ONE NEED A LION HEART TO LIVE IN NIGERIA

We just moved into our new apartment after being asked to leave our previous rented apartment in just a month, all because we were too many in a 3-bedroom flat. It’s crazy, but word on the street says the woman is a witch, and maybe her plan didn't work out the way she planned, so she asked us to leave.

So now we've come into the new apartment. The rooms are big, but it’s an old building. It’s good to go because it’s on the main road. But we’ve got a problem: no light. After payment was made to the agent responsible for the building, we found out that the previous tenants in the apartment were not up to date with their electric bill payments, so they owe a huge amount of arrears, summing up to 150,000 naira. This is actually wickedness.

Now, the power company doesn't care if you use the light or not; they just want their money. The building has six flats. The week we moved in, three other tenants did the same, plus the already existing tenants, so we summed up to six. I truly need the light because I’m always on my phone and laptop, so I started disturbing the caretaker. One day, he called the owner of the house who is in the USA, and he said we should reach out to the agent.

Funny enough, the man previously said that he would pay off the bill, but in the long run, he changed his mind. So we were told to split the bill among the six tenants and pay if we truly needed the light. This was truly depressing. We didn't have much choice, so the bill was split among the six of us. We ended up paying 25,000 naira each to offset the bill, and an additional 8,000 naira each was paid for the power holding company to fix the light back on the pole. For two weeks, they were nowhere to be found.

So we finally decided to call an electrician to help us fix it. We paid 1,500 naira each for that, and the electrician connected it to line 33. The next day, I don't know how the power holding company found out about it, but they came around and cut it, saying they didn’t want us to be on line 33; instead, we should be on line 11. "Okay, Oga, take us there." They eventually left without doing anything, even though we had already paid them to fix it. We waited for another week with no sign of them.

So we decided to call another electrician to help us connect it to line 11. We paid 12,000 naira for that, which is 2,000 naira each. We had light that night. The next day, the power holding company came around and cut it again, saying that the chief of the area didn’t want us to be connected to their line. I completely don't understand. The reason behind it is that he is the one taking care of the transformer. The chief demanded 50,000 naira. The funny part is that after cutting the line, they took the wire to the chief.

So an elderly tenant went to the chief to negotiate. They came back with the wire and said it was settled. I didn't want to ask what the negotiation was about as long as it didn’t involve bringing more money. So we ended up calling another electrician, but this time we paid 1,000 naira each, which is 6,000 naira.

So last night we had light. My dad plugged in his Ox fan directly into the socket, and immediately we had a spark. He quickly removed it, but it’s still working. My brother first plugged his charger directly into the socket, and we had a strong spark. The charger burned. I said I wasn't going to plug directly, so I used an extension. Immediately I plugged in my 3,500 naira charger, it burned too. So I retreated. My niece already had her charger in the socket; it also burned immediately the light came on. After some time, I plugged in my second charger to my power bank. The light on the power bank started acting abnormally. I immediately unplugged the cord from the adapter, and a thick smoke came out of it. I lost my two chargers that day.

Still confused about how things have occurred in just these past few weeks of moving in, dealing with the power holding company and local chiefs. One needs to be a lion to live in Nigeria.

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