Here’s a timeline that should make any Nigerian investor uncomfortable. December 2025: billionaire Femi Otedola sells his controlling stake in Geregu Power to a company linked to Senator Abdulaziz Yari, for a record ₦1.88 trillion ($750 million). The deal is financed almost entirely with debt. August 2026 eight months later, Geregu Power defaults on a ₦40.09 billion bond payment. Profit has collapsed 88 percent. And weeks before the default, the company had told investors to expect the opposite: a strong recovery.
Somebody’s timing here was either extraordinarily lucky, or extraordinarily well-informed.
The exit that now looks perfectly timed
Otedola’s exit wasn’t a quiet, gradual sell-down. It was a full transfer of control his 95 percent stake in Amperion Power Distribution Company, the entity holding his interest in Geregu, sold outright to Senator Yari-linked MA’AM Energy Limited, according to Arise News. The transaction was financed by a consortium of Nigerian banks led by Zenith Bank, with Blackbirch Capital advising the hallmarks of a serious, professionally structured $750 million takeover, not a fire sale.
Following the deal, Yari became Geregu’s board chairman, installing new directors including Usman Gur Mohammed, Sani Jaafaru and Uzoamaka Adogu.
Eight months later, the company he now controls can’t make its bond payments.
The default, in plain numbers
Geregu missed both its eighth semi-annual coupon payment and its scheduled fourth principal bullet repayment on a ₦40.09 billion Series 1 Senior Unsecured Bond, according to an updated listing status from FMDQ Securities Exchange, reported by Nairametrics. The bond was issued in July 2022 at a 14.5 percent fixed rate, structured to mature in 2029, this default hits at the midpoint of the bond’s life, not at maturity, which is a materially different kind of red flag.
Here’s the number that makes the default especially jarring: Geregu’s profit after tax for the six months ended June 30 collapsed 88 percent, to just ₦2.51 billion, down from ₦20.27 billion in the same period of 2025, according to Daily Post citing the company’s own unaudited financial statements filed with the NGX.
The broken promise
This is the detail that’s got analysts genuinely alarmed. Weeks before publishing those results, Geregu had guided the market to expect revenue of ₦44.34 billion and profit after tax of around ₦8.17 billion for the quarter, a promised recovery from a weak start to the year, according to Billionaires.Africa. What actually showed up was an 88 percent profit collapse and a missed bond payment. The company told investors one story and delivered a completely different one.
Financial analyst Olumide Adesina didn’t mince words on X, saying Geregu would likely have lost a fifth of its market value overnight had it been trading on a US exchange when this news broke. Another finance commentator, known online as Toby, called the missed payments “a serious red flag” for a company whose entire business is supplying electricity to the Nigerian grid, an industry where cash flow problems tend to compound fast.
It’s not just Geregu, the whole power sector had a bad week
This is where the story gets bigger than one company. In the same week Geregu’s default became public, Nigeria’s Electricity Regulatory Commission dissolved the entire board of Kaduna Electricity Distribution Company, citing prolonged financial and regulatory defaults totaling roughly ₦456.5 billion as of May 2026, according to Arise News. Two major power sector players, a generation company and a distribution company hitting serious financial trouble in the same seven-day stretch is not a coincidence anyone in Nigeria’s energy sector is comfortable dismissing.
So, bad luck or bad governance?
To be fair to Otedola, selling a controlling stake before a company hits financial trouble isn’t automatically suspicious, it could genuinely be coincidental timing, or Otedola may have simply wanted to exit power generation for unrelated reasons. Billionaires sell assets constantly, and $750 million is a serious, above-board transaction backed by major Nigerian banks, not a quiet backroom exit.
But the optics are brutal regardless of intent: a well-connected billionaire sells at what turned out to be exactly the right moment, a politically connected buyer takes over with a heavily debt-financed structure, and eight months later the company can’t meet its obligations after guiding investors toward a recovery that never materialized. Whether this was foresight, misfortune, or simply the debt load of a $750 million leveraged takeover catching up with a company already under pressure, one thing is clear: Nigerian bondholders who trusted Geregu’s guidance just got a very expensive lesson in reading the fine print.
