POWER GAMES

By Mike Ekunno

For a country with an estimated population of over 200 million but powered by less than 5,000 MW of electricity, power supply is bound to be an issue—managed, monitored—but never taken for granted. Epileptic does not fully describe the supply. Even when provided, the low voltage may be just enough to power a squint from the light bulb. Other appliances like air conditioners and fridges would have to endure a furlough, even when hooked to stabilizers. 

Such anomie has not gone without its fair share of re-engineering the lexicon. Load-shedding refers to how one neighbourhood’s electricity supply is another’s loss. It may be that your area is favoured with the night belt while it goes unpowered in the daytime. But this is not usually clearly defined. If it were, it wouldn’t be quite the society where a contrived disorder has to be maintained to keep sleaze and patronage alive. 

As with every anomalous situation, the human mind soon devises coping mechanisms to get around a recurring irritation. These mechanisms are the stuff of hacks, and while they won’t mean much to an electricity-unchallenged person, they make the difference between wearing an ironed shirt or a creased one for the electricity-challenged folk. That means that while ironing for work, I have to prioritise the tops. Why? Because if you had just finished ironing a trouser in the first take and power supply goes, you’d be hard put to wear a rumpled top. But you can pull off wearing a well-ironed top with an un-ironed pair of trousers instead, especially when dressed in native attire. 

That pantry hack—okay, common sense—also applies in the kitchen with blending. If you don’t want to be left with so much tomato paste and no pepper, or so much watermelon smoothie without pineapple, you must learn to combine a bit of each constituent in every batch inside the blender. That way, if the grid goes out, you still have a microcosm of the different constituents to proceed with instead of being stranded with only one ingredient blended. You should also be ready not to take “smoothie” literally, because the energy queen may zap before a fine paste is produced, forcing a dissonance that transforms your smoothie into a lumpie. I must confess that having some banana or pineapple pulp to munch in my smoothie can be fun, though.

Also, I’ve learnt to create time—daytime—for my current reading (and writing), knowing night often means dark. The need for illumination is topmost for nighttime power supply. Talking about time periods, you learn with time that the random visitor is the senior partner in the power equation because she doesn’t adjust to you, instead you adjust to her power (pun unintended), however inconvenient. I’ve learnt to wake up halfway through sleep to attend to something in advance of a power outage at a more appropriate time. It may be charging the phone or operating the washing machine. 

There are other practices that may not qualify as hacks in my game of wits with this continual nuisance. You learn to use the phone torchlight for illumination, so you must keep a mental picture of the phone’s position in the dark. The laptop is left in sleep mode instead of a full shutdown. That way, I can come on and cut to the chase immediately without the start-up throughput. The subtext to all of this is that remaining battery power is low and the wall socket is asleep.

Other members of the arsenal in this game include power banks, fast-charging USB plugs, extension cords, rechargeable lamps, and fans. Rechargeables are especially God-sent. Though mainly China-made, their utility is more to be found on the continent. But while these lamps can banish darkness at the touch of a knob or a button push, their lifespan can be so short as to make you wonder why you’d have to dispose of something that yet looks so new and barely used.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned disruptions traceable to power outages—or because of them—the stand-by electric generator comes into the mix as a self-help iteration of the epilepsy of the national grid. Power outage as a lifestyle feature means that stand-by generators have come to be standard options in Nigeria. They come with their economic value chain and are integrated into architectural designs. 

Whatever the source of one’s alternative power supply, it can only come in to modify and attenuate the disruptions visited by the national grid. Power cut is embedded in the daily life and lifestyle of every Nigerian and tags along like a shadow, only not so innocuous. It comes and goes half a dozen times in a day, and there’s no algorithm to track its randomised schedule.

Over time, I’ve subconsciously developed and imbibed the call signs and semaphores in my neighbourhood’s patterns of disruption. If it’s about to rain and a storm is brewing, I know to bring in the laundry and switch off the house supply in anticipation of a blackout. Like in many other areas, man and nature are frequently brought into antagonism when a storm has led to power outage, only for the storm to slink away without its happy ending of rainfall, while the retreated power fails to return. 

It’s not all woe with me and my power games; there are many cheery sides to the menace, such as its obedience to Holy Scripture, “the night cometh when no man can work.”

If one were minded to be positive, one would appreciate the biceps-building quality of having to wring beddings because power went off during machine spinning. Such moments also provide ample time for bonding with your partner, who holds one end of the soggy bedding while you both twist, tug-of-war style.

Living with intermittent power comes with many hilarious moments. I’ve been stuck with my strip of paper token bearing purchased electricity units, which cannot be loaded because the meter is not powered. It reminds me of the patient in need of a drip, yet whose veins cannot be located for the syringe. It’s a Catch-22 and the fox chasing its tail. 

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Mike Ekunno is the winner of the inaugural Harambee Literary Prize and author of the story collection, Soul Lounge. His fiction worked places as a top finalist in the 2025 Native Voices Award of Kinsman Quarterly. He is published in many journals including, The Republic, The Brussels Review, The First Line, Mysterion, Bridge Eight, Rigorous and Pensive Journal. Mike consults as a freelance book editor and speechwriter. He is still hooked on ABBA and remains an Agnetha fan.