How do you fold thirty-three years of your life into a cardboard box and walk away? How do you consign over a third of a century—the sweat, the night shifts, the pride in keeping the lights on for a nation—to a memory you were told you would be paid to forget?
It has been twelve years.
Twelve years since I held that disengagement letter, a single sheet of paper that felt heavier than any transformer I ever lifted. It spoke of a “severance package,” a term so sterile, so clinical, it felt like an insult. It was the price tag placed on my youth, on the thousands of colleagues who toiled in the heat and hum of substations, who climbed poles in the pouring rain, who knew the nation’s electrical grid like the lines on their own palms.
We were the Power Holding Company of Nigeria. We were NEPA before that. We were the keepers of the light. For thirty-three years, I showed up.
And then, with the stroke of a pen and the cold calculus of “privatization,” we were wished away. The government that we served disengaged us, not with a parade or a pension of gratitude, but with a proviso. A “proviso to pay.” It sounded so official, so promised.
But the promise was a lie. A lie that has festered for twelve long years.
We learned the grim truth that filtered down through the cracks of bureaucracy: the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), the very body meant to oversee this transition with justice, colluded with Joe Ajaero then the secretary general of the very union meant to protect us—the National Union of Electricity Employees (NUEE). They sat in rooms we were not allowed to enter and decided our fate. They turned our entitlement, the final reward for our decades of toil, into a feast for themselves. They syphoned it, diverted it, stolen it in broad daylight.
This was not just privatization. This was, and remains, economic banditry.
To work a man for the best years of his life and then, for twelve years, to systematically deny him the means of his survival is more than corruption. It is a calculated, ongoing act of cruelty. It is a slow, deliberate economic genocide that has been playing out for over a decade. They have not just taken our jobs; they have stolen twelve years of our future, our dignity, and our children’s education.
So, you ask me to move on? To forget the thirty-three years that are etched into my bones? The wound is not twelve months old; it is twelve years old, and it has never been allowed to heal. They switched off our careers as if we were a faulty line, and the darkness they left behind isn’t in the national grid. It is in the hearts of thousands of men and women who gave their all, only to be told, for twelve long years, that they were never truly valued at all.
