A note on the national blackout

As one read the letter from the Ghana Electricity provider below, one is no longer filled with anger, but it is rather a huge pall of sadness that descends heavily on one’s head.

Since electricity was discovered in 1866, human beings have invented baskets of sources to make sure that its production and supply for domestic and industrial usage is now taken for granted - in more serious societies, that is.

The average Dutch citizen doesn’t know what it means for a whole nation to be thrown into darkness because the national grid broke down.

I remember an incident a few years ago when there was a power outage in Amsterdam. I cannot help but giggled as I watched shocked Dutch people came out on the streets to wonder about what was amiss!

Their predicament and bewilderment becomes understandable when one consider the fact that modern economies today runs on Electrical Power.

From the heavy manufacturing industries to the banks to the hospitals, right up to the grocers and the bicycle repairers, everything was brought to a complete halt when the lights went off in Amsterdam.

Yes, the grocer and the bicycle repairers were included.

Unlike in our shores, every business that operates in the Netherlands must have a cash register which must be rung up for every transaction. The Dutch do not joke with their taxes.

The grocer cannot accept your money because she cannot access her register because there is no electricity.

Our tragedy is to know that our misrulers in Africa know all these things.

They attended the same schools with the leaders of Europe and Asia. And they regularly visit these countries and see how things run smoothly. On their visits, they and there families enjoy all the modern amenities science has created.

These leaders will then come back home, import and install all these modern amenities in their presidential palaces to cushion themselves against the grinding poverty they consign their compatriots. Cynically, they will then go on national media to tell stupid and outrageous lies about entrusting their countries’ fates to the phantoms and the goblins of the sky.

Since they have ensured that the education sector is crippled to the point of uselessness, their illiterate supporters, lacking any faculty or capacity to think critically or apprehend cognitively, will come out to dance and sing their praises.

The frenetic pace of industrialization embarked upon by Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, would have propelled the country to the ranks of developed nations within the shortest possible time.

By now, Ghana would have been rubbing shoulders with the likes of China, Singapore, South Korea etc.

The Osagyefo recognized the critical importance of electricity to any attempt at building a viable industrial base in a modern nation.

His quest to embark on an Atomic Energy Programme for the country with the laying of the foundation for the construction of the Ghana Atomic Reactor at Kwabenya near Accra on November 25, 1964, was probably among the strongest factors that propelled the imperialists to trigger their local lackeys to overthrow his government in 1966.

Westerners do not want a successful African story or state as it will negate and collapse their carefully-constructed White Supremacy world order.

Of course, among the achievements of the imperialists was the stealing of the country’s Atomic Reactor by the Americans. It remains a crime for which no government of Ghana has deemed it fit to seek compensation.

Will Ghana be experiencing Dumsor today if the West had not stolen its Atomic Reactor fifty-six years ago?

Of course, these are not the type of questions the West and its mouthpieces want to raise.

Today, those who masterminded the dastardly act and sentenced Ghana and Africa back by at least a century are busy with shameless revisionism.

Fẹmi Akọmọlafẹ is a writer and author.