THE REPUBLIC OF THE POWER BANK

By Lanre Ogundipe

There is a quiet, universal ritual performed across boardrooms, ministerial offices, motor parks and legislative chambers every morning in this country. It is not the reading of the national newspapers, nor the recitation of civic pledges. It is the anxious, almost instinctive patting of pockets and handbags to confirm the presence of our true national talisman: the power bank.

We are a people living in a perpetual state of electrical uncertainty. While Silicon Valley obsesses over artificial intelligence, quantum computing and autonomous vehicles, our own ingenuity is often occupied with a more immediate technological challenge: keeping a smartphone alive when the electricity disappears.

Thus, the 20,000 milliampere hour plastic brick has become an unofficial national accessory, carried with the seriousness once reserved for wallets, identity cards and house keys.

It could almost serve as our coat of arms. Picture it: on a field of fluctuating voltage, a discharged handset rampant, supported by two blinking LED indicator lights, with the national motto: Charge When You Can.

The philosophy behind it is larger than the gadget itself.

Sociologists may study institutional decay through budgets, policy papers and legislative bills. But the state of a society can sometimes be measured by something much simpler: how much it trusts the primary system to work.

We do not trust the primary source of anything.

The public electricity supply fails, so we buy generators. The generator drinks diesel and fills the neighbourhood with fumes, so we acquire inverters. The inverter needs charging, so we look for another source of electricity. When all else becomes uncertain, the rechargeable fan enters the room. And somewhere inside the briefcase sits the final line of defence, the faithful power bank.

We have nationalised the philosophy of backup.

We run our lives on auxiliary power, contingency plans and workarounds. It is an exhausting way to exist, requiring the mental bandwidth of an air traffic controller simply to keep a mobile phone alive long enough to transfer money for a plate of pepper soup.

Consider what this does to ordinary behaviour.

In a reasonably dependable environment, people can sit through a conversation without periodically checking their battery percentage. They can walk down the street without wondering whether their phone will die before they reach their destination. They can enter an office, a meeting or a restaurant without first locating the nearest charging socket.

Not here.

Our eyes are permanently drawn to the top right corner of the smartphone screen, monitoring the dwindling life of the battery with the anxiety of stockbrokers watching a market crash.

“Good afternoon, Honourable,” a visitor says, entering a plush office where the air conditioner is already negotiating with the electricity supply.

“Welcome, my brother,” the dignitary replies, barely looking up. “Let us talk quickly. My battery is on twelve percent, and NEPA has taken the light. The generator is warming up.”

Twelve percent.

In the Nigerian republic of the battery bar, that is not a number. It is a warning from the National Emergency Management Agency.

At ten percent, conversations acquire urgency.

At five percent, promises become negotiable.

At two percent, even national reconciliation can wait.

Entire meetings, business transactions and perfectly good conversations can suddenly become exercises in time management because someone's lithium ion battery is bleeding out. We have become a people held hostage, not by the technology itself, but by our uncertainty about whether the next socket will work.

That is what makes the power bank such a revealing little object.

It is not merely a charger. It is a private insurance policy against public uncertainty.

A power bank is an individual admission that the primary system cannot always be trusted.

That is why its metaphor extends beyond electricity. We provide our own security because public security may arrive late. We sink our own boreholes because public water cannot always be relied upon. We create private schools and hospitals because public alternatives may not meet our needs. We build informal networks of assistance because formal institutions can sometimes be painfully slow.

And now, we carry our own electricity in our pockets.

There is even a class system among power banks.

There are the sleek, fast charging models owned by those who can afford them, capable of reviving several devices at once. Then there is the bruised, tape wrapped generic brick bought from a roadside trader, proudly advertised as 50,000 milliampere hours but mysteriously exhausted after one phone charge.

Its owner knows better than to complain.

In Nigeria, even the power bank may come with a promise that requires verification.

Yet there is something almost admirable in the absurdity.

We charge these devices overnight, sometimes wondering whether the next voltage surge will turn them into expensive paperweights. We carry them into meetings, weddings, funerals, airports and journeys as though they were protective talismans against the darkness.

When the larger system falters, we improvise a smaller one.

That is the remarkable contradiction.

The Nigerian citizen is often portrayed as merely enduring failure. But endurance has become an operating system. We improvise, adapt, substitute and create private solutions around public deficiencies.

The danger, however, is that a society can become so accustomed to backup that it forgets what a reliable primary system feels like.

That is the deeper joke behind the power bank.

It was designed to support the system.

In our republic, the backup has become part of the system itself.

And perhaps that is why the humble power bank deserves its place in the national imagination. It is a pocket sized monument to Nigerian resilience, ingenuity and inconvenience, all charged overnight and carried into another uncertain day.

So, before you leave home this morning, check your indicator lights.

If your power bank is showing one lonely bar, think carefully.

You may not merely be going out with a dying battery.

You may be walking into a digital desert without water.

 Lanre Ogundipe is a Public Affairs Analyst, former President Nigeria and Africa Union of Journalists. He writes from Abuja