₦airaland Forum

There is a particular kind of suffering that nobody writes about in literary journals, nobody makes Netflix documentaries about, nobody brings up at climate summits or economic forums, and yet it has shaped more of my personality than any childhood trauma or formative heartbreak.

I am talking about sitting in a room at 2 pm, sweating so hard your shirt has essentially become a second skin, watching your laptop battery count down from 14% like a man reading his own last rites, while outside your window, a generator somewhere in the neighborhood is doing its best impression of a jet engine taking off.

Speaking of generator, I hope my neighbor, who always runs his generator overnight, gets to read this.

I want to be clear that I did not wake up today planning to be angry. I woke up with modest ambitions. I wanted to read. Maybe eat something. Possibly exist without incident. Then I realized it's Saturday, and I have barely seen six hours of light throughout the week, thirty minutes yesterday (Yes, I was counting).

A Brief History of My Betrayal

Let me explain something about Nigerian electricity that people who have not lived here do not fully appreciate, which is that the problem is not simply that it goes out.

Everything goes eventually. Batteries die. Relationships end. Governments collapse. We are not children. We understand entropy.

The specific psychological torment of NEPA is that it goes without explanation, returns without announcement, stays for an amount of time that has no discernible logic, and the entire system operates with the confidence of an entity that has never once been held accountable for anything in its entire institutional life. NEPA was renamed PHCN. Then it was privatized into DisCos. The light still goes at 6 am when you are trying to do something important and comes back at 3 am when you are asleep and cannot enjoy it. They changed the name and kept the chaos.

I have a generator. I want you to know that, not because I am bragging, but I need you to understand that having a generator in Nigeria is not luxury, it is a separate ongoing financial and emotional relationship that also has its own problems. Fun fact: I just did the maths, and realized I have actually bought five generators in my short time in this life.

Anyway, the generator needs fuel. The fuel costs money. More money today than yesterday, which is a way of saying I started using gen when a liter was #100, and now a liter is #1,400. The generator also makes noise that enters your skull and sits there like a tenant who has stopped paying rent but refuses to leave. And still, despite all of this, I feel genuine gratitude when it comes on.

I, a grown adult with a postgraduate education, feel sincere relief when a machine I purchased with my own money does the job it was purchased to do. Nigeria has conditioned me to be grateful for my own property working. That is not a small thing to process.

What They Don't Tell You About Heat

The temperature, according to my phone, on a hot afternoon can climb up to 34 degrees Celsius. But 34 degrees Celsius with no fan is not the same as 34 degrees Celsius with a fan.

The fan does not cool you. The fan moves the hot air around, which is technically different from cooling, in the same way that being punched by someone wearing a glove is technically different from being punched bare-fisted. You still got punched. You are still hot. But there is motion now, and motion is at least a form of lying to your body, and sometimes lying is enough to survive.

When the light goes out, and the fan stops, the lying stops too. You are just there with the heat, which has no agenda and no mercy and is simply doing what heat does. I have sat in rooms in this country, feeling my own thoughts slow down because of the temperature. I have watched myself become stupider in real time. I will be thinking something complex and interesting, and then the light goes out, and twenty minutes later, I am just staring at a wall, not even having a thought, just existing in the heat like a yam in a pot. This is not melodrama. I have a thesis to write. The yam analogy is more accurate than I am comfortable admitting.

The Inverter People

Somewhere in this country, there exists a class of people who solved the electricity problem by buying an inverter and a battery bank, and these people have achieved a kind of low-grade spiritual superiority that I find genuinely insufferable even though I completely understand it and would do the same thing if I had the money.

The Inverter Person does not join conversations about NEPA with the same urgency as the rest of us. They sort of float above the discussion, occasionally saying things like oh it was a bit inconvenient yesterday when it went for six hours because my battery was already at forty percent, and then everyone else at the table is silent because six hours is a Tuesday for us, six hours is nothing, six hours is when we start to feel like ourselves again after the initial panic.

The Inverter Person has decoupled from the Nigerian electricity emotional experience and is now operating on a separate frequency that I can only describe as mild inconvenience instead of existential siege.

I am not bitter. I am incredibly bitter. I want an inverter so badly, scratch that, I want to leave the country more badly.

The International Embarrassment Problem.

What makes this so particularly galling, and I mean galling in the specific way where you feel it in your chest cavity, is that we are not talking about a poor country that does not have resources. We are talking about a country that has oil, even though we are using half of it to pay debts. We are talking about a country that exports energy while its citizens sit in the dark, which is the kind of irony that would be funny if it were happening somewhere else and you were reading about it in a magazine on a flight.

When it happens to you in your room in Ibadan at 2 am, and you cannot charge your phone to call anyone, it is less funny. It is, in fact, not funny at all. It is the kind of situation that makes you reconsider every major life decision that brought you to this specific room in this specific country at this specific moment of powerlessness in both the literal and metaphorical sense.

I have read from online people how they lost their freelance gigs because of the anyhowness of NEPA. I have also read that NEPA needs almost $300BN to provide 24 hours of electricity. I don't know how true the calculation is, but what about we start with maybe 12 hours of constant electricity?

A Confession

I will tell you something embarrassing.

Whenever light comes back, especially after a long outage, there is a sound that happens in Nigerian neighborhoods that I can only describe as a collective exhale. And sometimes, sometimes, somebody in a house nearby will shout "Up NEPA".

Just a shout of relief. And the first thirty times this happened in my life, I found it amusing and slightly tragic. Now, when the light comes back, I sometimes shout too. Not loud. Just a small, private, ridiculous sound that escapes before I can catch it. I am a grown man with opinions, and I make small sounds of joy when electricity resumes. Nigeria did that to me. Nigeria took a person with dignity and made him grateful for the grid.

The Part Where I Try to Be Serious and Immediately Fail

There are real structural arguments to be made here about regulation, about the privatization experiment that produced fourteen distribution companies with varying degrees of incompetence, about transmission infrastructure that was underfunded for decades, about metering chaos and estimated billing, and all the ways the system extracts money from people while delivering nothing in return. I know these arguments.

I have read them. I believe them. I am also too livid right now to assemble them with the grace they deserve, because the light has been out since yesterday, and I am composing this on my laptop that's charging on my 1-hour daily dose of generator.

So I will just say: it is bad. It is embarrassing. It is the thing that drains people, literally and figuratively, the thing that front-loads every Nigerian's day with an anxiety about power that should not exist in 2026. The thing that makes diaspora Nigerians wince slightly when they come home, and everyone else says ah you people abroad just don't know. We know. We live it. We just keep going because what else is there to do?

How much be one LG for Ebonyi sef?

Abolish all forms of monarchy.

How can you say one thing three different times in one post?

henrolevra:
Thanks my life saver. That's why I cherished nairaland. I was just contemplating on trading meme coins.

Na prank.

Mariangeles:
Wetin konsine me.
The story dey interesting. 😀
At least, e dey straightforward pass that jacktheripper (abi wetin be that nairaland fiction writer moniker sef?🤔) stories wey no dey get definite ending.

Ah

Wetin concern me like this?? 😒

alpharoyalty:
This brother is a liar 😁
I honestly do not believe a person's life can be this messed up.
But I enjoy reading your lie story 😁

The guy's life don tire me. Na him get all the bad behaviour for this life. 🤣

RealityKings1:
Creative build and captivating. Nice work

Thanks 🙏🙏

Feldie:
It made sense until you mentioned 1950 any doctor who ordered a test in 1950 would be dead by now or so decrepit and frail that he wouldn't be able to stand up or see or recognize anyone

It's meant to be sort of a horror story 🤦‍♂️

brain54:
I think he meant to write...

'The ending'.

It wasn't clear to me either. Was the doctor a ghost? If he was why was his name on the doctors list?

It's a great story though and I enjoyed reading it!

Oh. What I was trying to do was to end it on a cliffhanger ( too much Netflix series wan wound me), but it seems I didn't do it well. Will do better next time.

And yes, my initial plan was that the guy was actually working with ghosts who just changed their names. But writing about how everything happened will be too long and probably be a novel.


Glad you enjoyed it the way it is though 🙏

Nonexisting1:
Incoherent story. The doctor's name in the lab order did not belong to the doctors there and all of a sudden, one of them agreed he ordered it and to crown it all, in 1950. Mtchew

No vex my boss. 👏

butterfly777:
You try. Your story is interesting, with good tempo, tests, suspence and flow. Only that then ebinbi not clear enough to me.

Thanks. What's ebinbi?

Elineska:
As "Jack The Ripper" You shouldn't be afraid of the Night and ghosts because that's your natural habitat.
D

Omo. I don't even know why I chose that name sef. 🤣

T0BY:
This one nah tales by moonlight or e real?

Things dey happen sha

🤣🤣🤣

So, our local government decides to play God and resurrect a hospital that’s been dead for seventy-five years. They painted, patched, and hired staff. I was one of the lucky (or unlucky) recruits, employed as one of only two lab technicians.

The lab they gave us was more like a box with microscopes. A windowless room squeezed into the corner, as if someone remembered last minute that hospitals need labs too. At most five people could fit in. Six, if you were ready to suffocate.

Now, history time: this same hospital was abandoned after a king from a nearby town died inside. Room 2418. They said his spirit refused to leave. Patients complained of midnight disturbances, voices, shadows, and cold hands. The legend spread. People avoided the place.

So when the government reopened only one wing, the rest remained sealed, like it was the pharaoh's tomb. Nobody asked questions.

Three weeks into my new job, on the night shift, I was bent over my microscope staring into the world of malaria parasites, when I heard someone enter. The security man, as usual, had vanished into thin air.

“Who’s there?” I asked.

A man’s voice, like he'd been smoking for decades, answered: “I came to run a test.”

Nothing strange except it was 11:35 PM. We don’t see routine patients at that time. But I told him to wait, and after a few minutes, I stepped out.

I asked for his request form. He handed me a sheet of yellow paper. That alone confused me. We only use white. For a second, I thought he wandered in from another hospital. But the paper carried our name, our logo, everything.

The requested test was FBC. So I told him the results wouldn’t be ready until noon. He agreed.

It was when I glanced at the doctor’s name that something crawled under my skin. Only two doctors worked in that hospital, on day and night shifts. I knew them like I knew my name. The name on the form belonged to neither.

But that was not the most disturbing part of the paper.

Still, I forced composure. “Please enter, and let me take your blood sample?”

He turned to me with a stare so sharp it felt like I had asked him for a kidney. Silence. Then finally, he said, “Nope, follow me to the ward.”

There was an odd echo, as if his voice was coming from somewhere far away

That was weird. But everything about this man has been weird, and now creepy, so I didn't ask why.

I asked which ward. He pointed. And I could immediately sense something was off. Because his finger was directed at the psychiatric block. The one still abandoned. The one sealed since before independence.

I quickly gave him back the paper, muttered that I’d join him, and the second he was out of sight, I ran to the gate.

The security man was chilling by the gate, as if nothing in this world concerned him. I cursed him, dragged him back to his post, and told him what happened. His reaction was zero. He just said, “He won’t come back.”

And he didn’t.

When morning came, out of morbid curiosity, I strolled past the front of the psychiatric ward. It was empty and silent and almost falling apart, like you would expect.

Months passed. Nobody mentioned anything strange. I told nobody about it.

Then, one day, I casually mentioned it to one of our doctors in the lobby. He wasn't amused or scared by my story; it was like showing someone a meme they have seen a million times.

In fact, he described the man’s appearance to me. Detail for detail, as if he had seen him just yesterday.

“How do you know?” I asked as I started feeling ice in my veins.

He laughed. The kind of laugh that doesn’t reach the eyes. Then, suddenly, he went cold, looked straight at me, and said, “Because I ordered the tests.”

At first, I thought it was a bad prank. Until he mentioned the one thing I had left out. The date on the yellow form.

5th July, 1950.

And before I could even recover, he added one more thing, something I had heard before.

“Room 2418.”

My legs turned into spaghetti as I tried to rush out of the lobby. He looked at me with the "What a pity" look. Then, almost casually, he said.

“Go there. You’ll see why none of us leave.”

I dey even fear to watch Netflix again like this. It's like I lose 1GB per episode of watching.

SocialJustice:
If Google wasn't a lazy company, they should have pushed Microsoft windows out of consumer market with chrome os but they are jokers.

No, they actually need Microsoft Windows as a minor competitor. If not, the US government can step in and call them a monopoly and sue with antitrust laws like they did to Standard oil.

That's how they fight every time. No sane person is dropping Chrome for Edge, or Gemini for Bing. If we investigate now, Microsoft is doing this to probably wants Google to pay more money to them so they can make Chrome the default browsers on Windows PC like how Google search is the default search engine on IOS devices, after paying Apple some $20Billion every year.

sakaba:
Reaper indeed...'cramping jaw from smiling' cracked me up .
You write well or is it AI...Toh
Grim reaper want s get hitched, to Harley McQueen.

True words nonetheless. Hilarious too.

Wetin AI go cause no be small thing 😏

Natbrowny:
U made sense bro

If u do simple wedding, mf will say na because u no get money.

Bride n Groom, parents of both, few friends n siblings. Done deal.

Dat money for hall go buy rice n foodstuff dat can last.



One of me homies did one recently, bride family spent the most, hall used was my place of work, so its 900k. People choke, security was protecting groom like Putin.

Truth be told, a week later, bride was in a street store to buy 2 cups of rice and others.
No bigdeal we thought, more days came and she was buying rice n stuff in small quantities, including filling 1kg gas.

After some digging, most money made was used to settle debts incurred b4 n during the wedding.

Its a sorry scenario. Somtin simple is good whether u rich or poor.

The bride family should take care of the family na.

Wananonly:
Many men. Many many many many men bro, planned their weddings in the same way you hope to plan yours..

But guess what happened at the end of the day bro...

They still did all the things they said they wouldn't do. And more!!!

I acknowledged that part. More often than not, those men succumb to pressure from the bride’s side, and maybe even his own side too. So maybe it's not in our power after all.

Today was one of those boring days when it felt like time was moving in slow motion. Out of boredom, I started searching the house aimlessly, looking for nothing, when I stumbled on something interesting.

An old, dangerously handsome picture of myself. I was dressed in a black suit (well, what was trying to be a suit) with an oversized trouser so big I could probably still fit in it today.. I must have been 5 or 6, maybe 7. But it wasn’t just random overdressing. I was the ring bearer for one of my uncle’s weddings.

I can’t remember much about the day except that we travelled all the way to Ibadan, and I slept through at least half of the event. But looking at the picture got me thinking.

One day, I’ll probably wear a similar outfit again. This time, in a properly tailored one, doing my wedding. And maybe, just maybe, I’ll be wide awake for that one. But then again, who knows?

But I was about to move on when another thought crept in...do I even want a wedding?

Not the marriage part. Marriage is fine. Love is fine. Companionship is fine. Bleh, bleh, bleh.

But the whole “invite 500 people, rent a hall, prostrate and roll on the floor 1,000 times, feed strangers you haven’t spoken to in five years, and smile till your jaw cramps” part?

I’m not so sure.

Weddings have a way of feeling like a long movie you didn’t ask to be cast in.

Still, the idea of my own wedding feels… different.

Because I feel weddings are like graduations.

They’re not really for you; they are for everyone else to see that you did the thing.

The couple is basically the entertainment for the day, paraded around like a pair of rare zoo animals, while aunties you didn’t know existed debate loudly about whether your rice tastes better than your cousin’s wedding rice from 2018.

And let’s not even talk about the expenses.

Weddings are the only event where people willingly spend the equivalent of a decent car, just for someone to come and whisper in your ears that the meat has finished, while over 200 people haven't eaten.

So maybe I will keep it small. Something simple, with just a few family members, a couple of friends, and one photographer who knows my good angles. No 12-layer cake, no rented hall, no live band that plays “Happy Birthday” by mistake.

Just me, my wife, and the people who matter. And by who matters, I'm talking of my parents and her parents. So 6 people in total. Maybe even less, depending on how the Grim Reaper feels.

Everyone thinks that's a delusional idea. They say it's actually not in my power to decide all that, which reinforces my initial ideas.

But honestly, I’d rather spend the extra money making sure my marriage lasts… than making sure my wedding trends on Instagram or WhatsApp status for a week. But that could be the broke me talking, though, or maybe the shy and humble me. You never can tell.

Tayorshd87:
my brother I was wondering that too until I got married hmmm

Please get to the stage before you will tell your own observation...

Marriage no be beans 🫘


Even the Peter in the Bible claim married people have more problems that's why he didn't marry.

So you must be prepared for it

The apostle Peter was actually married. Jesus healed his mother-in-law. Only married people have in-laws. Read: Matthew 8:14-15. Or do you mean to say Apostle Paul?

Because these days, weddings are less about partnership and more about performance.

Half the pressure to marry isn’t even about love. It’s theatre. Lights, camera, lace, gele. A public declaration that you have “made it” in the love department. Whether that love survives is the subplot nobody likes to discuss. And yet, people line up for their turn, convinced that this time it will be different.

Parents push it because it’s their final stamp of approval: proof they raised you “well” enough for someone to take you off their hands. Married friends push it because misery loves company. Society pushes it because society likes everyone to follow the same tired template.

A wedding doesn’t guarantee happiness. It doesn’t guarantee forever. It doesn’t even guarantee love. What it guarantees is an event, some pictures, a certificate, and the unpaid overtime of trying to make it work.

Biqsahm:
it was not readily available in Nigeria at that time like we have now.

Damn.

ibechris:
My younger brother was also misdiagnosed when he went to check his Genotype prior to his wedding. He was told he was AS...and I resisted and told him to try another place immediately, and after 24hours, the result says he is AA.

That mistake could have cost him his marriage.

I know you want that second result to be accurate, but what if the first result is correct? The only way you can be sure your brother isn't AS if both of your parents are AA. So maybe get a third opinion or result.

brain54:
Nice fiction...

Could probably never happen though. It takes a lot of tests to diagnose a cancer.

And no doctor the cancer patient is referred to is likely to just cut of the tissues without further testing.

I would believe that is also the last resort for such cases after other alternate treatment methods have been explored.

But nice story though. I think it may have sounded more convincing with other more common diseases with less testing procedures like malaria patients getting their diagnosis mixed up.

But good story. And the moral of your story in the end still applies!

Read the story of Darrie Eason.


Seun, to find characters hard o.

Let me tell you a medical horror story.

It started like an innocent Tuesday. Two women went for their breast check-up. Nothing serious. Just the usual "let's be sure everything is fine."

The doctor took a biopsy from both. Normal routine stuff.

When the results came back, one had cancer, the other didn't.

The woman with cancer was referred to another hospital for surgery. The surgeon looked at the report, did that slow doctor nod (you know the one that makes you start writing your will in your head), and scheduled a mastectomy.

Surgery went smoothly, as smoothly as cutting off someone's breast can be. They pack the breasts in a container full of formalin and send them to the histopathology lab for the usual final confirmation.

Madam went home afterwards. She was sad, yes, but also relieved. The kind of relief where you say, "At least I'm alive." She was probably even pricing padded bras on Instagram.

Then… the new lab report came back.

Guess what it said? No cancer. Just pure, innocent tissue looking at the pathologist like, "Excuse me, sir, why am I in a jar?"

The surgeon started sweating. Not the normal one that comes when gen goes. This was deep regret sweat. The kind that soaks through your scrubs and into your soul.

He ran to the lab to beg them to check every single block of tissue like a man looking for the last piece of goat meat in the pot. Still nothing.

At this point, the surgeon had to call the first lab that made the diagnosis.

Surgeon: Hello, good afternoon. About that cancer case you sent me…

Lab: Yes, doctor?

Surgeon: She doesn't have cancer.

Lab: Wait, what?

Surgeon: She. Does. Not. Have. Cancer.

Lab: Ah. Give us a moment.

They rechecked everything from that day. And then the devil's handiwork was revealed.

The samples had been mislabeled. The woman with no cancer was told she had cancer and had her breast removed. The woman with cancer was told she was fine, and was probably somewhere drinking Zobo to her "good health."

That's it. That's the story.

It's the kind of thing you laugh at first because your brain says, This can't be real, and then… you go quiet. You start wondering, how many people are walking around carrying someone else's diagnosis?

Biqsahm:
U av outdo urself again.nice read.guy!!!drop something for literature section now haba!!!

I don't think I have ever been to that section. But will check it out one of these days.