I can already see my activist brethren pumping fists in the air. The chants of Aluta Continua, Victoria Ascerta. Truth be told, people are very unhappy and we are in a struggle. The events of the last eighteen months have made being a Nigerian that lives in Nigeria rather challenging.
Traditionally, we all know disruption to mean something bad. Disrupting the peace of a neighbourhood or even a nation. However this is not the sort of disruption I am talking about. Instead of our anger driving us into depression and possibly anti-social behaviour, we can channel it positively. I am encouraging a focus on creative forms of disruption that will change the way we work as a country.
We can say hypothetically that things in the country are not working, we are at the mercy of greedy politicians and capitalists and our government doesn’t really care. We could sit and whine until we become grey and wrinkled, or we could do something about it.
Our current hardships offer us an opportunity to look inwards and begin to look at solutions that we hitherto never considered. We can use our God-given creativity to change the narrative and improve the quality of our lives. Before I go on, here are a few questions I ask myself from time to time about our nation
What are the problems that confront us as a country?
Which of them when solved would make the most impact?
Can we find a solution that is legal and doesn’t involve the government?
If the solution involves the government, what impediments do we need to get past?
For me the most critical problem is electricity; the others are security, infrastructure, healthcare, unemployment and fuel. I say electricity is most critical because if it worked, it would have a positive effect on all the others.
Before I continue, let me quickly speak about Uber in Lagos. Before the service started in Lagos, we were at the mercy of rickety cabs with varying prices depending on your negotiating skills, appearance and sometimes the mindset of the driver. I remember cab drivers taking advantage of me a lot in varying circumstances.
Now that there’s Uber in Lagos, the hitherto opportunistic cab drivers are not happy. The road transport unions and the agberos don’t know them. But guess who’s happy? The customers and the car owners. Passengers can connect to drivers with minimum stress, and the price is regulated. Now back to the matter at hand.
I believe we can drastically improve our electricity situation independent of the government or the sad excuse of a privatization arrangement done with our power infrastructure. I have always believed that the root of our power problems lie in vested interests that will not allow us to be great. The key to solving the problem is being able to circumvent these interests and create a structure they have little or no influence over.
A solution I have considered is community solar farms. Everyone says solar panels are expensive, but are they really? If you calculate how much you have spent on fuelling, generator maintenance and electric bills in the last two or three years, you would see that in the long run solar saves money.
Sometimes, because of our “Nigerian-ness”, we tend to overdo things. A lot of people buy generators that have a higher capacity than we actually need. Imagine if we plunged all that money into solar panels and inverters and batteries, we could save a ton of money. Now taking it a step further, imagine if each street, had it’s own solar array. They could decide to use regular electricity only at certain hours or for certain energy intensive tasks, or they could decide not to do it at all.
Imagine a situation where your generator is only on for a few hours in a month or your prepaid meter barely registers because you have little use for the electricity that is being supplied. Demand for petrol, diesel and even electricity would drop and as a result, price would have to drop.
Maybe when these cabals see their profits dropping, they will make a real effort to make things work. Maybe they might try to put obstacles in the way of our progresss, but when an unstoppable force meets an obstacle, the outcome is always the same.
I have used electricity as an example because it is the most critical one to me. There are thousands of ideas out there that can be applied to our current challenges. It just takes a few people who have done proper research and have the courage to make it happen.
Technology gives us access to knowledge and solutions that previous generations would never have dreamt of. This is not the time to whine and complain, this is the time to think and create. Your ideas are more powerful than their money.
There should be no mistake, the country belongs to us, not to our greedy senators, insensitive government or exploitative capitalists. The future belongs to the disruptors.
Aluta continua! Victoria Ascerta!
