How to prevent fire crisis in West Africa’s electrical boom

The skyline above Lagos rises faster than almost anywhere else on the continent. Cranes punctuate the horizon. New commercial towers climb out of reclaimed land on Victoria Island. Substations hum under rising load. Yet for every floor of glass and steel added to Africa’s most populous city, a quieter and more combustible threat creeps deeper into the electrical backbone holding it all together.

Electrical fires are emerging as one of West Africa’s most consequential infrastructure risks — and industry insiders say the region is not building fast enough, or smart enough, to contain them.

“Fire safety should move beyond mere compliance and become the very foundation on which electrical designs are built,” wrote Opeyemi Olaniyan, Offer Manager for Power Products at Schneider Electric West Africa, in an opinion piece published this week. “One cannot afford to get it wrong. The loss can be catastrophic — not only in terms of asset loss and operational disruption, but also reputational damage, rising insurance premiums, and, most critically, the risk to human life.”

In 2024, a fire at Afriland Tower in Lagos killed seven people and reignited a long-running debate about whether Nigeria’s commercial real estate sector is keeping pace with international fire and electrical safety standards. The Lagos State Fire and Rescue Service records hundreds of outbreaks annually, a significant share of them traced back to electrical faults in commercial or multi-story buildings.

What makes the problem structurally stubborn is that it is, in large part, a consequence of success. West Africa’s urbanisation rate is among the highest globally, and industrialisation is accelerating demand for power infrastructure at a pace that legacy frameworks were never designed to accommodate. The more complex electrical distribution networks become, stretching from medium-voltage transmission down through low-voltage final distribution, the more points of potential failure multiply.

Olaniyan argues, are no longer adequate for the task. Isolated components, reactive measures, and compliance-driven checklists were designed for a simpler era. What modern infrastructure requires, he contends, is something fundamentally different: integrated, intelligent systems in which fire mitigation is embedded directly into the architecture of the network itself, not bolted on afterwards.

That means real-time tracking of temperature and humidity across critical components. It means early fault detection capable of flagging anomalies before they escalate into ignition events. It means synchronised protection mechanisms running coherently across an entire distribution network rather than operating as disconnected silos. Done properly, proponents say, such systems reduce not just fire risk but also unplanned downtime, a cost that West African businesses, operating in environments where power reliability is already constrained, can ill afford.

But technology, Olaniyan is careful to note, solves only part of the problem. The subtler and often neglected dimension is human capability. As electrical systems grow more sophisticated, the talent required to design, install, and maintain them must grow alongside. That pipeline, engineers, contractors, system integrators, channel partners, remains underdeveloped across much of the region.

“When partners are equipped with product knowledge as well as a deeper understanding of how integrated systems mitigate risk, the quality and consistency of implementation improve significantly,” he writes.

Schneider Electric has responded by embedding structured training programmes across its partner and contractor networks in the region, with curricula covering not just individual product specifications but the systemic logic of how components interact under fault conditions. The approach reflects a broader industry recognition that the weakest link in electrical safety is often not the equipment — it is the person installing or maintaining it.

The business case for action is sharpening. Insurance underwriters are beginning to price electrical fire risk more aggressively into commercial property premiums across Nigeria and Ghana. Large corporations with regional headquarters in Lagos or Accra face growing pressure from global risk teams to demonstrate that local infrastructure meets international safety standards.