Recently, there’s been the trend of Millennials versus Gen Z, millennials being people born between 1981-1996, while Gen Z are people born between 1997-2015. The trend’s whole point was to see what generation has more influence, style, creatives, achievements, and even guts. Now imagine Millennials vs Gen z: The Power Sector Edition.
The Nigerian power sector has not always been like this. In fact, there are testaments of times when the simplest issues affecting the system were treated with the utmost importance. One example is that those days, in the millennial times, when there was going to be maintenance that would lead to a blackout, it was announced the day before. Shocking, right?
These announcements were on the national news stations, and they informed the public the number of hours it would be until electricity would be restored. The even better part was that most times, faults were fixed really fast, and energy was restored way earlier than expected.
So, when and why did it all go wrong? Pre or post-privatization? At what point did the energy sector start having so many challenges, to the extent that fixing electrical faults now takes days to weeks to months? Not to mention the lack of maintenance for electrical infrastructure, and in most cases, the total absence of electrical infrastructure.
If we really are doing “Millennials vs Gen Z: The Power Sector Edition”, I think we all know the generation that wins.