No NEPA!

At the forefront of everyones minds when you ask them about coming home to Nigeria is the power problem. No NEPA. Hot sweltering nights with no tv, mosquitos flying around lazily in the heat and taking their time to enjoy your blood (when there is power the aircon freezes them to death), generators beating in the background and giving you head ache while you have half waking half asleep lurid dreams caused by suffocation by diesel fumes.

I would like to tell you some amazing piece of news about how the new Independent Power Plants are generating more power than we have ever had in our lives. I would like to tell you that the days of our youth, candles, lamps etc are all gone. I would like to tell you that in all those years, we have solved our problem. I would even like to tell you that our $60B oil reserve was used in its entirety to solve the problem with only 50kobo change (what happened to the kobo by the way?)

NO!!!!!!
For the past week, no light, from night till morning and back again, days on end and weekends included with a few hours of weak current. Off and on and off again. Electrical equipment destroying light. Light so weak, you feel that you are having harmattan in your house and can hardly see. Light that is no better than no light. And even worse, light so weak that there is no point cooking soup as it will spoil the following day!!! That unfortunately is how it has been for the past week. I would have liked to say otherwise but that would have been lying to you my reader. My only relief is that I am at work every day so just experience it in the evenings/nights. You may wonder, ah ah he is a banker now, can't he afford diesel, but how much diesel can you put into a generator to run it all day and all night 24/7. Am I sitting on an oil well??? or is gas flaring going on in my back yard to power my gas powered generator?

I do hear that some of our big men get drums of diesel as part of their perks. Maybe that is why the thing doesn't work. Big men paid off by big drums of diesel to run their huge generators all day and all night and kill the rest of us with diesel fumes.

You start to appreciate small blessings like a cold bucket bath after a hot night, just like when I was a boy preparing for school.