The Concourse
I Ain’t Got No Regrets
By Soney Antai, serial awards-winning columnist
Whichever way, by all means necessary, you must have electricity, and you will not pay for estimated bill anymore ….
– “Business Lunch with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu”, on TVC News, 2023.
I have often flaunted my credentials as a village boy. It is a far cry from the Nigerian President, who is frequently dubbed “City Boy” by his admirers. Unlike him, I was brewed, born, bred, but not burnished in the village. As I am wont to say, I am darned proud of it!
Amid the February 28 blitzkrieg launched by Israel and the US on Iran, I have found it incredibly frustrating to follow the military activities in the Gulf. While we at WatchmanPost have published a number of reports on these hostilities, a certain group of people has chosen to keep me and my fellow Nigerians in darkness. By denying me access to electricity—even when I am willing and ready to pay for it—they have effectively cut me off from the world.
Growing up in my small village, visiting a town was considered a monumental achievement. Living in hovels as we did, those who returned from the city were the cynosure of all of us rustic chaps. Such folks were as rare as their visits were brief. Their “back-to-base” stories were endless talking points; life in the city, we learned, was good. We envied them and secretly wished to walk in their shoes.
Back then, there were no phones or electricity in the countryside. You could count the number of vehicles passing through the village in a week on your fingers. They were marvels to us kids; we waved at them, ran after them, and caressed their metal frames. Before we lost our childhood innocence, those vehicles—especially the “nwonwo oro” (lorries with wooden floors)—were “houses on wheels.”
To see at night, we used a wick dipped in palm oil inside a shard of broken pottery. As our “economic evolution” progressed, we moved to hand-held tin lanterns powered by kerosene—the “bush lantern.” Eventually, we graduated to glass-globed lanterns, and finally the Tilley lantern. The Tilley was a luxury; you had to pump it repeatedly to keep the light alive. Is this what those who withhold electricity want me to revert to?
My first visit to a city was at age ten. While the experience wasn’t life-changing, the environment—bathed in electric light—was worlds away from my provenance. In the years since, I have gathered a motley of experiences from schools, jobs, and travels. I now understand clearly what a city should be.
A defining feature of urban life is publicly provided energy. It powers commerce, creates employment, and drives the economy. Yet, here I am, living in the capital of an oil-producing state that has boasted a power plant for two decades, living in perpetual darkness. Over the last five weeks, I have lost the sense of being “connected” to the grid. When power does return, it rarely lasts twenty minutes.
The scenario is the same at my office: the light pops up, vanishes in seconds, returns for five minutes, and disappears again. Within a fifteen-minute window, it is “given and taken” four or five times. Then, silence for 48 hours. You cannot iron clothes, refrigerate food, or even power a phone to find relief from the sweltering heat. Those of us without private generators (rendered nearly obsolete by the prohibitive cost of petrol) or solar power are simply left in the cold.
Whether it is the Federal Government with its ₦10bn solar installations in Aso Rock, in spite of the epigraph etched above, the DisCos, or the Akwa Ibom State Government failing to utilise its own power plant—they seem indifferent to this inefficiency.
Last week, this medium reported that Nigerians paid a scandalous ₦2.3 trillion in 2025 to DisCos. They pocketed that fortune, yet the cumulative hours of light my neighbors and I have enjoyed this month wouldn’t sum up to five hours.
In the village, darkness was normative; no one wished for better because few knew a better alternative existed. But this is a city that once had lights on fences of residential buildings and business premises. Today, the domestic lights are gone, and we take cold solace in the streetlights that maintain the “optics” that Akwa Ibom is okay.
That flickering hope keeps me going—the dream that one day, the Akwa Ibom power plant will truly run. Until then, I ain’t got no regrets about migrating from the village where darkness was the landlord, to the city where darkness, once a mere tenant, is threatening to become the master of my home. My only fear tough, is that when reminiscences rubbish current living realities, it indicates that progress has been in recession.