By Prof. Idris Okonkwo
For decades, gross domestic product has served as the shorthand for national strength. Policymakers, investors, and journalists alike speak of GDP growth as if it were destiny. Yet in the twenty-first century, a different metric may matter more: the hum of the electric grid. Where energy is abundant, economies thrive. Where it is scarce, even the most promising industries stall. Electricity is not just a utility—it is the real currency of nations.
The Power Behind Development
The logic is simple: factories cannot run without steady current, schools cannot connect without internet, and hospitals cannot save lives without reliable lighting and refrigeration. The World Bank estimates that nearly 770 million people still lack electricity, the vast majority in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria, blackouts cost an estimated 2 percent of GDP annually. Contrast this with South Korea, where near-universal electrification in the 1970s laid the foundation for an export-driven miracle. Energy access is less a byproduct of development than its precondition.
Inequality in Kilowatts
The divide is stark. The average American consumes roughly 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per year; the average Ethiopian, less than 100. This disparity shapes everything from industrial competitiveness to quality of life. While GDP aggregates mask these gaps, the grid reveals them plainly: who has light after sunset, who can refrigerate vaccines, who can build data centers. In practice, energy inequality is development inequality.
Energy as Geopolitics
Electricity is also a strategic asset. China’s Belt and Road Initiative is not just about ports and railways; it is about power plants, grids, and transmission lines that bind client states into infrastructural dependence. Russia’s grip on Europe has long rested on gas pipelines, but as the continent transitions to renewables, transmission grids and battery storage will become the new terrain of leverage. Nations able to export not just oil but clean electricity—through interconnectors, hydrogen, or high-voltage cables—will wield influence akin to petrostates.
Beyond GDP
GDP counts goods and services but cannot capture the lived reality of unreliable power. A factory shut down by outages still contributes to GDP when its backup generator burns diesel. But the hidden tax of energy poverty—lost productivity, stunted education, constrained innovation—does not appear in national accounts. A more honest measure of modern capacity might be kilowatt-hours per capita, weighted by reliability.
A Currency Worth Investing In
If electrification is the currency of the future, then investments must shift accordingly. Expanding decentralized solar, modernizing transmission networks, and building regional grids are not simply infrastructure projects—they are the foundations of sovereignty and prosperity. The challenge for policymakers is to stop treating electricity as an afterthought of growth and start treating it as the bedrock.
GDP will continue to dominate headlines. But in the quiet glow of a lightbulb after dark, in the steady hum of a server farm, the true balance of power is already being written—not in dollars, but in watts.
