There is a particular kind of suffering that nobody writes about in literary journals, nobody makes Netflix documentaries about, nobody brings up at climate summits or economic forums, and yet it has shaped more of my personality than any childhood trauma or formative heartbreak.

I am talking about sitting in a room at 2 pm, sweating so hard your shirt has essentially become a second skin, watching your laptop battery count down from 14% like a man reading his own last rites, while outside your window, a generator somewhere in the neighborhood is doing its best impression of a jet engine taking off.

Speaking of generator, I hope my neighbor, who always runs his generator overnight, gets to read this.

I want to be clear that I did not wake up today planning to be angry. I woke up with modest ambitions. I wanted to read. Maybe eat something. Possibly exist without incident. Then I realized it's Saturday, and I have barely seen six hours of light throughout the week, thirty minutes yesterday (Yes, I was counting).

A Brief History of My Betrayal

Let me explain something about Nigerian electricity that people who have not lived here do not fully appreciate, which is that the problem is not simply that it goes out.

Everything goes eventually. Batteries die. Relationships end. Governments collapse. We are not children. We understand entropy.

The specific psychological torment of NEPA is that it goes without explanation, returns without announcement, stays for an amount of time that has no discernible logic, and the entire system operates with the confidence of an entity that has never once been held accountable for anything in its entire institutional life. NEPA was renamed PHCN. Then it was privatized into DisCos. The light still goes at 6 am when you are trying to do something important and comes back at 3 am when you are asleep and cannot enjoy it. They changed the name and kept the chaos.

I have a generator. I want you to know that, not because I am bragging, but I need you to understand that having a generator in Nigeria is not luxury, it is a separate ongoing financial and emotional relationship that also has its own problems. Fun fact: I just did the maths, and realized I have actually bought five generators in my short time in this life.

Anyway, the generator needs fuel. The fuel costs money. More money today than yesterday, which is a way of saying I started using gen when a liter was #100, and now a liter is #1,400. The generator also makes noise that enters your skull and sits there like a tenant who has stopped paying rent but refuses to leave. And still, despite all of this, I feel genuine gratitude when it comes on.

I, a grown adult with a postgraduate education, feel sincere relief when a machine I purchased with my own money does the job it was purchased to do. Nigeria has conditioned me to be grateful for my own property working. That is not a small thing to process.

What They Don't Tell You About Heat

The temperature, according to my phone, on a hot afternoon can climb up to 34 degrees Celsius. But 34 degrees Celsius with no fan is not the same as 34 degrees Celsius with a fan.

The fan does not cool you. The fan moves the hot air around, which is technically different from cooling, in the same way that being punched by someone wearing a glove is technically different from being punched bare-fisted. You still got punched. You are still hot. But there is motion now, and motion is at least a form of lying to your body, and sometimes lying is enough to survive.

When the light goes out, and the fan stops, the lying stops too. You are just there with the heat, which has no agenda and no mercy and is simply doing what heat does. I have sat in rooms in this country, feeling my own thoughts slow down because of the temperature. I have watched myself become stupider in real time. I will be thinking something complex and interesting, and then the light goes out, and twenty minutes later, I am just staring at a wall, not even having a thought, just existing in the heat like a yam in a pot. This is not melodrama. I have a thesis to write. The yam analogy is more accurate than I am comfortable admitting.

The Inverter People

Somewhere in this country, there exists a class of people who solved the electricity problem by buying an inverter and a battery bank, and these people have achieved a kind of low-grade spiritual superiority that I find genuinely insufferable even though I completely understand it and would do the same thing if I had the money.

The Inverter Person does not join conversations about NEPA with the same urgency as the rest of us. They sort of float above the discussion, occasionally saying things like oh it was a bit inconvenient yesterday when it went for six hours because my battery was already at forty percent, and then everyone else at the table is silent because six hours is a Tuesday for us, six hours is nothing, six hours is when we start to feel like ourselves again after the initial panic.

The Inverter Person has decoupled from the Nigerian electricity emotional experience and is now operating on a separate frequency that I can only describe as mild inconvenience instead of existential siege.

I am not bitter. I am incredibly bitter. I want an inverter so badly, scratch that, I want to leave the country more badly.

The International Embarrassment Problem

What makes this so particularly galling, and I mean galling in the specific way where you feel it in your chest cavity, is that we are not talking about a poor country that does not have resources. We are talking about a country that has oil, even though we are using half of it to pay debts. We are talking about a country that exports energy while its citizens sit in the dark, which is the kind of irony that would be funny if it were happening somewhere else and you were reading about it in a magazine on a flight.

When it happens to you in your room in Ibadan at 2 am, and you cannot charge your phone to call anyone, it is less funny. It is, in fact, not funny at all. It is the kind of situation that makes you reconsider every major life decision that brought you to this specific room in this specific country at this specific moment of powerlessness in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

I have read from online people how they lost their freelance gigs because of the anyhowness of NEPA. I have also read that NEPA needs almost $300BN to provide 24 hours of electricity. I don't know how true the calculation is, but what about we start with maybe 12 hours of constant electricity?

A Confession

I will tell you something embarrassing.

Whenever light comes back, especially after a long outage, there is a sound that happens in Nigerian neighborhoods that I can only describe as a collective exhale. And sometimes, sometimes, somebody in a house nearby will shout "Up NEPA".

Just a shout of relief. And the first thirty times this happened in my life, I found it amusing and slightly tragic. Now, when the light comes back, I sometimes shout too. Not loud. Just a small, private, ridiculous sound that escapes before I can catch it. I am a grown man with opinions, and I make small sounds of joy when electricity resumes. Nigeria did that to me. Nigeria took a person with dignity and made him grateful for the grid.

The Part Where I Try to Be Serious and Immediately Fail

There are real structural arguments to be made here about regulation, about the privatization experiment that produced fourteen distribution companies with varying degrees of incompetence, about transmission infrastructure that was underfunded for decades, about metering chaos and estimated billing, and all the ways the system extracts money from people while delivering nothing in return. I know these arguments.

I have read them. I believe them. I am also too livid right now to assemble them with the grace they deserve, because the light has been out since yesterday, and I am composing this on my laptop that's charging on my 1-hour daily dose of generator.

So I will just say: it is bad. It is embarrassing. It is the thing that drains people, literally and figuratively, the thing that front-loads every Nigerian's day with an anxiety about power that should not exist in 2026. The thing that makes diaspora Nigerians wince slightly when they come home, and everyone else says ah you people abroad just don't know. We know. We live it. We just keep going because what else is there to do?