Blackout is an anomaly which decreases a lot of activities both on the personal and on a business level. It's not fun to be in a house where there is a blackout. I don't enjoy that and it's just so sad that this same 'anomaly' is now a norm in my part of the world.
Nigerians will tell you so much about our struggles with insufficient power supply. It's something we've sadly come to terms with. For most Nigerians, it's more weird to have an uninterrupted power supply for 24 hours than to spend 3 days without any power supply. We are just not used to having uninterrupted power. The idea of it happening sounds very alien to us.
As you can already imagine, I've experienced power blackouts in several cases. We've all learned to improvise and embrace alternative sources of power supply. Most households and businesses in Nigeria have standby generators which they use to generate power whenever they are faced with the issue of blackouts.
Usage of Solar panels is also on the increase. If you can't afford any of that, you can still make do with Power Banks. I have a few power banks which I've been using for a very long time and each of them is worth every penny spent to get it.
Now, lemme tell of the worst incident of power outage that I've ever experienced;
During my days as a University student, I lived in school hostel from my sophomore year to my graduation year. This is mostly because I couldn't afford to live off-campus. House rent over there is a big deal. However, there is an adorable advantage that comes with living in school. We are usually guaranteed a few hours of power supply each day even if there is no power supply in town.
Our school has very big standby generators that power the whole school environment from 7 pm to 11 pm. This was very helpful because as students, electricity is one of the important things we need for studying at night, ironing our uniforms, keeping our gadgets charged and whatnot. It's hard to spend a day without seeing electricity.
Sometime in 2016, just at the beginning of the second semester, we started having some power supply issues. The Power distributors failed to provide electricity to our school and we were not too bothered because we expected the school to turn on their standby generators by 7 p.m. The time came and nothing happened. We didn't see any sign of electricity. None at all.
It was a very tough night and many people showed up in the next day's lectures with rumpled uniforms. Students were carrying around their gadgets with their chargers in search of where to charge their gadgets, but the odds of finding such a place were very unfavorable. When it was nearing 7 p.m. that day, we patiently waited for something inspiring to happen, but all hope was shattered.
After two whole days of no electricity, the inconveniences became too unbearable for students. The school completely ignored the students. No memo was passed around about the issue at hand. By the third day, when it was time to on the generator and nothing happened, students went wild and broke into a protest.
That protest rocked the school environment. A couple of windows got shattered. A bunch of flowers got messed up. As far as I could tell, that was a peaceful protest, but the school Admins thought otherwise.
Everyone was forced into a 2-months break and all the students of our University paid #10,000 each as a reparation fee for the 'damages' caused during the protest. That's A LOT of money. The worst part of this issue is that we only spent a month at the beginning of the semester before we got forced to go on that break.
Immediately it got called off, we came back only to be faced with the end of end-of-semester Exams. A lot of people had very poor results due to this and some even had to reseat for several courses after failing to get decent grades in the Exam.
This incident of protesting due to blackouts and having to pay #10,000 as a reparation fee happened twice during the years I spent as a student at the University of Nigeria, Enugu Campus. I didn't enjoy any of that.
Thanks For Not Missing Any Full-stop Or Comma.
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Additional Image is taken from Unsplash
