LIBERIANS HOLD ON TO HOPE THROUGH BLACKOUTS
Despite a newly reopened hydropower plant, West African nation struggles with faltering electricity 13 years after the civil war ended
For the first time in 26 years, the electricity came on in Hayes Lewis’ modest house in the cluttered Monrovia suburb of Sayon Town in Liberia. The very next day, Mr Lewis went out and purchased a television set, a fan and a single light bulb. The purchases cost him US$250 (8,750 baht) — about a quarter of a year’s income for the 62-year-old jack-of-all-trades.
But it was money Mr Lewis had been longing to spend. He remembers the time back in 1990 when the warlord Prince Johnson’s forces took over the area and fighting destroyed the nearby Mount Coffee hydroelectric plant, cutting off electricity — or, as Liberians call it, “current”.
“To have current, tha’ not small thing,” he said in Liberian English, motioning proudly at the light bulb in his bedroom.
Except the light bulb was dark, the fan was still and the television screen was blank because the electricity, after making its much heralded return, had gone out again.
On New Year’s Day, a bandit trying to steal the copper wire from one of the light poles at the newly reopened Mount Coffee hydropower plant had electrocuted himself, prompting the shutdown of huge swathes of the system.
Five days later, Mr Lewis once again had no current. I asked him what he was going to do. Shrugging, Lewis trudged outside and put a large rectangle object on the table. “I wi’ use Chinese lantern,” he said, resignedly.
After 26 years, the irony of the situation was beyond him. He supposedly had current, but he was still using the same makeshift battery light that had gotten him through the last two decades.
But that is all par for the course here in this country that, 13 years after the civil war ended, is still trying to put back together the pieces that the war ripped apart. Fourteen years of war snuffed out 200,000 lives and laid waste to Liberia, producing generals who led ritual sacrifices of children before going into battle, naked except for shoes and a gun.
By the time the war was finally over in 2003 and Charles Taylor was escorted out of the country, to eventually face a war crimes conviction, the country was left a shell. Schools were shuttered. What passed for a middle class had fled. Infrastructure was destroyed.
And current was gone, taking with it running water, streetlights, and the simple assumptions of everyday life, including walking into your house and turning on the lights, or opening your refrigerator and getting a cold glass of water. Downtown Monrovia at night looked medieval; candles in shopfronts cast their dim light on the ribbons of dirty water running down the gutters.
Liberians, as they have for decades, simply adapted. They acquired Tiger batteries, the lower-cost alternative to expensive generators, and used those to plug in their mobile phones. Those phones they then used to light their way at night, as they travelled in the dark along rural roads and city streets.
They bought so-called Chinese lanterns every other day. In Liberia, “Chinese lantern” refers to an ugly square or rectangular battery-powered light, the kind you might use at a campground at night.
Even the wealthiest Liberians still hoard electricity as if it is about to be taken from them.
If you walk into the average Liberian’s house during the day, you will not find any lights glowing, let alone air-conditioners, fans, televisions, radios or refrigerators running.
In fact, most Liberians with generators do not have refrigerators; they have a deep freezer that they plug in for a few hours at night, long enough to get cold. Then they unplug it and keep the door closed, sometimes for up to two days, until they decide it needs another four-hour juicing.
When President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf arrived at the Mount Coffee plant on a Friday in December to flick the switch that would officially signal the reopening of the plant, it was a big deal here.
Flanked by Linda Thomas-Greenfield, the Obama administration’s assistant secretary of state for African affairs, Ms Sirleaf was visibly buoyant, in no small part because she was finally making good on an early promise from 2006 that she would get Mount Coffee up and running again.
The United States, Germany, Norway and the European Investment Bank contributed to the $357 million project, which was delayed after the Ebola outbreak in 2014. Finally, last summer, neighbourhoods like Mr Lewis’ began getting hooked up to the electrical grid, in anticipation of the hydropower plant’s reopening in December.
In Sayon Town, Mark Laffor, 30, was selling DVDs in his tiny stall, using the power of the same small generator that he has been using for years. He was supposed to be one of the people to benefit when Mount Coffee-supplied electricity, with its far lower price tag, returned. But he said his current lasted only a couple of days before going back out.
“We were having current but they said the pole was destroyed,” he said, shaking his head in frustration.
A few houses down, 59-year old Nora Tabah, a market woman, proudly invited me into her home to show off the single light bulb she had recently installed in the hallway. “For years I was living in darkness,” she said.
She was still living in darkness. Like Mr Lewis, her current had gone out after a few days. But Ms Tabah, who sells farina and kola nuts in front of her house, expressed optimism that things were about to change. “I ‘coming buy freezer,” she said.
Hedrick Walker, 24, owns a shop in Sayon Town that sells “yama yama” — water, biscuits, Spam, Coca-Cola and the like. He said both his life and the town had changed now that Mount Coffee had come back on.
“It’s more lively now,” he said. “I used to close at 6pm. Now I am open until 11pm” — at least on nights when the electricity is on.