Electricity is one of the most important things in our world today. Almost all the things we are making use of for our day to day activities require power in one way or the other as such, power is highly esteemed.
It is so important that in some places before anyone decides to rent an apartment or build a house, the first thing they ask for is how good their power supply is.
Some years back the Power holding company of Nigeria was a government property. Then, it was popularly known as NEPA (National Electric Power Authority) those days, power supply was steady and cheap, but the disadvantage was if anything goes wrong with it, it takes a long time for it to be fixed, you know how the government is.
Along the line the company was sold to private organizations, currently, my state is under Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC).
Light rationing came into the picture and the bill became outrageous but one thing I love about this company is that unless your community is not faithful with paying bills, they are always prompt in attending to any fault that disrupts power supply.
For a very long period of time I was used to rationing light, from 12 hours per day to 8 hours per day and I became used to it.
But when I change location, light becomes something I see everyday. I noticed something with my place, villages and small communities tend to have fixed and steady light compared to the town.
The place I live currently was considered one of the places with steady light in the whole local government. They hardly take the light for an hour without restoring it.
However, recently we do not enjoy light like we used to because most of the inhabitants are average people, majority are small scale farmers who live from hand to mouth.
Paying bills became an issue, instead of the company to tackle the issue for individual houses, they generalized it and started giving limited power.
Last month they brought a bill of 40,000 naira per house and were serious about each house paying the amount. We didn't comply because it was outrageous, this place is like a village and we do not even use heavy gadgets, paying such an amount looks unfair.
So they disconnected our fuse from the transformer. The good news is, we have settled the issue and fixed it back now. They have now agreed for each house to pay at least 15000 naira monthly. It's still huge for the inhabitants but it's better than 40,000 naira.
Nevertheless, power is not as stable as it used to be. It is now being rationed, most times we see light in the evening but during the day, it is usually unstable.
Concerning stealing things from the transformer, it has happened to us countless times, there was a time the armor cable was stolen, we stayed for over two months with no light. Later a politician volunteered and bought it for us.
After that, some wires were stolen early this year, it took us two weeks to get new ones.
It's annoying how some people reason, it is the same light all of us enjoy, why steal things from the transformer? Well, everyone has the way they think, the best way to avoid things like that is to stay vigilant and keep watch on the transformer and other power supply gadgets closely.
N.B: All Images Were Generated By Meta AI