In Accra my thoughts are on Yar Adua's one year in office

How do we celebrate one year of President Yar Adua in the ICT community? I am in Accra at an eLearning conference and exhibition. I have been here for two nights, and the power supply has not blinked for a second.

I remember the taunts of my Ghanaian friend last night at a local pub. The man had mocked that I had to bring my clothes to Accra, Ghana, to iron because I had inadvertently confessed that I have not had power in the area where I live in Lagos for over four weeks and that I consider myself lucky because there are areas in Lagos where power went dead over nine months ago.

I am working on the Internet wirelessly now, and mercifully, I can boast of some speed. I have been able to download a document I last accessed in Cairo, Egypt, two weeks ago. I had the misfortune of not downloading the documents then, when it opened, thinking I could also do it in Lagos. But in Lagos and Abuja, I tried and I failed to download the document – speed was slow and the power supply was a mess. Now, in Accra, I just did the impossible.

As I reflect on one year of President Yar Adua, I can’t help but remember the mockery of my Ghanaian friend and all the disappointments back home within the ICT community: the unclear Nitel mess, the growing disenchantment with NITDA, the increasing frustration at getting affordable fast Internet access and the raging battle over quality of telephone service. But it is the power situation that hurts most.

One year on, many cybercafes and computer training centres have closed down, haunted by the twin evils of frequent power failure and costly bandwidth. And, then, there is the cold fact that this government has not made any clear-cut or strong policy statements on ICT to affirm whether it will go the way of its predecessor or adopt a new approach to integrating ICT into our national life. It has not even said whether it has any agenda for ICT.

Indeed, my friend from Kenya who pushes refurbished systems across the continent wonders aloud if my president is not one of the "IT-illiterates" at the helm of affairs across the continent. She would later remind me that my president has joined the small list of educated African leaders but the long list of IT-illiterate presidents who do not know what a mouse click has to do with Bill Gates' fortunes or the reason why India and China are redefining the map of prosperous countries.

“How do you guys do business in Nigeria without power?” one of my friends from Gambia had asked a day earlier. I am also reflecting on his question as I remember the gallons of petrol bought as a daily routine to keep the office running and business going. I also remember that our small, struggling publishing business has, in the last four years, changed generators multiple times; and I recall an article written by Calithux Okoruwa on the pains of running a GSM business in a generator economy. I dare not share the gist of this piece of unhappy article with my Ghanaian friend, lest he laughs me to anger and an ECOWAS quarrel.

What happened to the promise to declare a state of emergency in the power sector? What happened to the campaign speech to radically alter our power mess for good within months? It is 12 months with President Yar Adua, and I am still trying to make a sense out of my business and social life beyond the probe of the power sector, the increasing disillusionment displayed by government officials in the ICT and other sectors.

I am getting disillusioned too over the uncanny feeling of a loser growing in me. I fear that, in the great success the Nigerian ICT space has recorded in the last 8 years, lies a gaping hole through which all gains of nearly a decade will leak away.

I am wearing well-ironed clothes inside Accra at the conference centre. They had been lying untouched and "unusable" for weeks inside my wardrobe in Lagos. I dare not use the noisy generator to iron my clothes, lest I am forced to buy another generator faster than I should inside Nigeria’s financial capital of 15 million people, where the noise and fumes of generators speak of early death and higher health problems for millions of people.

They say frequent power cuts corrupt computer files; well, they should add that, in Nigeria, it shortens the lifespan of the rich and the "almost rich," whose economic power to afford generators will ultimately kill them.

I am reflecting on how easy it is to do business in Accra and tough to make things happen in Lagos. I am looking at the clean tarred roads within Accra and reflecting on the potholes in highbrow Ikoyi. I am seeing the peace of the city and developing goose pimples while reflecting on the chaos and dangers of living in Lagos.

My Ghanaian friend is walking towards me as I sign off this article. He is pointing at me as a latent force in a failed state. He is telling me that our size and potential strength and oil wealth come to nought if he lives better than me and works in an environment that is better than mine. He would never spend a dime on a generator and would never buy a pumping machine to pump water for domestic use from a borehole. The public water system works well in Ghana.

Most importantly, he would never buy a computer that would be blasted by an angry, over-used generator as happened to me last year in Lagos.

And he would never have cause to celebrate one year of his president in office lamenting the collapse of the public power supply grid and the early death of a costly laptop whose death I blame on a country that has failed me - a country I love so well.