The modern world, I would say, was built on a major sector of its economy which is power, to a layman it is called electricity. As the name implies, it powers all technologies in use and those that will be the product of innovation in the near future either directly or indirectly. The basic needs of man in today’s world include adequate power supply. In my country, the concept of power outage has been one of the main issues that a good number of citizens have. Frankly, conventional politicians have always come in their glory to proclaim fake promises to fix the occasional power outage completely. Well, to an extent, they tried. I digress ...
Power outage (or blackout) especially at important times is never what you’d wish even your enemies. One of those times was the post-covid time when life was waking up from the previous year. School resumed, transportation was coming up and so on. As a student who was already tired of the long duration of sitting at home, not like I had any other choice because I could not just go out or anything. I went back to school just a week after the official resumption date.
No sooner had I gotten back to school than an issue came up. Somehow the electricity distribution company had brought the bill - an outrageous one at that, and no one knew when it came. Someone just hung it by the gate of my hostel as if he knew some hell could let loose by the content of the bill.
Prior to the the advent of the pandemic, we had finished the final exams of the sessions and normally the co-tenants were very cooperative such that every bill that was brought was 100% cleared. No bill for a month lingered to the other. When the lockdown was relaxed the same year, I travelled to my hostel twice and each of those times was evidently with blackouts. Those who decided to stay behind or who were locked down and could not travel home or elsewhere severely complained of the intensity of the outage. They could even manage an epileptic power supply.
Through some calculations, we got to understand that the distribution company added all the bills for each month as if there had been constant power (or what was being provided before). I remember we finished exams by January, and the lockdown got intensified by March/April. Now, imagine you getting a bill for about 9 months of power supply you didn't use one bit. It was that bad. I said earlier that we do clear every bill every month. We came back to meet a bill of about 120 thousand naira ($120) up from just about 5000 ($5) per month. Which begs the question - Why, where and how?
Normally, what I do hear is that when there is some form of power outage that lasts for months, there is an unwritten rule that there won’t be any form of a bill for that time duration. When the officials from the distribution company threatened to disconnect the line, we vehemently agreed, honestly because we could not afford to pay any dime for that ludicrous thing. Even if we could, we aren't paying sh't. Somehow, the landlord later ‘sorted’ the issue How? I don’t know and I don’t care. However, it ensured that the landlord got a prepaid meter later on to avoid any stories that touch moving forward.