If you want to understand why Nigerians are exhausted, start with electricity. Or rather, start with the absence of it. For decades, this country has promised stable power and delivered darkness. The names have changed from NEPA to PHCN to DisCos but the experience in most Nigerian homes has remained stubbornly, painfully the same. The financial cost alone is staggering. The average Nigerian household that cannot rely on the grid spends between ₦30,000 and ₦80,000 every month on generator fuel, depending on usage. Add the cost of buying and maintaining the generator itself, purchasing inverter batteries, and paying for solar installations, and you begin to understand that Nigerians are not just paying electricity bills. They are funding an entire parallel power system out of their own pockets. Businesses suffer even more. Small shop owners, tailors, hair salons, and food vendors lose productive hours and perishable goods every single time the light goes. Many have quietly folded because the cost of keeping operations alive without reliable power simply became too high. The cruelest part of this story is that Nigerians still receive electricity bills for power they never used. They pay, they protest, and then they go buy more fuel. The grid has failed the people so consistently that most Nigerians have simply stopped expecting it to work. That acceptance is its own kind of tragedy.
