In my city, there's a particular area that gets electricity supply more than every other place in the town, and according to what I have heard and also found out, it's said that the supply is directly from a bigger city close to it, and it baffles me a lot why they can't make every part of the city get such electricity supply.
Sometimes, whenever I'm coming back from church and I see that there's electricity in that area, I don't just put on my hope on that electricity supply , hoping to meet light at home. The people that live in that area always feel like they're on top of the world, and of course, they are on top of the world because they're completely different from other areas. The setting has been like that, and no one in the city seems bothered enough to fight for the generalisation of electricity supply.
Is electricity supply in my area very poor?
Mehn, it's extremely poor! We only get electricity at the mercy of the power company in the town and not generally in Nigeria because there are some states in Nigeria that get regular electricity supply, such as Akwa Ibom.
In a month, the only time we get regular electricity supply is whenever bills are to be shared, and the light only lasts regularly for, at most, four days. And this is so bad because it means that since they have the capacity to supply electricity on a constant basis whenever they want to distribute bills, it shows they can still supply electricity on a regular basis all through the month and not just for a back-to-back few days.
Some weeks back, I had countless sleepless nights because there was a constant electricity supply, and it mostly came at night and that was because bills were distributed. I needed to utilise the electricity fully because we don't get to see it often. Oh yes, we usually see light once or twice every week on average. We have gotten used to the lifestyle; we have gotten used to generating our electricity through generators with fueling and solar systems.
We pay electricity bills!
Because it's compulsory to pay electricity bills, otherwise the light will be disconnected, my compound devised a means to reduce the payment cost. No matter the amount of bills we are charged for a month, which most times gets to ₦10,000, we only pay ₦3,000. Yes, we've made it a mandatory thing not to exceed that amount, and the power company has been accepting that because they need money too. This means that we don't pay according to the bill given to us; we pay according to what we've agreed on, and it's been working perfectly for us.
Sometimes, we even deliberately boycott some months' payments, and nothing happens to us. Lol.
Thanks for reading.
Photo used is mine