There is a kind of darkness Nigerians know too intimately. Not the literary kind. Not the kind poets turn into metaphor. The real darkness. The one that arrives in the middle of dinner, shuts down a child’s homework, silences a hospital machine, and leaves an entire street listening to the cough of generators like a second national anthem.
The one that comes without warning, stays longer than it should, and forces an entire country to rearrange its life around absence.
That darkness has become routine.
Nigerians understand this too well. Not because they want to, but because they have been forced to.
Businesses now budget for diesel the way they once budgeted for expansion. Why businesses factor fuel into survival. Why homes fall silent at night, not out of peace, but because there is simply nothing left to power.
Families buy rechargeable lamps before they buy furniture. Students read with one eye on their books and the other on the battery percentage of a dying phone.
This is no longer an inconvenience. It is a way of life forced on a people who deserve better.
So whenever a public official leaves the nation’s power sector and begins to look toward a bigger political office, citizens are right to ask a simple question.
What exactly is the record being promoted?
This is not personal. It is civic memory.
Nigerians may forget speeches, but they do not forget lived reality. They remember the sudden grid collapses that threw the country into chaos. They remember the unstable supply that made planning impossible. They remember being told improvement was around the corner while their generators kept working overtime.
Electricity is one of the few promises the government cannot hide behind language. It is brutally honest. Either people have light, or they do not.
And for too many Nigerians, the last stretch in the sector felt less like progress and more like survival.
Of course, no honest person will pretend the power crisis began with one minister or one administration. The decay is decades old. The infrastructure has been weak for years. Policy inconsistency, corruption, transmission failures, and underinvestment all predate the latest occupant of the office.
But leadership is never judged only by what it inherited.
It is judged by what changed.
Did supply become noticeably more stable in homes and businesses?
Did the grid stop collapsing with embarrassing regularity?
Did ordinary Nigerians feel any measurable relief?
Or did they simply become more creative in managing disappointment?
Those are not hostile questions. They are the bare minimum in any democracy that claims to value accountability.
Because public office is not just about occupying a chair. It is about leaving behind evidence that the chair mattered.
And this is where our politics keeps failing us.
We have normalized the culture of moving from one office to another without forcing a serious reckoning with performance. Yesterday’s unresolved failure becomes tomorrow’s campaign slogan. The system keeps recycling ambition while citizens keep recycling fuel cans.
That is not democracy at its best.
That is amnesia as governance.
But Nigerians are not as forgetful as politicians hope.
The small-business owner who closes early because fuel costs are crushing profits remembers.
The mother who cannot preserve food because power disappears for days remembers.
The hospital patient, praying the backup generator survives the night, remembers.
The student whose future keeps being interrupted by darkness remembers.
This is why every new political ambition must pass through the gate of old performance.
Not because anyone should be denied the right to contest.
But leadership should never be separated from consequence.
The truth is, electricity is too central to life for failure in that sector to be treated as just another chapter in a political résumé. Power touches everything. Commerce, healthcare, education, security, dignity. When it fails, the damage travels far beyond darkness. It enters livelihoods, hopes, and futures.
That is why this conversation matters.
Not because one man wants another office.
But because citizens must decide whether ambition alone is enough.
In serious democracies, records speak before candidates do.
And where millions of people still measure their nights by outage schedules, the loudest part of any campaign may not be the promises ahead, but the darkness left behind.
No politician should ask for more power without first answering for the one that failed in his hands.
That is the standard that public life must begin to demand.
Anything less is how nations learn to normalize decline.
No politician should campaign for a bigger office while millions still live inside the darkness of his last assignment.
Stephanie Shaakaa
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