THE SILENCE AFTER THE SPARKS: WHY NIGERIA'S ENERGY FUTURE CANNOT WAIT FOR THE GRID
It started with heavy rain. The kind of rain that makes you stop whatever you're doing because you know something is about to happen. The gutters overflow. Roads become rivers. People rush home. Then, in the middle of the storm, the community transformer begins to make strange sounds. A loud spark. Another one. Then suddenly, it explodes. The transformer crashes to the ground, and just like that, an entire community is thrown into darkness. When I watched the video, what caught my attention wasn't only the transformer falling. It was the comments underneath. Some people were laughing. One person said "Any light una see from now na torch light." Funny right? Below are some other comments. It sounds funny at first. Many Nigerians even laughed because we've heard comments like that before. But if you think about it, it's actually heartbreaking. People are no longer shocked when electricity infrastructure fails. We've become so used ...