Why have we allowed ourselves to get so used to avoidable darkness? To feel comfortable like it’s normal, NO it’s not! We can enjoy 24/7 electricity in Nigeria. We can turn off our freezers because they are over frozen. It’s very possible. If you could shop all your food items; tomatoes, beans, meats… in season when they are very affordable and be able to preserve them till the next season, do you know how much money you’ll have lying idle in your bank account? for other important needs? Electricity problems in Nigeria, haven’t they always been there? I flashback always and try to remember a time when Nigeria had constant and regular electricity and I can’t remember at all. Maybe I am too young to know. The epileptic situation of electricity is
causing so much stress on us women , so much avoidable stress. Imagine how life would be for us if you had to cook just once a month, do your laundry in minutes and use the rest of the weekend to attend to other things. Imagine the quality of life we’ll enjoy if our blenders always worked and we didn’t have to take buckets of tomatoes to the mills for blending and just imagine if you could blend a whole basket of tomatoes and freeze. A whole lot of wahala taken away. Life would become so much easier if we could do everything we needed to do with electricity.
Hard life everywhere because we must do everything manually or spend every dime on generators; cooking everyday, warming food that should be frozen, sweeping with broom and parker when vacuum cleaners could have done the cleaning and even better sef. Getting unwanted house helps to cause headaches when washing machines, dishwashers and other appliances could have helped with chores.
After shopping, look at the shopping bag you are carrying, it’s almost empty whereas the money is finished. When shop and supermarket owners run on generators, why won’t they increase prices of commodities. When they spend so much on generators just to keep frozen foods fresh, why won’t they sell a kilo of mackerel for N1200. Why won’t they? Will you blame mothers for recutting fish and meat before serving food?
The amount of money spent fixing generators, replacing dead generators that die from overuse, and buying fuel for generators. In a month, do you know how much money your family spends on fueling the generator? Have you sat down to calculate? For large families that use diesel, do you know how much is spent monthly buying diesel for the generating plant? Imagine if you had all that money in the bank , imagine how that money could help you pay kids school fees on time. For the housewives, have you thought about how much you’d be making from home by selling cold drinks, cold kunu, cold zobo or even water? You know how to make all these drinks, you know what to do but where is the electricity needed to chill and preserve them. Imagine how much easier life would have been for you if you made that extra income for yourself and didn’t have to depend on your husband’s salary for every little need. I can rant the whole day about the benefits of having regular electricity in our homes. If you force yourself to get that good quality life sleeping in air conditioned rooms daily, you realise that a big chunk of your earning is spent buying gas/fuel. I tire oh.
Dangote and other companies still doing business in Nigeria are really really trying hard to be able to stay afloat and make profits and even grow. They’ll expand faster and more Companies will invest here providing employment for our idle graduates, if they didn’t have to depend on generators and irregular private electricity. If we had regular electricity in Nigeria, unemployment w’d drop drastically, jobs will spring up everywhere, intelligent people will create jobs for themselves because there is electricity. Entrepreneurs won’t have to struggle this much.
If only one person, just one Nigerian can take it upon himself/herself to fix electricity problems in this country and become the number one Hero we know. Is it that impossible or what? Everyone campaigns using electricity to win our hearts and ganner votes. When campaigns begin, we hear promises of ending Electricity problems in Nigeria, we get excited and vote with all our hearts. After elections are won, we remain where we have always been or get worse. Must we always suffer in this country. If others can do it why can’t we?
If someone wins Elections in Nigeria and all he/she can do is solve these electricity problems permanently, we would still see him/her as our Naija Hero. Life should be easier for us as the giant of Africa. Imagine what Nigerian bloggers go through. The stress is avoidable. Imagine running generators 24/7 just to enable you keep your blog updated. Not every blogger is making that much money like Linda Ikeji, some of us are making just enough to buy pure water and hoping that one day we’ll get more traffic to our blogs and make more but the darkness in our country is so draining. Sometimes, you need fuel at night and cannot even find. Sometimes all your generators break down and there’s nothing you can do as the mechanic tells you to give him 30 minutes to be at your house only to arrive the next day, lol.
Why won’t youths be jobless when even those who have great ideas to create jobs are left helpless as most businesses require regular electricity to start or even stay alive.
Most Nigerians would rather pay higher bills and get constant electricity than buy fuel daily for generators but what can we do?
For those who can afford it, solar energy is here to help even though it has it’s own limitations. I haven’t seen a solar powered house that connects every electrical appliance to the solar panels. Maybe I haven’t seen the best yet because families that installed solar energy would always say that the freezer is not connected because the solar energy can’t carry, some enjoy just Television and fan with solar energy as they can’t cook or bake with it, sometimes even the air conditioners cannot be connected.
May it not take so long before someone fixes this problem for us. Only one life and one cannot even enjoy it to the fullest. We need this quality of life improved upon and constant electricity in Nigeria will sure guarantee that. Someone should please do this even against all odds, just give us constant light abeg!