Abdullahi Garba Ramat was not born into the aristocracy of Nigerian politics; he was raised by a poor mother, so bound to her that he grafted her name onto his own identity, an act of quiet reverence in a country where lineage can be both currency and curse.
Through Kwankwaso’s foreign scholarship scheme in Kano, he left the constraints of his background and went on to earn a first degree in electrical engineering, a first-class Master’s in telecommunications, and a PhD in Strategic Management from Lincoln University, finishing at the top of his class.
Along the way, he collected advanced certifications from institutions like Harvard, Google, Microsoft and Gonzaga University, specializing in big data, civic engagement, and power transmission. His credentials speak less of paper-chasing than of a mind deliberately aligning itself with the complexities of modern infrastructure.
His public career bears the imprint of that preparation. As Managing Director of the Kano State Metropolitan Agency and later as Chairman of Ungogo Local Government, he pursued energy retrofitting for public facilities and introduced Nigeria’s first blockchain-based decentralized e-identity system for indigene and residency IDs, a locally grounded but globally literate attempt to drag governance into the digital age.
In Ungogo, he rolled out a cloud-based ERP platform that reportedly drove internally generated revenue up by more than 300 percent, turning a local council into a proof-of-concept for what intelligent leadership can accomplish when it treats technology as an instrument of public purpose rather than a buzzword.
TINUBU’S MERITOCRATIC WAGER
When President Bola Tinubu chose Ramat on 5 August 2025 as Chairman/CEO of the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), he was making more than a routine regulatory appointment; he was placing a bet on the possibility that Nigerian governance could be reordered around merit rather than the accident of birth.
The presidency’s own framing of the nomination underscored this: a 39‑year‑old engineer-administrator, steeped in power systems, technology, and strategic management, was to be entrusted with stabilizing and reforming a sector that has long mocked the hopes of 230 million people.
Conscious of the institutional fragility at NERC, Tinubu directed Ramat to assume office in acting capacity to avoid a leadership vacuum.
In a country where the accusation has often been that presidents surround themselves with familiar cronies and ethnic kinsmen, the selection of a relatively young technocrat from Kano, whose story is rooted not in inherited privilege but in educational grit, was an attempt to widen the circle of power and to dramatize a new narrative: that brilliance from the periphery can be called to the centre.
A SENATE THAT STALLED
The Senate Committee on Power, chaired by opposition stalwart Enyinnaya Abaribe, did its work: it screened Ramat, examined his record and, by the account of multiple members, signed off on his suitability by an overwhelming margin.
Yet, after this technocratic green light, the process drifted into a strange, airless corridor where plenary confirmation was endlessly deferred, and no coherent public explanation emerged from the Senate leadership.
Civil society coalitions, frustrated by what they described as an “unjustifiable” and politically motivated delay, accused Senate President Godswill Akpabio and his deputy, Barau Jibrin, of turning themselves into a blockade against power sector reforms and of placing personal bargaining above the national interest.
Protesters soon took their outrage from press statements to the streets of Abuja, storming the National Assembly complex to demand that the upper chamber either confirm Ramat or explain, in specific terms, why it would not.
In the background, darker allegations circulated: that senior figures in the Senate had been offered a massive bribe. Figures as high as ten million dollars were whispered to stall the confirmation. Allegations the Senate’s spokesperson flatly denied while pointing instead to unspecified petitions against the nominee.
The effect, however, was the same: a young, eminently qualified Nigerian became the object of elite tug‑of‑war, while a critical regulator drifted into leadership vacuum as the vice‑chairman and another commissioner retired after completing their terms.
POWER, POVERTY AND THE NORTHERN PARADOX
There is an added irony, almost cruel in its symmetry, that much of the resistance is alleged to emanate from Ramat’s own home front in Kano, where some political figures appear less alarmed by the urgent need in the power sector than by the prospect that a “son of a nobody” might rise too high, too quickly.
In the unwritten protocols of Nigerian politics, senators from a nominee’s state are often expected to be the first line of defence on the floor, yet, as commentators on this issue have noted, only one opposition senator reportedly stepped forward with visible enthusiasm, while key power brokers from Kano are not overtly pushy.
Ramat’s journey, from a modest childhood to foreign degrees, entrepreneurial ventures, and reformist local governance, embodies a script that millions of young Nigerians, especially in the North, long to believe is still possible; to see that script obstructed not by failure but by invisible intrigues is to be told that merit is admired in principle but throttled in practice.
THE FRAGILE BOND OF THE 10th SENATE
To their credit, Akpabio’s 10th Senate has distinguished itself by an almost seamless cooperation with the Tinubu administration; budgets have moved with unusual speed, key appointees have been waved through, and the familiar theatre of executive-legislative warfare has been largely absent.
That harmony has been interpreted by some as institutional maturity and by others as capitulation, but in either case, it has created an image of a National Assembly willing to prioritize stability over spectacle.
The Ramat saga, however, introduces an uncomfortable wrinkle: it suggests there are red lines the Senate leadership will draw, but not around principle or policy; instead, around the shadowy calculus of local political rivalries and personal leverage.
If left unresolved or sustained without justification, this single act of resistance risks corroding the very narrative of partnership the 10th Senate has carefully cultivated, recasting cooperation as opportunism. It’s swift when patronage is at stake, sluggish when merit threatens established networks.
WHERE POLITICS POISONS POWER
The cost of this delay cannot be measured solely in the career of one man; it must be counted in rolling blackouts, stalled investments, and the corrosive uncertainty that investors and citizens alike feel when the regulator at the heart of a fragile power ecosystem is left in limbo.
NERC is not a ceremonial commission: it is the referee in a game where generators, distributors, consumers, and future investors need rules that are clear, credible, and consistently enforced; a leadership vacuum here amplifies every existing dysfunction in the grid.
Nigeria’s power sector has long suffered from a fatal intimacy between politics and regulation, including tariffs frozen for electoral convenience, contracts awarded as spoils, reforms announced in fanfare but sabotaged in committee rooms.
To turn the Senate’s constitutional role of advice and consent into a theatre for local vendettas or transactional brinkmanship is to weaponize institutional oversight against the very reforms it is supposed to refine, and to tell Nigerians sitting in the dark that their darkness is a by‑product of elite gamesmanship rather than technical inevitability.
YOUTH WATCHING FROM THE GALLERY
There is another audience, quieter but more consequential, that is following this drama with almost forensic attention: Nigeria’s young people, who were told, after #EndSARS and during subsequent elections, that engagement, excellence, and patience would eventually be rewarded.
For them, Ramat’s story is more than a curriculum vitae; it is a test case of whether the system can absorb a new kind of actor: young, hyper-qualified, unshielded by dynasty, and not spit him out at the first collision with entrenched interests.
If Akpabio and Barau allow this matter to fester without transparency, they do not merely imperil their personal legacies; they risk confirming the most cynical hypothesis of a generation that already suspects that the rules are rigged, that merit is a decorative myth, and that excellence, when it emerges from the wrong postcode, will be quietly suffocated.
If, on the other hand, they choose to treat the petitions, if any exist, with visible seriousness, to debate the nominee in the open, and to vote one way or another with reasons on record, they might yet demonstrate that the Senate can be both robust and fair, and that scrutiny need not be a synonym for sabotage.
A CHOICE BEFORE THE SENATE
At its core, the Ramat affair is a referendum on what kind of Republic Nigeria intends to be in the age of permanent crisis and permanent opportunity.
Does it wish to remain a polity where the son of “somebody” glides through the corridors of power while the son of “nobody” is interrogated to the point of paralysis, even when that “nobody” has acquired all the tools the future demands? Or can it become a place where institutions are strong enough, and leaders secure enough, to allow competence to prevail over clan?
The Senate does not need to be a rubber stamp to redeem itself in this moment; it needs only to be intelligible, accountable, and alive to the stakes of its inaction.
For now, the lights of progress flicker more dangerously because political actors have chosen to play in the dark; whether they step back into the glare of responsibility or continue to move in the shadows will determine not just the fate of one man from Ungogo, but the credibility of a legislature that promised to work in tandem with a president who, time and again, has wagered on merit over pedigree.
Olabode Opeseitan
Editorial Architect | Legacy Steward | Strategic Communicator
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