Generators for the Powerless
by Jídé Salawu
Let’s talk about the experience of Nigeria’s darkness in terms of power supply. Growing up in a small town of Shao, miles away from the Kainji Dam, I always imagined the immensity of the megadam as the whole country’s source of electricity. Kainji was part of Nigeria's colonial inheritance, financed and powered by loans and grants from the IMF. Kainji was a promise of modernity, at the expense of the local villagers whose lives were erased each rainy season in the floods believed to be caused by the release of excess water from the dam.
In Shao in the early 1990s, power outages lasting a full day were very rare, though they were more common in larger cities like Ilorin and Lagos. But things changed radically at the millennium; consecutive days of darkness became normal, and a five-day total outage was not unusual. Individuals who relied on electricity had to start buying generators. Many relied on a Tiger generator, popularly called the “I Pass My Neighbor” generator, to light their homes. Tiger, Yamahya, Mikano—these are the names that power Nigeria. Until the national cry of euphoria again arises in the phrase “UP NEPA”—a shouted sign of excitement by Nigerians upon the restoration of power.
Kainji supplied Nigeria with its electricity, and my hometown was a beneficiary of the project in 1976 when the town experienced its first lights. Nigeria’s power problem did not start today, and its experience of endemic national outages is part of its history.
Nigeria’s darkness, real and symbolic, expresses the decline of humanity within the country. The more you probe its history, the worse the darkness swallows you: violations of human rights, crimes, atrocities, coups d’état by power-hungry military figures inflicting, one after another, their monomaniacal, invariable economic austerity, and with it the loss of social coherence attendant on all the above. There are many ways to talk about Nigeria's darkness. It is the archetype of the failed postcolonial promise under the perpetual grip of self-serving politicians ever ready to sell the birthright of the country for the sake of their own privilege.
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