Chidi Amuta
2 July 2009
opinion
Lagos — The generator is perhaps the most apt metaphor for a nation that has learnt to survive on permanent life support. How else can anyone explain our addiction to emergency arrangements in place of enduring solutions that even more modest nations have come to take for granted? Gradually, progressively and unconsciously, we have come to internalize an emergency mentality, the unconditional acceptance of all manner of contraptions that add up to a devaluation of our collective self worth. And most readily, the emergency solution graduates into the norm and people come to accept it and move on.
If the police cannot protect you from criminals, erect vigilantes. Get the police high command to license and recognize the vigilantes until they become one and the sense with the criminals that necessitated their onset. When that regime is sufficiently internalized, the vigilante arrangement comes to be preferred by even those who are paid to ensure that things work differently.
Anyone who manages to insist that the police should do its job is seen as abnormal. That is how come Bakassi in the South-east and OPC in Lagos became part of the language of security among the people to the mortal disadvantage of the police. Now, vigilantes, militants, policemen, customs officers and soldiers have become virtual formations of the "armed forces of Nigeria" incorporated. They all bear arms. They all use them freely. They all wear uniforms, sometimes hardly distinguishable one from the other.
Similarly, if as a matter of deliberate policy, the government refuses to get the refineries to function, the same government hands out licences to cronies and dubious oligarchs to import petroleum products indefinitely. With time, the emergency regime of importation of these products is elevated to a national policy and, gradually, public discourse shifts from the aberration of importing what we can produce easily to other ridiculous matters like the "federal character" composition of the importers, the appropriate prices of imported products, the degree of "subsidy" in the "landed cost" of the products etc. While these arguments go on, the rest of us are left stranded at the gas station and workers threaten to go on strike to press home their own preferred price regime for the imported products.
Then we proceed from there to elevate the importers of petrol into national icons, "whiz kids", role models. The honorary degrees, chieftaincy titles, national honours, media awards etc. flow naturally. A nation that elevates glorified petrol attendants and racketeering thugs into role models condemns its future to the kind of perennial crisis that now defines our lives.
Nowhere else is our collective comfort with the emergency mentality more frightening than at the level of national politics and the management of the public space. If the electoral system delivers a crook when you voted for a credible patriot, an outcome at variance with the wishes of the majority, the system cajoles you to live with the surrogate impostor and allow time and courts of dubious jurisprudence to legitimize the fraud. The otherwise illegitimate ruler and the regime of fraud that ushered him in become the norm. New laws defining the rules of the electoral game roll out and with time the new rules are used to perpetuate the infamy. Over time, what started out as criminal hijack of the system is legitimized into a norm that perpetuates itself in an endless cycle of infamy. The frequent triumphs of aberration further blurs the dividing line between the norm and an emergency expediency to the point where successive generations come to accept the exception as the rule.
On the immediate subject of our tragic power supply situation, the generator psychology requires even greater understanding. Most urban-based Nigerians aged 35 and under have almost no memory of a world without generators. In fact, those of them who attained the voting age of 18 in the last 10 years have only known generators as the most reliable intervention agency in the all too frequent power outages that now constitutes our daily reality. In reality, most Nigerians have no memory of when last our public power system functioned reliably. Some put it as far back as when we still had the ECN (Electricity Corporation of Nigeria.) There is the joke that from the moment when the authority was renamed NEPA (National Electric Power Authority), we have been plunged into a seemingly endless embrace with darkness. To that extent, it is quite possible that a significant percentage of our population have come to imbibe the generator mentality in its fullest ramifications.
In the consciousness of these younger Nigerians, the omnipresence and deification of generators is no different from the recourse of our people to native medicine men, ritual shrines (Nollywood, beware!) and alternative concoctions in preference to public hospitals that have neither drugs nor competent personnel. It is no different from the deadly choice between both outright illiteracy and the expensive private schools in the face of a public education system that is everywhere in terminal decay.
For good measure, therefore, those who have President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua's ears should assist him. On his long standing promise to declare an emergency on the scandalous power crisis, the President needs to be counselled to conserve his energy. The emergency declared itself long ago. If emergency means a situation in which what is normal is suspended and what is expedient is momentarily decreed into existence, then as a matter of fact, we have been living in an emergency ever since. If the president insists on declaring the emergency in the power sector, he would be reminding us of a pain we are getting used to. He will remind us of the empty promises of his predecessors, the wasted funds, the raised and dashed hopes. We have become so used to our generators that we now supplicate before them each time a major football match is to be relayed on television. If your generator fails you, your neighbour's own will not betray. It is better to leave us alone.
The emergence of the generator as a ubiquitous feature of our reality especially in the urban areas is therefore long standing. Gradually, the generator which was meant as an emergency source of power has become the dominant reality. So much has been written and said about the virtual collapse of the power system and the rise of generators. The cost of governance rises each time governments all over the federation install and fuel these huge generators. Businesses operate in fits and starts because the cost of alternative power is enough to drain any decent business out of existence. The more sensible businesses especially in manufacturing are closing shop and moving elsewhere in West Africa, especially Ghana, to escape power induced bankruptcy in Nigeria. They are leaving with the jobs as well!
Not to talk of the social costs. Each time there is a power outage, someone on the operating table or in the labour ward in some remote hospital dies. In some of our densely populated urban areas, we all are dying instalmentally from the fumes of a million generators.
The inequality of circumstance among our people manifests also in access to generators. It has become a way of showing your economic power. The super rich possess multiple generators - one for the day and another for the night. Others make do with just one in the hope that nothing goes wrong. The lowly are not about to be knocked out. Courtesy of the industrial explosion in China, India and Korea, something novel has entered the social vocabulary of Nigerians by way of generators. In Lagos, this tribe of small generators, some just enough to power a few light bulbs, are called, in popular parlance- "I better pass my neighbour". In the pitch darkness of most nights, the few apartments that can boast of functional generators become the abodes of the blessed, islands of light in a sea of darkness.
If the President insists that he wants to break our apparent contract with darkness, he may have struck a familiar chord. Others before him have said so and we are still here, stranded in the dark. He is awarding contracts to rehabilitate power stations or build new ones. That has happened before. No one knows the relationship between these new contracts and the ones former President Olusegun Obasanjo awarded to rehabilitate the same facilities. An elaborate investigation of the power sector once revealed that the Obasanjo contracts were an elaborate scam. As it turns out, both those who investigated the Obasanjo power sector and those hired to preside over the reformed power arrangement are either undergoing criminal investigation or have been arraigned in a related capacity.
Yet I have no doubts that the President means well on this power matter as indeed on other lofty matters such as security of life and property, the sanitization of the financial system or peace and prosperity in the Niger Delta. But on this power thing, I have some humble pieces of advice. The President must urgently summon an important meeting behind closed doors. The attendance must include the President, his immediate predecessor in office, all importers of diesel and petrol, leaders of the generator lobby (mostly Lebanese), all representatives of power system companies (including General Electric) and the topmost management of Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).
The assignment of this all important meeting should be simple: each participant should submit a one page explanation of how the interests they represent have contributed to the collapse of the Nigerian public power system. Thereafter, the President should in the presence of his august visitors order the dismantling and removal of all generators in Aso Rock Villa within 90 days. The understanding would be that from then on, each of these interest groups will be held responsible for any power outage in Nigeria.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2009 This Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
Nigeria is blessed with enormous energy resources. It needs them locally, but exports them to get foreign money it does not really need. In any economy, money competes with money. The more there is, the less each unit is worth. This is especially true of foreign money, but easiest to see with domestic. Look at Zimbabwe. Everyone has oodles of money, but no one has any MONEY. Use your oil and gas to solve your local problems. Export little, as your descendants will want some too. Help those fuel addicts in Europe and America solve their problems by denying them another 'fix'. Develop and exploit non fossil energy sources in your land. You have plenty, just in the biomass in your Typha infestation. You have tropical sunlight to use. Make your nation rich.