Regular NEPA Outages Were Killing My Business — My Neighbor Risked His Safety To Save It
The hum of the shop was a death rattle, and I knew it. "Musa, the blood is leaking through the carton," I whispered, my voice cracking as I pointed at the stack of frozen chicken. The compressor in my freezer had been silent for six hours, and the Egbeda heat was already turning my investment into a pool of grey, foul-smelling water.
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"Femi, move your hand, let me see," Musa said, his brow furrowed as he leaned over the chest freezer, the smell of thawing poultry hitting us like a physical blow. He touched the side of the unit, his fingers trailing through the condensation that felt like the cold sweat of a dying man.
"It’s warm, the gas isn't even holding anymore; if NEPA doesn't bring light in the next hour, you are finished." I gripped the edge of the counter so hard my knuckles turned white, staring at the five hundred thousand Naira worth of stock that represented my entire life's savings, now rotting in the dark.
I moved to Egbeda with a bruised ego and a thin wallet. Lagos had chewed me up and spat me out. The marketing firm in Ikeja didn’t care about my five years of service.
"Downsizing," the HR manager had said, not looking me in the eye.
I took my severance pay and rented a tiny shop. I painted the walls a hopeful white. I bought two deep freezers and a sign that read Femi’s Fresh Cuts. The plan was simple: buy wholesale, sell retail, survive.
Musa was my first friend in the area. He sat in a wooden kiosk right next to my shop entrance. He repaired phones with a magnifying glass and a soldering iron. He was a man of few words but many smiles.
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"Oga Femi, you are welcome," he had said on my first day. He helped me carry the heavy freezer inside.
"Thank you, Musa, I hope the light here is stable," I replied. He laughed, a dry, raspy sound that should have warned me.
"Stable? NEPA and stability are like oil and water," he said. I brushed it off, thinking my luck would be different. I believed I could manage the outages with careful planning. If the shop went dark, I’d move the meat to my house.
We shared Cokes under the shade of his kiosk during slow hours. He told me about his family in the North. I told him about my dreams of owning a cold-room chain. We were just two men trying to keep our heads above the Lagos tide.
"Don't worry," Musa told me one evening as we closed up. "A neighbour is a brother you choose for yourself." I didn't realise then how literally he meant those words. I just smiled and locked my padlocks, praying for a quiet night.
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The first month was a dream of steady sales. I felt like I was finally winning. But in Egbeda, hope is a fragile thing. The darkness was coming, and it was coming for everything I owned.
The first real blow landed on a Tuesday afternoon. The fan in my shop slowed to a crawl and then stopped. The silence that followed was heavy and suffocating. "Up NEPA!" a child shouted mockingly from the street.
I waited for the surge of the transformer. It never came. Two hours turned into five, then eight. I opened the freezer lid, and the puff of cold air was weak.
"Musa, is your house light on?" I asked, walking to his kiosk. He shook his head without looking up from a shattered iPhone screen. "The whole street is out, Femi. Someone said the transformer blew." My heart did a slow, painful somersault in my chest.
I tried to flag down a yellow bus to take the meat home. But the traffic on Akowonjo Road was a graveyard of cars. By the time I got a wheelbarrow, it was dark. I pushed the heavy cartons through the potholes, sweating through my shirt.
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When I reached my apartment, the street was pitch black. "No light here either?" I screamed at the empty air. My neighbour's generator was screaming in the distance. I stood over my boxes, listening to the drip, drip, drip of melting ice.
The night was a cacophony of "I-pass-my-neighbour" generators. The rhythmic taka-taka-taka of a hundred small engines filled the humid air, a mechanical heartbeat that mocked my silence.
Underneath it, the wet, heavy thud of a piece of chicken sliding against cardboard sounded like a sob.
The next morning, I lost forty percent of that stock. I had to bury it in a clearing behind the shops. The smell of the earth and rotting meat stayed in my nostrils for days. "You should buy a generator, Femi," Musa said quietly that afternoon.
"With what money, Musa? I just paid the rent," I snapped. I was angry at the world, at the government, at the darkness. He didn't get offended; he just nodded and kept working. "Small small," he whispered. "We will find a way."
Two weeks later, the "Great Blackout" began. The grid collapsed nationwide. The shop became a furnace, and the meat began to soften again. I sat on the floor, head in my hands, ready to give up.
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"Femi! Come out here!" Musa shouted over the roar of his small Tiger generator. I stepped out, blinking against the harsh glare of the afternoon sun. He was dragging a long, tangled orange extension cable toward my door. "What are you doing?" I asked, confused.
"Plug your freezer," he commanded, wiping grease onto his trousers. "Musa, your generator is too small for a deep freezer," I protested. "It will carry it if I don't use my charging rack," he countered. "I can't let you lose your business because of fuel."
"I will pay for the petrol," I said, reaching for my pocket. He pushed my hand away with a firm, calloused palm. "Don't worry about that now. Just save the chicken." The cable snaked across the dusty ground like a lifeline.
I plugged it in, and the freezer hummed to life. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. But the fuel prices were rising, and the queues were miles long. I watched Musa go to the station at 4:00 a.m. just to keep us running.
The gridlock of the national grid stretched from days into weeks. Each morning, I arrived to find Musa already at his post. The sun in Egbeda was a relentless, punishing orb. It baked the asphalt until the air shimmered with heat haze.
"Musa, the fuel price jumped again," I said, showing him my phone.
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The black market was selling a litre for triple the official rate. He didn't blink, just kept scrubbing a circuit board with a toothbrush. "I know, Femi. I stood in line for four hours this morning."
I reached into my pocket to bring out a crumpled stack of notes. "Take this, please. It’s for the fuel you bought today." He didn't even look at the money; he just pointed at my shop. "Go and check the temperature of your turkey, my friend."
"I cannot keep taking from you like this," I insisted, my voice rising. The guilt was a heavy stone sitting in my stomach. "You are losing customers because you can't charge their phones." He had unplugged his multi-socket charging rack to save my stock.
"The phones can wait," he said, finally looking up at me. His eyes were bloodshot from the lack of sleep and the fumes. "A phone is a luxury, but this shop is your life." I felt a lump in my throat that I couldn't swallow away.
The third week of the blackout brought a tropical storm. The sky turned a bruised purple before opening up in a deluge. The rain hammered the zinc roofs with a deafening, metallic roar. I watched from my doorway as the street turned into a brown river.
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Suddenly, the hum of Musa’s generator sputtered and died. "The cable!" I screamed, seeing the orange wire sparking in a puddle. Musa didn't hesitate; he jumped into the downpour. He was soaked to the bone in seconds, his shirt clinging to his ribs.
The rain felt like needles against my skin as I ran out to help him. The mud of the unpaved walkway was a slick, treacherous paste between my toes.
I grabbed the wet extension cable, the rubber gritty with sand and vibrating with a dangerous, low-level hum that made my teeth ache.
"Hold the plastic over the socket!" Musa yelled through the wind. We stood there, two grown men shivering in the middle of a storm. He re-taped the connection with a piece of old nylon and electrical tape.
His hands were shaking from the cold, but his grip was steady. We were fighting a war against the darkness, one carton of turkey at a time.
The blackout finally ended after six weeks of madness. Business was stabilising, and I began to make a steady profit. I went to Musa's kiosk to finally settle my "debt." I had calculated the fuel costs and a generous "thank you" fee.
"Musa, I have the money for all the petrol and the wear on your Gen." I handed him an envelope containing eighty thousand Naira. He looked at the envelope as if it contained a poisonous snake. "Femi, put your money back in your pocket," he said softly.
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"I can't do that. You risked your machine and your safety." I thought he was just being polite, the typical Nigerian "no worry." But he stood up and walked me to the side of his kiosk. He pointed to a small, handwritten ledger he kept for his repairs.
"Look at the dates, Femi," he said, turning the yellowed pages. "During the weeks I was powering your shop, I didn't just stop charging phones." "I saw people coming and going," I said, "but you had my freezer plugged in." "I was using my neighbour's generator for the phones," he revealed.
I was stunned. "You were paying someone else to charge your customers' phones?" "Yes," he nodded.
"I paid Oga Chidi across the road a daily fee." "Wait—so you were paying for fuel for me, and paying Chidi for yourself?" The realisation hit me like a physical blow to the chest.
"Why would you do that, Musa? You were losing money every single day!"
He had been running a deficit just to keep my freezers cold. He wasn't just sharing his power; he was subsidising my survival. He had intentionally crippled his own small profit margin for my sake.
"I saw you when you first moved here," Musa said, his voice calm. "I saw the way you looked at those freezers—like they were your children."
"But you barely knew me then," I argued, my head spinning. "In the North, we have a saying," he replied with a small smile.
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"A neighbour who sees your house on fire and asks for the price of water is a murderer." He hadn't been "balancing" any accounts in his head. He had been performing a silent, sacrificial act of brotherhood. He had watched me struggle and decided I wouldn't be allowed to fail.
Three months later, the "Femi’s Fresh Cuts" sign was glowing. I had secured a contract with The Golden Spoon restaurant nearby. My first big cheque went straight to a generator dealership. I bought a brand new 3.5kVA Sumec Firman—the "Big Boy" of generators.
When the delivery truck arrived, Musa came out to cheer. "Oga Femi! Finally! No more orange cables!" he shouted. We celebrated with cold bottles of Star lager in front of our shops. But I couldn't just let the past go without a proper balance.
I didn't try to give him the envelope of money again. I knew his pride wouldn't allow him to take "payment" for a gift. Instead, I waited until he went to the mosque on a Friday afternoon. I called a generator mechanic I had vetted through a friend.
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"Service this engine until it sounds like a brand new one," I instructed. "Change the oil, the spark plugs, the filters—everything."
I also went to the hardware store and bought the thickest industrial cable. It was a heavy-duty, armoured wire that could withstand a flood.
When the sun began to set, the orange glow of the Lagos evening caught the copper in the new wiring. The shop lights flickered on as the street entered its usual twilight. The new cable didn't look like a desperate lifeline anymore; it looked like a bridge, solid and gleaming under the fluorescent shop light.
When Musa returned, his generator was humming a smooth, quiet tune. The old, frayed orange wire was gone, replaced by the professional black cable. He stood in front of his kiosk, his prayer mat still tucked under his arm. He touched the new wire, feeling its thickness with his thumb.
"Femi... this is too much," he whispered, looking at his refurbished machine. "It is not even half of what you gave me, Musa," I replied.
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"You gave me time. You gave me a future. This is just copper and oil." He didn't argue this time; he just reached out and shook my hand.
In the city of Lagos, we are taught that it is every man for himself. We build high walls, and we buy our own "private" infrastructure. We think that success is a solo journey fueled by grit and greed. But Egbeda taught me a lesson that my marketing degree never could.
Survival in a place where the system fails is a collective effort. We are only as strong as the person standing in the kiosk next to us. Musa didn't see a competitor or a stranger when my business was dying. He saw a limb of the same body, and he refused to let it rot.
I often think about those nights we spent in the rain. Two men from different tribes, different religions, and different backgrounds. Bound together by a cheap orange cable and the fear of losing everything. Humanity isn't found in the big speeches or the grand gestures.
Humanity is found in the quiet decision to keep a generator running an extra hour. It is found in the man who sleeps on a plastic chair to guard a neighbour's dream. It is found in the silent sacrifice that expects no repayment. We spend so much time praying for a light at the end of the tunnel.
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We forget that sometimes, we have to be the ones to provide the fuel. The darkness of the Nigerian power grid is a physical reality. But the darkness of the human heart is an optional state of being. I am a successful businessman today because a repairman chose to be a brother.
I look at my new generator now, and I don't just hear the noise. I hear the echoes of the "taka-taka" sound that saved my life.
I hear the sound of a community that refuses to stay in the dark. If the person next to you was drowning in a silent crisis, would you be the one to hand them a lifeline, or would you simply watch the water rise?
This story is inspired by the real experiences of our readers. We believe that every story carries a lesson that can bring light to others. To protect everyone’s privacy, our editors may change names, locations, and certain details while keeping the heart of the story true. Images are for illustration only. If you’d like to share your own experience, please contact us via email.
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