By Emmanuel Omolayo
The notifications keep coming, same format, edited dates. There is something so infuriating about getting an electricity update faster, swiftly typed, one that is more efficient and constant than the power supply. This session, UI power supply has earned its masters in only one art form: disappearing. The following are words that can be used to define the current state of power supply: ephemeral, capricious, luminal, fitful, spectral and borrowed presence. Like an Abiku, it arrives, stays for a while, perhaps long enough to keep one hopeful, and suddenly, it falls as quickly as it rises.
The UI community needs more electricity supply, not more updates. Light trips off long before your gadgets charge completely and before notes are saved, an experience of a light-out that spares almost no night, one that shows up and disappears like a view-once message on WhatsApp, in a twinkle of an eye, hope is sapped from the eyes that have waited so long for power, only to get a single flash.
What is left? A dark room, students studying for a test with a phone on 5%, a wasted day and probably another electricity update notifying us that power would be restored soon. Ironically, the word soon has been redefined.
This is the cyclical nature of power supply at the premier university of Ibadan; students now trust the consistency of notification on power supply rather than the supply. This has gone beyond accountability of the management; it has become a system. Over 24k students pay a utility fee of twenty thousand naira every session, that is a conservative sum of ₦480 million collected per year for a service that flickers on and off like a dying candle. A salute to the unchanging nature of UI light.
Consequently, a mind that knows an unstable power supply is yet to be free. This is week seven in the mud, we have a few weeks left to exams and day in day out, several students are unable to submit a 20marks assignments or eventually submit after a deadline, which may likely get rejected and result in failure of a course. This could account for those few marks away from getting a first-class; study schedules get collapsed as power does. In no time, academic performance would be affected.
Additionally, the water supply in halls of residence is also affected. Students are left with empty big tanks, some are unable to take a shower before leaving for class, dirty clothes are piled in a corner, as well as used plates, and the bathrooms are messed up. This is very dangerous to healthy living.
Funnily, this menace is quietly becoming a new normal; there is a sudden decrease in outrage, and students have now developed coping strategies. However, this is very heartbreaking and unhealthy. Normalising a failure would never make it less of a failure; rather, it only makes it less visible, and this, at most, should not be acceptable. Students go outside campus to either charge at a friend’s or pay to charge their gadgets and subsequently adapt. This has continued for too long. As a point of emphasis, Unibadan remains a citadel of learning, not a village in the 1900s.
The students of the first and best deserve the best power supply. The electricity updates have carried the same lines for too long. Is there an honest truth untold? Is this a budget issue? How long before this irregularity becomes a policy? Every Uites deserve answers.
This is an abject call to the authorities charged with the responsibility of power supply in Unibadan. We need a functional power supply, not a functional notification system!
