This electricity nonsense

I once lived in what I could call a palatial apartment on the Island. It was situated in one of those cosy estates hence, it was tagged by friends and everyone who had visited as ‘the rich man’s area’. Yet the so called rich man abode cried bitterly like any part of the metropolis, nay, country, for adequate power supply.
I could recall those glorious days when I had just moved into the neighbourhood. It was an Eldorado. No power outage and whenever there was, power was back in the twinkle of an eye. There was hardly any night when there was no power supply. It was like a haven until one cold night in December of 2007. There was power outage as usual when a popular soap was airing on TV. The whole family was watching with rapt attention when PHCN struck. Everyone had thought power would be back in the twinkle of an eye, as was the norm. Alas, it was not to be. Seconds, minutes and hours passed, no light, not even a flicker from the bulb. Everyone was disappointed. The generating set which had long been abandoned came alive again. Christmas was a few days away. No power to celebrate the good Lord’s birth. It was awful! That was how the nightmare of the rich began in a hitherto peaceful estate as all manner of noise came out of generating sets all night.

A friend who lived in a room and parlour on the Island also lamented a similar fate. Hers was elegantly christened ‘a mini flat’ by estate agents in order to price it higher; but it is still a room and parlour. It was not even up to a standard room and a parlour on the mainland as the rooms were smaller than average.

For my friend, it was not the room and parlour that was the issue, however. It was the appliances she had in the room and parlour in relation to the monthly bill that almighty PHCN gave her. She had a sound system, a television set, a fridge, an iron, two ceiling fans and, of course, about five bulbs. The challenge was that she did not have a metre which could be dangerous when you are dealing with a powerful entity like PHCN.

According to her, PHCN officials started on the small side whenever they brought the bill, or that was what she thought. In her first year of living in the apartment, her bill was around N1,200 per month which she paid without challenges. Then she realised that because she had a very busy schedule and was hardly at home, she would rather pay her bill in advance. But that was a mistake because it suddenly sent the wrong signals to her electricity benefactor.

Within a few months, her bill jumped to N3,000.00 per month, then to N4,000.00 and finally to N8,000.00 per month. In all these months, her electricity consumption did not change. In fact, in one of the months, she had no electricity supply for a whole month except for about three or four days, and yet in that same month, her bill moved up from the previous month’s N3,000.00 to N4,000.00. She had to pay for being supplied darkness that month.

She eventually became so fed up that she wrote a letter to the PHCN marketing manager on the Island requesting she be disconnected from the PHCN grid since it had obviously become cheaper for her to generate electricity independently via her generating set than to buy from PHCN. Not surprisingly, she did not get an official reply from PHCN. She said she was not expecting one, anyway. “PHCN have no time for small fries like me,” she told me.

The PHCN problem in Nigeria comes in different ways. Like my friend, there are those who have paid for years to be supplied meters but have not been supplied, but still try all they can to pay bills for an electricity consumption that was never measured.

There are people who never even pay any bill at all, they just use free electricity, while there are some people who have meters but have no power supply even as the nation marks her 50 years of independence. The promise of power by 2010 since the regimes of Babangida and Abacha is yet to be fulfilled. Obansanjo made many promises, yet none was fulfilled, although it was said that he laid the foundation for his successor to build on. Unfortunately, the power project did not live to see the light of day.

Now, it is Goodluck’s turn to make promises. We are all quietly waiting to see what he would do regarding this. Nigerians are tired of this electricity nonsense!