DISCOS: Agents of Darkness

By Abdu Labaran Malumfashi.

The other day, I heard a member of the DISCO in charge of Kaduna state and others, reassuring their customers that the DISCO would do its best to provide light to them.

Well, let me from the beginning confess that I am not an expert in this field nor am I an intellectual who has researched the subject very well before this discussion. I am not one by any stretch of the imagination, any way.

I am just an interested party by way of being an electric consumer in Abuja and Katsina who paid through prepaid meter and by cash monthly. I am also an observer of what the DISCOS do all over the country.

I say DISCOS are agents of darkness because that is what they provide most of the time, not the light they are supposed to supply all the time.

As the most populous country and having the highest Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in Africa, one of the most populous countries in the world and potentially the 3rd most populated country by the year 2050, according to the experts, it is a shame that Nigeria has not reached the stage of serving its people with electricity all the time.

And if there is a time when the DISCOS are not supposed to fail their customers, it is now when there is extreme heat everywhere and the price of petroleum is prohibitively high, and therefore unaffordable for most people everywhere.

This is avoidable wickedness, but then the privatisation of the sector was not done in good faith with a view to serving the people sincerely, but for the purpose of settling a few people in each of the goe-political zones so as to achieve some hidden objectives of the authors.

In cases that are not unclear, the sellers of this important Commonwealth, sold it to themselves through proxies, and they continue milking the ordinary person this way.

The DICOS are agents of darkness, because it is not often you hear the children shout ‘NEPA’, as they do all the time they are around, heralding the coming of power in the house. And sometimes before they finish their celebration, the power will go out. One will be lucky to have it for ten minutes, but luckier if it lasts up to five hours, and that happens in the middle of the night, in most of the cases.

That is the fate of most of the electric consumers, the uncertainty of when power is coming back, and more importantly, when it is going to be taken away as is often the case.

Besides, not everyone can afford the erection of houses with sufficient converters to supply the needed power to power the electricity it needs. Some of the people live in rented houses, by the way.

Sometimes last year, there was power supply for three consecutive days in a certain geo-political zone, and people started jubilation, thinking that the DISCO had reformed. But on the fourth day things reverted to their worst state.

It was later that people came to learn that the bank that had loaned the power supplier the money to ‘purchase’ prom the government had defaulted on their loan and the bank had no option but to seize the business for the purpose of recouping its money with interest.

Where did the bank get the electric power to supply the customers for three consecutive days without fail, but is not found by the DISCO in that area?

Of course, businesses are started for the purpose of making profit, but the profit is supposed to come after rendering satisfactory service. But on these shores, some people who think that they are so special expect to make profit from their business without giving appropriate service.

I am supposed to write on something yesterday, but the unavailability of power on my set forced me to take it to the neighbours (who are in the position to afford running a generator) for a recharge. Unknown to me and (so they said) the neighbours, their children had switched off the power source to recharge the set, in anger over the use of the power outlet they use for ‘games’ on their sets.

I am not narrating my experience, but the experiences of millions of the ordinary people on what they go through most of the time. Anyone who doubts this, can do their own research on the matter.

For instance, one needs go to the social media where one will find a lot of video clips of the comical caricatures of the staff of the power suppliers, on how they perform their duties and other things.

The funniest one seen by this writer is the one performed by two Nollywood actors depicting a ‘DISCO staff’ and a ‘native doctor’. The ‘DISCO staff’ went to the ‘native doctor’ for the latter to work for him (the former) to go and study abroad so that he would be promoted to the position of a manager upon his return.

The ‘native doctor’ insisted on knowing where his potential client worked, and upon hearing where, he turned wild, raining curses on the potential client, saying “you will never see light in your life” and that the potential client “will die his miserable self in the dark”. So ended the comedy.

But why should Nigeria continue this way? The answers are bad leadership and the docility of most of the people, who seem content to take every rubbish thrown at them by those in power, whereas they (leaders) are not quite shy of emptying the treasury and other commonwealth for themselves.

The situation is so bad that every preceding administration is preferred over today’s because the leadership is busy with something else, not what it was ‘elected’ to do or is hamstrung by those close to it to do the right thing.

It is said (by those people in the know) that Nigeria has all it takes to become a developed nation, but the leadership to achieve the feat is not there, as in other developing nations on the planet.

Let us hope that our children or their children will one day get it right by getting the correct leadership that will first think about the led before themselves, as is the case in the developed world at the moment.

Malam Malumfashi wrote from Abuja.