Photo credit: the Guardian
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention. If we agree so, may I ask who/what the father is?
A friend called me early this morning, and after the usual exchange of banter, I asked how he was doing. His reply was a hit below the belt, he said he was watching video without electricity!
I didn’t actually know what that meant. I proceeded to ask if that was a new invention. I mean video without electricity.
He then said if someone didn’t have electric power in the house and he went outside to be watching the scenery, wouldn’t that be video without electricity?
Who has not been involved in video without electricity? OK, our powerful men in the various seats of power might have escaped it.
The nouveau riche too might not have experienced video without electricity. How could they have? They have giant generating sets supplying power to their houses twenty-four seven.
Why should these groups bother, they are helping us in spending our money. We have long gone past the stage of caring.
They know us for our docility. They know we are generally complacent. They recognise the fact that we would usually leave rabid leprosy to take care of a slight ringworm.
Some years ago, I was a regular visitor to Togo. Apart from the relative peace and quiet of Lome, the capital which I noticed, one other thing was that I never heard shouts of NEPA or whatever their electricity supply company was called.
It wasn’t as if the power supply never suffered any interruptions. However, as at when I was a regular visitor to the country, whenever there was a cut in power supply, it hardly lasted more than a couple of minutes.
But then, such occurrences were never common.
A couple of years ago, some a school took its pupils on excursion to Ghana from Nigeria. One of the teachers that led the pupils there did what was a sensible thing for a Nigerian to do.
He took along a rechargeable torchlight. However, the contingent was in for a shock. For the half week they spent in the country, they never experienced a cut in power supply.
Our teacher was not used to non stop electricity supply. So, he inserted his torchlight in an electric socket to be charged in case of any eventuality.
The contingent had arrived in Nigeria before he remembered the gadget!
Some days ago, a luxury bus came to a street in Abeokuta. The bus brought the properties of a a retired diplomat. He was serving in the Nigerian embassy in Ivory Coast.
Some gentlemen came with the bus. Most of their cellphone batteries needed to be charged. They then saw a man who was charging phone batteries.
They first gave him their phones to charge. However, when they discovered that he was charging the batteries with a generator, they retrieved their phones from him.
They said they had never charged their phones with generators. A generator was actually strange to them, just like it was strange to us when we were little brats.
However, you know we are the giants of Africa. And you also know that we are very many in this country. Our problems are also multifaceted.
I wonder what countries like China, India and the United States should be complaining about.
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