The time is 3:57 AM, and I’ve just been woken by a message notification on my phone. I had barely slept three hours, having only wrapped up work around midnight. Exhausted as I was, I decided to finish up my draft for Friday’s post — one centered around my experience with power outages in Nigeria.
But what happened next was unexpected.
As I got out of bed, I noticed the house was very quiet and completely dark — as though every appliance had given up. Curious, I walked to my window and saw that my entire street, as far as I could see, was swallowed in darkness.
Confused, I checked my phone again — the message that had woken me was from the power company, informing residents that there had been a power outage and engineers were working to restore it within four hours.
Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that light could just disappear like that — not here, not in the abroad, and certainly not the day I chose to write on power outages.
But here I was, living through a scene that felt all too familiar.
I grew up in a country where electricity was a privilege, not a guarantee.
When the lights came on, you dropped everything to make the most of it. In some privileged areas, people knew the power schedule and could plan accordingly.
But where I grew up, power came like a blessing from the gods — unpredictable and rare. And when it arrived, it was celebrated with loud, joyful shouts of “Up NEPA!” — a chant known in almost every Nigerian home.
Because of this unpredictability, communities adapted. We became resourceful. Many homes installed multiple power lines — different phases — in the hope that if one failed, another might still have power supply. At other occasions, one line could have very low current, and the other very high current – both of them equally useless.
But sometimes, the most painful experience wasn’t that there was no power — it was that power had returned on a different phase, and you didn’t know. So you sat in unnecessary darkness, unaware that light was already available — just not where you expected.
And isn’t that how life works too?
Many of us live in self-imposed darkness — not because there isn’t light available, but because we’ve stopped checking. We’ve grown so accustomed to scarcity, to waiting, to disappointment, that even when opportunities arise — when “light” returns — we don’t notice.
We stay in rooms darkened not by circumstance, but by unawareness.
Those experiences remind me that sometimes in life, we must pause, step out of autopilot, and check the lines. Check our perspective. Check our assumptions. The light we’ve been waiting for might already be here — just on a different channel.
2 Peter 1:3 reminds us, “His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness.” The light we need has already been provided — the resources, the wisdom, the strength — it’s all there.
All it takes is the courage to look.
Have an amazing weekend
1 thought on “UP NEPA!”
I will never stop checking. I will not grow accustomed to scarcity. I refuse unawareness.
This is LIGHT 🕯️
By, the way that was such an interesting coincidence with the power outage.