Recently, I passed through two simple but highly effective and clean international airports, both located in Africa, and this led me to share a post on social media. I ended it with a prayer, which goes thus, ‘May the sleeping giant of Africa truly arise!’
I spent the last few days in and around the city of Dar es Salaam and did not experience a single second of blackout. In fact, I was made to understand that it rarely ever happens. This is indeed a blessing for the residents of that city, especially the entrepreneurs who rely heavily on power.
Honestly, each time I travel, I try to observe other countries and it beats my imagination why certain things seem so complex back at home. Of particular disappointment is the issue of adequate electricity supply; one wonders when we will ever get it right.
There is no doubting the fact that Nigeria needs a well-developed tech ecosystem to help her out of the myriad of problems that tech can effectively solve. One thing that is, however, clear to all is that, for tech to be of any significant use in solving some of our problems in this country, certain other infrastructure have to be effectively made available. These set of infrastructure will assist tech to tackle some of the problems.
This week, I will be looking at one of the basic infrastructure that is required to be on ground and working, for the tech ecosystem to work effectively, and that is power, or electricity, as we usually call it in this clime. It is generally known that, electricity supply in this country has been epileptic for a very long time. Each government that assumes the governance of the country always promises to find a lasting solution to it, but at the end of its tenure in office, no solution is ever found. It got to a point that we all thought no solution was coming, when it comes to the issue of electricity, because government has always been in control of the process – from generation through to transmission and distribution. This made us to split the Power Holding Company of Nigeria and sell in bits to power generation and distribution companies.
Since the commencement of business by these Gencos and Discos, as they are usually referred to, not much improvement has been recorded, in both generation and distribution. The resultant effect of this is that many individual users and — Finish Reading on the Punch
