In the Dark in Nigeria (2023)
Focus: The psychological toll of infrastructure deficits
Summary:
In the Dark in Nigeria reveals the unseen emotional and psychological costs of Nigeria’s chronic electricity failures. Through field interviews and lived experience, I traced how blackouts seep into daily rhythms, shaping moods, decisions, and even how people perceive time and connection. What begins as a story about ‘energy poverty’ becomes an inquiry into what it means to live without light—light as visibility, as relief, and as power.
Drawing from academic research and oral testimony, the essay situates Nigeria’s condition within a global continuum of infrastructural neglect and emotional fatigue. It listens closely to language, revealing how people metabolise systemic failure as a private, bodily experience.
Read more: https://popula.com/2023/07/29/in-the-dark-in-nigeria/
“In colloquial Nigerian, we do not speak of ‘blackouts’, ‘power cuts’ or ‘load-shedding’. We generally simply say: “There is no light.” And we mean light as in ‘to make things visible’, light as in relief from a burden, light as energy, and light as power, all at once. All the connotations of ‘light’ combine to draw a fuller picture of the multiple dimensions of energy poverty.”
For commissioning editors:
This essay is an example of how attentive my storytelling practice is to voice, texture, and rhythms of ordinary life.
It shows how I’m able to reveal the emotional webbing around policy and infrastructure topics, helping audiences not only understand systems and their problems but also feel them. And things change not because we understand them but because we are moved internally to change them.