Why Nigerian factories are using softwares to outrun power costs

Nigerian manufacturers spent N1.35 trillion on alternative power in 2025, up more than 21 percent from a year earlier, according to the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria. Energy alone now consumes 35 percent to 40 percent of production costs at many local firms. The World Bank puts the broader toll of unreliable electricity at roughly $29 billion a year — close to 7 percent of GDP.

Those aren’t abstractions to plant managers in Lagos, Port Harcourt or Kano. They’re the reason a production line stalls when a generator hiccups, or why a maintenance budget gets blown before the quarter is out.

A shift now underway in how industrial control systems are built could ease some of that pressure, and it’s drawing more attention from operators than it has from the wider tech press. The approach, known as software-defined automation, replaces fixed-function equipment with components that are configured and reconfigured through software rather than rewired or replaced by hand.
The payoff shows up in inventory rooms and customs queues as much as on the factory floor. Fewer specialised spare parts sit unused waiting for a breakdown. Fewer production runs stall for months while an imported component clears port.

Schneider Electric, which has built the concept into its Foxboro control platform, says operators using the approach have cut spare-parts inventory by as much as 70 percent and sidestepped production delays that would otherwise have required swapping hardware, changes made instead with a settings update.

That flexibility lands differently in Nigeria than it might in a market with a stable grid. More than 70 percent of Nigerian manufacturers run on generators just to keep operations going, and maintenance planning routinely gets upended by import delays and currency swings that make replacement parts unpredictably expensive. A control system that can be reconfigured rather than rebuilt removes one of the more expensive variables from an already volatile equation.

The pattern extends across the region. Sub-Saharan Africa’s industrial process automation market is on track to grow from about $817 million in 2025 to more than $1.5 billion by 2030, according to industry estimates, with oil and gas and pharmaceutical operators among the biggest adopters as they look to run leaner in conditions that don’t offer much margin for error.

“The operators who will lead the next decade are the ones building plants that can adapt, not just the ones building plants to spec,” said Elijah Daniel, Schneider Electric’s country sales director for Sub-Saharan Africa. Daniel has been pressing the case that automation in the region needs a different mental model, not a fixed capital purchase locked in at commissioning, but a platform meant to be adjusted as conditions change.

That reframing matters in a market where the conditions rarely hold still. A plant specified for one set of assumptions about power, currency and parts availability can find those assumptions obsolete within a year. Systems designed to be reconfigured, rather than replaced, are built for that instability rather than against it.

None of this fixes Nigeria’s power supply. Diesel and gas-fired generation will likely remain the backbone of industrial operations for years, and no software update lowers the price of fuel. What software-defined automation does is remove friction elsewhere, in the warehouse, at customs, on the maintenance schedule, from an operating environment that already has more than enough of it.