Opening
Same Country. Same Pattern. Different Decade.
The Enron failure is the public history. JCM has its own, and it is more recent. In 2016, JCM Capital and its local partner Pan Africa Solar signed a 20-year, $0.115/kWh Power Purchase Agreement (PPA) with the federal Nigeria Bulk Electricity Trader (NBET) for a 75 MW solar plant in Katsina State[…]. Six years and several extensions later, the project had not built a single megawatt[…].
1999
Enron · Lagos
$500M IPP, voided in 5 months
2014 – 2022
JCM · Katsina
75 MW solar, never reached financial close
Authority
Counterparty
Macro / FX
Authority
1999 · Enron · Lagos
Lagos signed a deal it had no constitutional power to enforce. Federal Government voided it.
2014–2022 · JCM · Katsina
JCM and Pan Africa Solar signed with NBET, a federal counterparty. State had no role in the contract.
Counterparty
1999 · Enron · Lagos
Single federal monopoly buyer (NEPA), with mixed incentives about state independence.
2014–2022 · JCM · Katsina
NBET as single federal buyer. Its creditworthiness collapsed under a sector-wide liquidity crisis.
Macro / FX
1999 · Enron · Lagos
Dollar-priced diesel imports, naira-denominated revenue. Project absorbed every macro shock.
2014–2022 · JCM · Katsina
Tariff fixed at $0.115/kWh in 2016. Naira depreciation made the agreed tariff appear uneconomic; government sought to renegotiate downward.
Two attempts. Same three causes. Twenty-three years apart.
Two decades apart, the exact same structural flaws doomed both projects. By relying entirely on centralized federal-only counterparties, these frameworks stripped away state-level autonomy and paired the ventures with dollar-priced tariffs that were completely decoupled from a rapidly depreciating Naira. Ultimately, what looked coherent on paper collapsed under the weight of difficult macroeconomic realities.
Detailed context on the 14-PPA cohort, internal JCM projections, and historical work product is located in Appendix H.
The strategic implication
JCM is not entering Nigeria. JCM has been in Nigeria, in a different form, for eleven years. This proposal is the application of what JCM already paid to learn: that a federal-counterparty, federal-grid, federal-tariff model does not work. The post-2023 alternative is the model that does.