Once again on the seemingly intractable issue of power supply. The
primary question is, Why is Nigeria still in darkness? Is it due to the
ineptitude of our engineers? Is it due to a lack of financial wherewithal?
Or simply a want of political will?

I have to disagree with more distinguished Nigerians on the issue of
finances: I aver emphatically that Nigeria's inability to provide a
continuous electric power supply to her citizens is not due to financial
constraints. Lately, the international oil trade dynamic has benefited
our national coffers greatly. As for technology, engineers at NEPA/PHCN
are not being asked to (re-)invent the wheel here nor even to introduce
electricity to Nigeria. Thankfully the colonialists brought us
electricity; otherwise the situation on the ground might be even more
calamitous.

The developed world ushered in the electronic age in the 19th century
and here we are, simply and only, asking the engineers to maintain what is
on the ground, repair what they can, replace what they cannot and
endeavour to expand the grid of distribution so that more citizens can
benefit from this century-old techology.

Power generation and distribution is being done successfully the world
over. Indeed in neighbouring Ghana engineers would put our gentlemen
of NEPA/PHCN to shame were the latter capable of so humane an emotion.

Nigerians must realize now that forces of darkness are are in danger of
overwhelming us. There is an unholy alliance, between petroleum
marketers and government who have come to realize that it is politically
inexpedient to keep throttling the hapless citizens by raising the price
of petroleum products ad nauseam.

What then is the their solution? This
is what I call The Devil's Calculus. The genius solution is simply to
shut off power supply!

The citizens are then compelled to provide their own supply of power
even as they continue to pay their PHCN bills. The net result is that the
nation's consumption of petroleum products goes up quantumly thereby
achieving for this unholy alliance, through volume, what they couldn't
accomplish through pricing.

Through volume, the favoured importers are effectively guaranteed an
abundant margin of profit without touching the genie of price increase.

The profit motive, therefore, overrides everything else. Even as
Nigerians choke to death from Carbon Monoxide in ever-increasing numbers. Meanwhile government acts the ostrich with its head buried
in the sand. Notice the absence of any awareness drive to enlighten the
citizenry on the dangers of improper use of power generators, the
proper manner in which to handle the highly inflammable fuel that our
house-help and others are constrained to contend with in the dead dark of
night.

It is time now to send a clear message to our leaders that this tragedy
has brutalized and traumatized the people enough. No more excuses.
There is no rationalizing this blight in this 21century. We must have
Nigeria on-line NOW and that means uninterrupted power supply from PHCN and
not from my three, smoky, overworked generators which are slowly
killing everyone with pollution.