Welcome To The Dark Ages Called Nigeria

As a Nigerian living in Nigeria, having a blackout isn't news, it has never been and probably will never be. The country and it's citizens are used to being in the dark, I actually have no power supply as I type this and it's really not a big deal because no one else has electricity (except those who turned on their generator). The only time it becomes a big deal is when my neighbour in the next building has electricity and I don't, then we go for war.

_{Photo by Ricardo IV Tamayo}

The issue with electricity in Nigeria is not something I feel like I can all write in words because something in me just tells me that maybe it's a curse passed down from our ancestors or maybe some really old lady that we must have pissed off somewhere in history.

Some few years ago, I had read somewhere in the news about a certain minister had resigned just because they had some few hours of blackout in Taiwan. I remember reading that and a smile appeared on my face, the obvious question I had asked myself was if something like that would ever happen here and I already knew the answer even before I finished asking the question, a big no.

You see, when it comes to Nigeria and blackout, I would want to believe that the meaning of blackout won't be the same as that of other countries because there's a blackout everyday here and seeing how today's contest is asking us to write about a blackout that stood out for us, it will be a very difficult thing to do.

So instead of talking about blackouts (which is an everyday occurrence like I said), I will talk about the one time my neighbours had power supply and we didn't, so a personal blackout is what I would call this one.

This was during my second year in school and in my school, students are given projects to handle during the second year and one thing that is very common amongst this project is the amount of typing you have to do on your computer. So the process of the whole thing was pretty simple, get a good approved topic from the lecturer, make your research and then type all of your research into one very lengthy document before printing it out.

I was given my project topic during the holidays and this was the time I had refused to go home to be with my family, so I had remained in school and we probably were like just four people left in the entire hostel. And then one faithful morning, the guys in charge of electricity had disconnected our light because we had some bills to settle.

From that day till the next two weeks was me moving from one house to another, begging people to let me charge my laptop just so that I could keep on typing out my project. That period was no doubt the worse for me because I was already uncomfortable having to do all of those typing myself and now that I was doing it at people's houses it made the whole thing worse.

Luckily for me the light got fixed few days before school resumption and I was able to complete my project at the comfort of my own home.