Tag: Energy

The Lagos municipality was first electrified in 1886, long before our country came into being.

That is certainly impressive but much so is the fact that New York, now known to the world as the city of lights was first electrified in 1882,  a mere four years before Lagos was connected to the modern miracle of municipally supplied electricity. Lagos was, in the beginning juiced up with electrify provided by two generators with a combined capacity of 60 Kw and must have generated a great buzz among the Lagosians who were alive at the time.

I spent my early years in the provinces and was witness to the arrival of electricity in Osogbo in 1957 where it generated great excitement, not least in our household. We had just arrived from Oyo at the time where we were familiar with the brightness of the electric light bulb. This is because we lived on the premises of the famous St Andrew’s College which had a generator which was operational until 10 pm and so we were very excited at the prospect of resuming our acquaintance with the wonders of electricity. By the time we arrived in Lagos in 1960, Lagos had a steady supply of electricity from the coal powered station at Ijora and from the point of view of electricity, life could not be better as power supply could, at that time be taken for granted at all times. The streets of Lagos were brightly lit by electric lamps which everywhere banished the oppression of darkness and turned Lagos into a twenty four hour city which never slept. The lights went off during the Civil War and never really came back again so that today, landing at the Lagos airport at night is like landing in another century, one that existed before the world knew the wonders of electricity. This is in sharp contrast to other more fortunate cities whose welcoming lights could be seen a long way off before your plane begins its descent into the sea of lights which they represented.

Now, there are not too many places in Nigeria where there is no supply of electricity, at least nominally. The vast majority of houses are wired for electricity even if the supply is at best, only fitful. But long after the miracle of 1886, electricity is no longer about light but power, power to do so many things that to be without it is to descend into the hell of the Middle ages and before. Now, the modern household will feel terribly deprived if electricity supply lasts only until 10 pm because fans, television sets,  fridges, not to talk of those mobile phones waiting to be charged and all those other  wonderful gadgets which keep us constantly in touch with modernity and life itself, need a constant all round supply of electricity.  This is a far cry from what it was in 1886 when the mere provision of light was enough to send the citizenry into undiluted ecstasy. And there is no limit to the boundaries which electricity can cross at will.

This is a far cry from 1831 when Michael Faraday first created an electric current. This was a marvellous invention which caused such great excitement that Prince Albert, consort to Queen Victoria had to come to see for himself what all the fuss was about. Apparently, he was more puzzled than impressed by the demonstration of the existence of electric currents because after seeing the demonstration of this phenomenon he asked the expectant scientist what was the point of the electric current . As far as the royal visitor was concerned, the infant current was no more than a gimmick, something to provide some short lived entertainment for the multitudes of the great unwashed. The inventor, taken aback by the question replied with a question of his own. ‘Your Majesty, what is the point of a new born baby?’ That particular new born baby, treated by the prince with a distinct lack of enthusiasm has grown and is growing  in so many directions that life on this planet would simply be impossible without it. In fact any debate about the usefulness of electricity to the world would be like the argument about the chicken and the egg as to which came first because in terms of the modern world, can there be a world, any world at all, without electricity? All round the world the materials which we consume in vast quantities are coming off all kinds of conveyor belts all driven by electricity without which nothing is made that was made. These days, you cannot even get a hair cut or clean your teeth without the involvement of electricity and we carry the badge of our serious underdevelopment in our inability to generate enough electricity to power the machines which produce all those artefacts which give meaning to our lives. And this is in spite of the fact that Lagos, the so called economic capital of Nigeria was electrified only four years after New York entered her own electrical age.

Lagos was dragged into her electrical age but unlike New York, the industrial revolution which ensured the phenomenal growth of that city did not come to Lagos and therefore, to be honest, no pre-industrial society has any real need of electricity. This is why Lagos can be said to have very little, if any need of electricity. Were the lights to go off completely in New York today, that city would be dead within twenty-four torrid hours. All the millions of lifts which keep those sky scrapers for which the city is famous operational will stop moving in an instant and for how long will the hundreds of thousands of people trapped in them survive? Navigating the streets will become impossible as all the street lights would be decommissioned with immediate effect and traffic snarled up for thousands of city miles. And what about the hospitals, tied as they are to the life support of continuous electricity supply? Those patients on life support would be dead in minutes and those undergoing any form of surgical intervention for whatever ails them would follow shortly thereafter. As for Lagos, if the lights were to go off for any length of time, the primitive beat of life in the city will go on, perhaps indefinitely and the situation, at least in the first few days, will excite nothing more than snide remarks or some form of gallows humour to make the situation bearable. There are precious few conveyor belts to be halted in Lagos and babies can be born in the feeble glow of torch lights. Under those conditions, life would go on and a lot more babies will be conceived. Humourous Lagosians would notice the bump and come up with a nickname for the cohort of babies born during the period covered by the extended power outage. In time, the dark days will be relegated so far back that it would be completely forgotten much sooner than later. For New York, life without electricity for twenty-four hours will be like a massive heart attack whereas for Lagos, it will maybe register as a little blip, not worthy of mention.

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For all that, the most single topic of conversation in Nigeria is electricity or to be more specific, the lack of it. I went to a secondary school in Lagos in the sixties, more than seventy years after the electrification of the city. I spent seven memorable years in that school and throughout that period, the school routine was disturbed on less than six occasions by a power cut and this was brought about by the general strike of 1964 when workers walked off their places at Ijora. As a result of this, evening prep had to be suspended, much to the delight of the student body which savoured the unexpected but most welcome  suspension of engagement with dull school books. We gathered in little groups to tell tall tails and waited for normalcy to be restored. Now, even with generators and other backup facilities, I wonder if there are schools in Lagos that can guarantee that power cuts will not disrupt their activities at some point in time throughout the school year. This sign of a regression to the distant past is unmistakeable.

In the intervening years between my experience in a Lagos in which electricity supply could be taken for granted and now, electricity has taken on a new and disturbing meaning in Nigeria.  A vast and expanding sum of money has been spent  only to be incinerated in the search for the provision of electricity to the expanding population of a country that has become bogged down in a morass of underdevelopment and an insane expansion in population. More and more people are facing the contradiction of dwindling resources amidst the rigours of galloping inflation and rising demands for a better life even as the possibility of meaningful employment receded on a more or less daily basis forcing the indefinite postponement of life goals, a postponement that is threatening to become a termination. We are confronted with myriad problems but right at the bottom of the pile is that of productivity. There is a lack of the means of production and so we are unemployed, misemployed or underemployed and those that are lucky enough to be employed are underpaid and disgruntled. There is a shortage, an acute shortage of power in this country and as our population grows, our ability to cope diminishes to the same extent as the number of people needing any form of service increases.

For close to eight months now, we have been scratching our heads as to solve the pressing problem of how to afford the cost of diesel, petrol, aviation fuel, cooking gas, charcoal and even fire wood. When we factor in the uncertain supply of electricity, it becomes clear that we are in the fierce grip of an acute shortage of power to produce anything. This is why we are forced to import virtually everything from other countries where the problem of any shortage of productive power has been solved. At various times in history, certain countries have stepped forward to claim the title of workshop to the world. Following the Industrial Revolution in the middle years of the eighteenth century, the global workshop was centred in Birmingham, England. At that time, coal provided power for production and so much coal was burnt in the area around Birmingham that that area acquired the name of Black country because the whole place was blackened by the smoke from burning coal. Since then, other parts of the globe have taken up the challenge of producing the industrial goods consumed all over the world. The USA, Germany, Japan have at various times provided the world with finished goods. Today, India and more strongly, China are the leaders of consumer goods production and their respective economies are booming which is why their peoples are being promoted into a comfortable global middle class.

Over in Nigeria, we have not yet arrived at the starting point of industrial production because we are in the grip of a suffocating energy shortage. This is in spite of the fact that  even though for more than half a decade Nigeria has been one of the leading producers of the greatest source of energy, crude oil from which other countries have extracted vast quantities of energy. They are using the energy availm produced all sorts of wonderful goods for which we have developed an unhealthy appetite. All we have done is set up a rentier economy which has bred nothing other than rank corruption for which we are justly famous of if you like, infamous. More and more Nigerians are falling into intractable poverty and terror stalks the land with a ferocity which is destroying our joys and well being. Nigeria is slowly roasting in the unquenchable fires of crude oil and it is becoming apparent that there is nothing we can do about it.