How have the mighty fallen: from diesel generator to petrol!
A re-run of our 2016 ar cle seems prescient as diesel prices reported to hit N725/litre as at the me of wri ng. Will people abandon their petrol generators?
Iam a ‘big boy’. I may not have the multi-billions that Aliko Dangote has but my house is in the Lekki axis with an income of about N24million a year (don’t tell the tax man!) means that in the Nigerian context, I am in the top 10% of the population.
With my position, surely, I should be fairly immune from the issue of power shortages? I thought so too until my residence did not get any power supply from PHCN in the last two months. Sorry, I am exaggerating: we got a cumulative supply of about 7.5 hours over the last two months. At first, I did not notice. After all coming home at around 9p.m. to meet the generator on was not a strange occurrence. Waking up to find that the generator worked through the night was also not too distressing – after all this is Nigeria. It took my accountant’s visit in the office to alert me that he had been paying for an inordinate amount of diesel for the home generator over the last few weeks. In fact in the last four weeks, I had spent N412,000 on the stuff!
I was immediately suspicious of the driver who used to buy the diesel. On interrogation, Atanda admitted that he used to steal diesel before but had stopped when he saw the amount I was spending on it in the last few weeks. “Oga, in fact, I pity you”. Shocked at his confession, I shouted on him to get out of my sight and called my wife. She replied that we had not had power during the last few weeks, not only because the power supply was bad but also because the cable supplying power to our street was bad. So all the sirens I usually hear overnight, heralding the coming of power were just signals for the adjoining streets, not ours. We had to continue managing until the issue was rectified.
Then the petrol generator ‘broke’. That’s right. Not broke down but broke. One Sunday afternoon, it made as sound like the end of the world had come and stopped working. When I got to the power house, I saw that the engine block had shattered into many pieces. You may be wondering about our power house. That is where our 40 KVA and 5.5KVA petrol generators as well as our 2 KVA inverter reside. With the petrol generator dead, all our energy needs went on the inverter and the diesel generator. In a few days, we learnt that two of the inverter batteries had to be changed. The price? N110,000. Meanwhile the replacement of the petrol generator was to cost N250,000.
Not being flush with cash (even bog boys get short once in a while), I decided to continue managing the diesel.…… until I found out that my diesel bills were nudging N140,000 a week! I sat down with Madam to have a power sector conference. After much wrangling, we decided to port to petrol generators. We had weighed the pros and the cons. Running the diesel generator will lead us into penury. We should just keep it for the times the house was full of visitors and we needed to pose that we were still ‘part of the diesel crowd’. The inverter was okay but could not power an airconditioner and it also needed a power source to charge the batteries. On the other hand, a 5.5 KVA petrol generator could power an air conditioner and would run on about N15,000 a week. We would start with one, see how it goes and then buy another petrol generator.
I could not help feeling sorry as we made this decision. I felt sorry for our massive 40KVA soundproof diesel generator. It had served us faithfully as a back-up but as the main source of power supply, it would ruin us. I felt sorry for myself. I remembered when I bought my first diesel generator, many years ago. It was a cheap unreliable Chinese import but it was a sign of progress from my petrol generator days. I had moved up the diesel generator owning ladder until I reached the 40KVA soundproof stage. How have the mighty fallen! I was back to fully petrol. My wife comforted me – all our big boy neighbours were also back fully to petrol generators. I had tried as I had held out for this long. I was the biggest of the big boys in our neighbourhood!