The Nigerian Language of National Ecstasy
There are many ways to discover that Nigeria is a country of extraordinary diversity. You can count our hundreds of ethnic groups, listen to our rich tapestry of dialects, attend our fiery political rallies, or watch two strangers argue passionately over religion at a bus stop. But if you truly want to discover the one single language that unites the entire federation, you do not need a national conference, a constitutional amendment, or a three-year panel of inquiry.
You simply have to wait until the electricity returns.
Somewhere in a neighborhood, a bulb flickers. A ceiling fan groans like a sleepy giant waking from a long slumber. A television screen illuminates a living room that has spent the last several hours in humid darkness. Then, from a compound whose occupants may not even know the names of the people living next door, comes that unmistakable, thunderous roar:
“UP NEPAAAAAAA!”
And just like that, Nigeria achieves a level of total, spontaneous unity that government campaigns struggle to negotiate.
Nobody needs to translate the expression. Nobody asks what it means. There is no need to consult a dictionary, convene a committee, or verify the speaker’s credentials. Even a Nigerian who has just stepped off an international flight after twenty years abroad understands the announcement instinctively. Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, Tiv, Ijaw, Efik, and every other tongue in our remarkable collection can take a brief rest. The bulb has come on, and everybody understands the assignment.
Over the years, our authorities have tried tirelessly to rename the national grid. First, it was NEPA, which citizens wisely translated to Never Expect Power Always. Then they rebranded it to PHCN, or Please Hold Candle Now. Lately, they broke it into various distribution companies with fancy acronyms like EKEDC, IBEDC, and AEDC names that sound less like utility providers and more like venue managers for a weekend rave. Yet, despite decades of power sector reforms, no Nigerian in history has ever jumped from a hot, sweaty mattress to scream, “THE ELECTRICITY DISTRIBUTION COMPANY PLC HAS RESTORED THE ELECTRONS!” Never. The ancestral chant remains forever unbroken, unchanged, and undisputed.
The shout travels across fences, leaps over rooftops, and enters neighboring rooms, often drawing an answering chorus from people who were not even aware they had been waiting with such emotional intensity. The Nigerian “UP NEPA!” is not merely a statement of fact; it is a wave of pure, unadulterated relief. It starts with a tiny, suspicious red light on a television box. A child sitting on the rug spots it and lets out an excited screech. Before the child can even finish the syllable, neighboring houses join the choir, rolling the sound down the street until it becomes a single, triumphant wave. It is a sound forged from hours of heat, stale air, and dead phone batteries,a sound that momentarily scares the darkness back into the transformer.
The second the roar dies down, zero words are spoken. A silent, military-grade emergency operation triggers in every household, because every Nigerian knows that electricity in the transformer is not a permanent state; it is a temporary truce between man and nature.
Mama abandons whatever she is doing and moves briskly to the kitchen to blend frozen pepper before the current collapses into a dim orange wire. Daddy irons his shirt with the frantic precision of a Formula One pit crew. Junior runs outside to switch on the water pump, shouting across the fence to remind the neighbors to turn off their heavy freezers if the voltage starts flickering like a candle. Meanwhile, the children hunt through the house like treasure seekers, gathering every power bank, torchlight, and phone with the urgency of a hospital resuscitation team.
Of course, no sacred ritual is without its tragedies, and there is a particular heartbreak in the False Alarm. This occurs when a neighbor suddenly fires up a heavy-duty generator, sending a bright flash of light across an adjacent window, or when a street light flickers once before dying permanently. A child or an over-eager guest immediately screams the holy phrase, causing the street to erupt in celebration, only to realize the darkness remains untouched. The silence that follows is thick enough to cut with a knife. The collective sigh of disappointment sounds like a trailer tire deflating, and the offender is left to eat their dinner in quiet, shameful exile.
Then there is the delicate diplomatic negotiation of the generator owner. He has spent money on fuel, endured the noise, and tolerated the exhaust blowing across his veranda. Now that public electricity has returned, shutting down the machine requires experience, observation, and a little bit of faith. He steps onto the balcony, inspects the stability of the street lamp, listens to the hum of the neighborhood, and carefully calculates whether the light will last long enough to justify switching off his private power plant.
Beneath all this hilarious domestic chaos lies something deeply profound. We should never make the mistake of mocking the happiness itself. There is nothing foolish about celebrating relief. Electricity returning can rescue a family’s food from spoilage, restore basic human comfort, enable a student to study, and allow a worker to finish a deadline. The problem is not that Nigerians celebrate. The problem is that an ordinary, everyday necessity has acquired the emotional weight of a surprise visitor.
For those few precious minutes, a single illuminated bulb accomplishes what endless political debate fails to deliver. Nobody cares who voted for whom. Nobody asks the person shouting from the next compound which political party he supports, or demands proof of ethnic identity before joining the chorus. The light comes on, and the quarrels can wait.
When the power inevitably cuts off twenty minutes later with that sharp, loud clack from the street pole, the fan slows down, the television disappears into darkness, and the iron is abandoned mid-task. There is a brief, two-second hush. Nobody cries. Nobody is even surprised. Then, like a well-rehearsed orchestra, generators across the estate start coughing into life at the exact same time. Mama quietly unplugs the half-blended pepper in the dark, sighs, and whispers the ultimate national motto
“Ah-ah, at least they tried today. Tomorrow e go better.”
We can appreciate the joke without pretending the circumstances behind it are ideal. A country does not need to turn the restoration of an essential service into a recurring national festival if that service is dependable in the first place.
And so we return to the neighborhood, where the temporary celebration has given way once more to the familiar hum of generators. We look forward to the day when electricity becomes so boring, so constant, and so ordinary that its presence requires no announcement at all.
Until that day arrives, however, whenever the darkness finally gives way to light, Nigerians will continue to find each other in the dark and share the only language everyone understands.
Up NEPA!
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Stephanie Shaakaa shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
08034861434
