Kelvin Okechukwu has watched his hotel’s biggest expense stop being staff, food, or maintenance, and become diesel.
Okechukwu, Chief Executive Officer of Panama Hotel and Suites, said in an interview published by The PUNCH on September 13, 2026, that diesel alone accounts for roughly half of his hotel’s general operating costs. His property gets, by his account, about three hours of grid electricity a day, with some days recording none at all, a gap he said forces near-total dependence on generators.
The strain isn’t unique to his business. In March 2026, filmmaker Kunle Afolayan said his KAP Film Village and Resort in Oyo State was spending about ₦11 million on diesel every four to five weeks, according to a video he posted and reported by Arise News, despite the resort already running solar power. Diesel prices, he said at the time, had climbed to around ₦1,500 a litre.
For Okechukwu, solar has helped but not solved the problem. He said his hotel’s diesel bill had run as high as ₦10 million a month before a solar installation, since falling to between ₦6 million and ₦7 million monthly. Even so, he said the system covers only eight to ten hours of power a day, depending on sunlight, leaving generators to fill the rest.
That cost is colliding with what guests are willing to pay. Okechukwu said his hotel’s ₦30,000 rooms usually sell out and can require weeks of advance booking, while ₦55,000 rooms often sit empty as customers trade down. “If you increase it too much, the tonnage will reduce,” he said, describing room pricing as a balance between covering costs and keeping demand.
He pointed to borrowing costs, interest rates around 30%, by his account, as a further obstacle to financing expansion or upgrades like additional solar capacity. He also said some hotel restaurants are losing food-and-beverage revenue as guests opt to eat elsewhere or bring their own meals to cut costs.
Okechukwu argued that a more reliable national grid would eventually let hotels lower room rates, since less spending on diesel and generator upkeep would ease the cost pressure now being passed, only partially, on to guests.
