ECG, VRA, Gridco, God? Who’s to blame for these power outages?

As I began this blog post, I slotted my pen drive into the USB port. That’s because I hate to lose this blog to the black hole of the blogosphere if, scratch that, when the power goes off. Again. At least I’ll only lose a minute’s worth of work since I set the autosave up for that. Besides the electricity in our house, I have a little problem with a laptop battery not charging. That’s entirely my bad; I need a new one and delayed in getting it.

What is not my bad is the “lights off” situation here in Tema. For the past three weeks, maybe even four, we have regularly had our electricity turned off. Twelve hours at a go here, ten there, another day it was 14 solid hours of no lights, no power, no nothing. Even the best laptop battery couldn’t withstand that degree of ridiculousness.

“Are you load shedding?” you might wonder. Who the hell knows? Ghana’s electricity related utility companies (ECG – Electric Company of Ghana, VRA – Volta Regional Authority, and Gridco – the transmission line people) are nothing if not obtuse and arrogant. No information was or has since been disseminated.

Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I did once hear a car driving slowly through the neighborhood with someone making an announcement in Twi through the loudhailer. And were I to understand Twi (I know, my bad) I could have perhaps been forewarned of the power situation. As it was, a shopkeeper told me what they said – the day after a “lights off” event.

But that really only explains one day. We still have no idea what happened the other seven or eight separate occasions when the electricity went off. The shopkeeper said that the announcement (done on the Monday after, by the way) mentioned that “routine annual maintenance” on Friday was the reason for Friday’s all-day outage, but that the outage on Saturday (which blacked out all of Tema) was the result of a fire. From what? My conclusion is that said “routine annual maintenance” caused the fire. That begs the question, has no one here ever heard of the expression, "if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it?"

Meanwhile, a friend through Facebook who lives somewhat close said she’d heard it was a transformer that caught fire. Another friend (the same day) said he’d heard that the heavy rains of the previous night pulled some wires down and that lead to the power disruption.

I don’t know what the truth is. As I said no one is forthcoming. Regular citizens like me are just guessing and hypothesizing. And, if they’re like me, they’re sitting in the heat (since we don’t have a generator) baking, simmering and stewing in our juices as we seethe over the situation.

And it’s not just a matter of heat. Yes, it’s hot; we’re all sweaty and have short tempers. And we could go to a pool or something. Except that with the constancy of the power outages I’ve now got a freezer full of food thawing. The drip pan beneath the freezer needs constant monitoring. On the first day of lights out, I was throwing chunks of ice into the sink to slow the filling of the drip pan. By the third day I was leaving the chunks of ice in the freezer, in the hope that it would keep the meat, fish and $100 worth of fresh shrimp we’d just bought from spoiling. There's not enough time between lights off for any real ice build up.

And let’s not forget that I’ve got a life-saving drug that needs to be kept cold here. I’d be out more than $500 if Alex’s insulin cache spoiled. And money aside, I’d be putting my daughter’s life at risk if it got warm, so I’m manic about keeping it cold. I’d had to shift the bag of a dozen insulin vials from the fridge’s crisper drawer which is no longer cool to the touch to the thawing freezer shelf that is still cold but no longer freezing. Then reverse the process when the power came back on. Whether or not I successfully kept the insulin at the proper temperature I won't know until... well, I'd rather not go there just now, let's just say I hope me and my OCD did good.

Oh, and let’s not forget that I happen to do freelance work from home. I’m a writer if you didn’t know. Yeah, this “lights off” problem could shoot my productivity level right down to zero. That is if it I let it. I can’t. My work is important to me, not just because the money is good and we need it, but because someone relies on me to produce it on a daily basis. I can get away with one or two instances of “Sorry, we lost power,” but after too many of those I’m embarrassed. Even though it is the truth, I just know my buyer is thinking, “Is she for real?” I have too much pride for that.

So I’m forced to throw on some clothes (we freelancers work in our jammies, ya know), grab my laptop, glasses, pen drive and money, and hightail it to the nearest internet café. Well, not the nearest, because the nearest also has lights off, the most reliable. In this case, all the way across town in Community 1 at Vodafone’s Tema branch.

There, I sit among the rest of Tema’s hot, sweaty and internet-deprived and do my writing, editing, posting. All interspersed with games of Scrabble and visits to Facebook or a non-virtual walk to the local junk store (Melcom), as I wait for article approvals, edits or distributions or what have you. Today, I spent five long bladder-bursting hours there. I’m sure they’ve got a toilet somewhere, but I couldn’t find it and the single customer service guy at the desk was deluged with customers. All in all, today's visit cost me about $10 for taxis and hourly connection fees. If I'm lucky I won't get a bladder infection.

That’s still better than the other day when I tried out a more local internet café that happened to be attached to a hotel here. Hotel Marjorie Y is where I went (the Y stands for Yaw – the first name of both hotel owners) and the internet café costs GHS 4 per hour (that’s about $3), and I needed two. At least Vodafone had lightening quick page loading -- this was worse than dial-up.

The only thing that redeemed the ridiculously expensive Hotel Marjorie Y was that while I was there I noticed a meeting of Gridco employees (yeah, that Gridco) being held in one of their conference rooms. I waited in the lobby for them to head for the buffet table out by the pool. And when they did, I took the opportunity to cast dirty looks upon each and every one of them as I whispered epitaphs and cursed them under my breath. I sure hope they all had a restless night's sleep, wondering about the crazy, sweaty obroni who kept staring at them. Yeah, that was worth it.