I am of the generation of Nigerians who cut their teeth on candle lights and rechargeable lamps and given the way things are going, from bad to worse, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that the vision of 24-hour, seven-day-a-week electric power supply is unreachable in my lifetime. Toyosi Akerele, an inspiring youth leader recently announced in a fanciful pun, that the present generation of leaders had handed nothing but generators to this generation of Nigerians.
At home in Kano last weekend, neighbours said they hadn’t seen light for five days in my part of the GRA. In normal times, you got more power supply here than those who lived in slum sections of the outer city. I met someone from there who said for fifteen days, they hadn’t seen a blink. In Abuja and the other cities, power continues to deteriorate, with just a few cities and towns enjoying very little supplies.
On one of those days last week in Kano, radio news announced the allocation of 12 megawatts to the Kano distribution company with Kano, a megacity by all standard, getting six megawatts, Katsina four, Dutse two and Azare zero.
In February 2013, soon after the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) executed share sale agreements which saw the “historic” hand-over of the 14 out of the successor companies carved out of the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria, (PHCN), the federal, government with a fixed eye on propaganda, proclaimed 2013 the “year of power.” Much hope was raised that the take-over of the generation, transmission and distribution by private investors–someone called them asset strippers–will see the new owners revamping the sector and impacting positively on the nation’s power supply. Last year, most Nigerians celebrated Christmas in darkness. Wherever a new leadership takes over a political or even a business entity, there are changes that often come with that. The new leaders start with a zeal to score quick runs, in this case, improve the level of service to make an immediate good impression. When the new owners of the power companies took over, what Nigerians have experienced is a slip-up. Apart from introducing quite a few faces, nothing, by way of improvement, has come to the consumers.
In a hot season as we are now in, with temperatures hovering above 30o Celsius in a majority of cities, and 40 oC and above in the fringe cities of the North, this is a period where there is usually an increase in the demand for power for cooling the environment as well as storage. An increase in demand and declining supply make for a very bad combination. With a population of 170 million, Nigeria requires an average of 40,000 megawatts of electricity. As it is, less than 4,000 or 10 percent is available for both industry and domestic consumption.
After surrendering to the deteriorating situation for many years, those citizens who believed in the government that things would get better and delayed such investment decisions as the purchase of generating set, are now the wiser. They are bringing out money from savings to buy their own units. For those who can’t afford to do that, there is a booming electricity supply underground by retailers who wire up shops and houses in neighbourhoods, selling power per minute and hour. Without this, women can no longer prepare soup and store it inside refrigerators. They will also have to buy beef and poultry on a day-to-day basis. Government offices that cannot power a whole establishment now buy 2-5 KVA generators, exclusively to power the office of Permanent Secretary or even Minister.
As a television reporter covering the Ministry of Power said, this was how bad things were in the final days of the Shagari administration. At that time, overall national output had dropped to a miserable 900 megawatts. The only difference is that you had the power sector under a state monopoly. You could then by right, hold the Minister and his government responsible for the situation. But state control of the power sector, as argued by many, was counter-productive and eventually was dismantled. With this so-called “significant milestone” by which generation, transmission and distribution are driven by the private sector, government officials are already pointing at the new owners as those responsible for the terrible situation. But government can’t run away from the public. With 80 percent of power plants which are gas-fired deprived of regular gas supply amidst increasing sabotage of gas and oil pipelines in the Delta region, as illustrated by the recent bombing of the gas supply pipeline between Excravos and Warri, it is hard for the government to play ostrich on this matter even if that is their wish. They can’t run away from responsibility by abandoning consumers to the antics of “asset strippers” exploiting the ordinary citizens to their marrow. You wonder why you have a minister of power, with the addition of a junior minister if all they have to do is to drink tea at the Council of Ministers and draw fat salaries and allowances, if they have no power and will to regulate the sector. Why the hell do you have a huge government agency, the National Electricity Regulatory Commission if they cannot ensure market and operating rules in the power sector? Who is there to right the wrongs in the power sector? It doesn’t sound like we have a government in place. If we had one, someone should start worrying about the sliding power supply, insisting on performance and righting the wrongs that are right therefore before everyone’s eyes. Should government be running from its responsibility?

People have different experiences and face different challenges in life. But the issue is how the individual works to overcome such challenges. There is every tendency, especially among the youth to make the greatest mistake of their life because they cannot appreciate the beauty of failure. One can even take the risk of making a swift statement, that for every child who grows, his parents succeed in making him a real human being by strengthening and correcting his or her failures: from sitting, crawling, walking, running etc. It is the support provided that makes one to realize his full potentials. Yet this basic facet of life is missing in our youth.
Since the youth are crazy about sports these days, especially football, let me borrow some lessons from there in order to make my point. Although I am not a Manchester United fan, but few will argue against the idea that the reign of Sir Alex Ferguson was one of the most successful not only in the English Premier League, but in the history of football. In his recent autobiography published in 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson had a lot of interesting stories on how to recover from the brink of failure and emerge as a winner. The example he gave was one which illustrates that failure itself is not a bad thing, but your attitude towards your understanding of the failure, and planning to respond to it is where the problem lies.  All those tactics he employs such as looking at his watch in extra-time, also called Fergie-time, were strategies to scare the opponent and  snatch an unlikely victory from the brink of defeat.
Mr. Ferguson was playing a game against Liverpool at the peak of their success in the 1980s, and as he stated in his own words: “the Souness–Dalglish Liverpool teams were the benchmark for English football in the 1980s, when I made my first foray into management south of the border. Those Liverpool sides were formidable. I had suffered against them with Aberdeen and brought those memories with me to Manchester. In one European tie, we had lost 1–0 at Pittodrie, played really well for the first 20 minutes at Anfield, but still ended up 2–0 down at half-time. I did my usual thing in the dressing room and, as the players were leaving, one, Drew Jarvie, said, ‘Come on, lads, two quick goals and we’re back in it.’
”Losing a football match is not an easy thing for the club and the fans, but to lose a Derby with your arch rivals is even more difficult to take, even if they have a superior team. As such, instead of thinking that the game will be lost, some of the players saw such failure as a temporary thing, but what they were not willing to accept was a defeat. This is just one story, and whether you are an Arsenal, Chelsea, Real Madrid or Barcelona supporter, you must have some interesting stories about a comeback match which will always provide a talking point between you and the opponents of your team.
Yet my question is, as a youth who witness such ‘miraculous’ comebacks by your team, simply because they refuse to accept defeat, what sort of comeback did you plan for yourself when you couldn’t secure enough credits to get to university? or because of a single carry-over at school you almost take a decision to abandon your studies; or simply because the business venture you have started has not taken up as quickly as possible, you decided to abandon it and retire into joblessness! Do you watch a football match simply to shout it’s a goaaaaaaaaaaaal, or do you have a goal in life which you seek to achieve? You see, those vicissitudes  of life are key ingredients of success that will be useful to you later in life, only if you appreciate that your failures early in life will help you to build a successful future later as you seek to achieve your goals.
In his classical work “The laws of success in sixteen lessons” or what is popularly called the sixteen laws of success, Napoleon Hill spent a great deal of time explaining how the failures of successful people helped them to succeed in life. According to him, “profiting by failure will teach you how to make stepping stones out of all of your past and future mistakes and failures. It will teach you the difference between “failure” and “temporary defeat,” a difference which is very great and very important. It will teach you how to profit by your own failures and by the failures of other people.”
In fact, as he stated, “every failure is a blessing in disguise, provided it teaches some needed lesson one couldn’t have learned without it. Most of the so called failures are only temporary defeats.”
I don’t know if you agree with him, but for me, I certainly believe there is an element of truth in his thesis. In failure there is beauty, but the inability to rise from one’s failures is what will lead to a tragic defeat.