Power and Abuse

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I once wrote about power and how a lot of people would most likely abuse it if it was given to them. Well today I’m here to talk about it again but this time it will be based on what happened in my hostel this morning.

A lot of you know I’m from Nigeria and if you know Nigeria, you will know one thing we don’t have is a lot of power supply and no power supply meant no water. Don’t get me wrong, because I know some of you are already picturing me living in a poor village where my only source of water is a dirty river far away from where I live. But that isn’t the case here, the world is very developed around here and there are some places who have steady power supply for up to twenty hours a day and some even more than that, just not where I live.

Last night, some of the tenants decided to speak out about the water issue on my hostels whatsapp group (that’s right, we have a WhatsApp group). Apparently the people living upstairs at the top most floor were not happy about the fact that whenever there was power supply, the people downstairs would have water and we upstairs wouldn’t. We would be forced to take our buckets downstairs to go fetch water and then take it back upstairs, nothing different of a military training.

They spoke calmly about their problem and we even ended up joking about it before going to bed only for us to be woken up by our caretaker early this morning. She wasn’t online last night during the whole chat and had only read our messages early this morning. She had stormed upstairs angry, threatening not to give us water for a whole month because we were complaining.

The whole thing sounded like a joke to me but apparently she was serious because she locked the water tanks. So now I’m starting to get pissed off because we clearly paid for this water when we paid for our rent and there wasn’t any rule on the tenant agreement we signed that said that tenants can’t complain about any dissatisfaction. She clearly is abusing her power as the caretaker and unfortunately no one is saying or doing anything about it, not even me.

We had power supply this morning and she refused to go turn on the water. If people with little powers can behave like this, who is to say what they will do when they get to a place of real power.

Thoughts of reporting her to the landlord has crossed my mind multiple times but the landlord is her uncle and would only tell her that I called him, making her my enemy and that is the last thing I want right now. Not because I’m scared, but because I really am too busy with work to make a new enemy for myself right now.