If Lenin’s pragmatic synthesis of Socialism to electricity and the railway is anything to go by, then it could be said that one, remote Nigerian village is now in a state of ‘Socialism’. That would be Ogene – Amejo in Edumoga District of Okpokwu Local Government Area of Benue State in central Nigeria. Electricity got there January 28th, 2021, the day the button for a rural electrification plant was activated. It has been a long way to that moment.
Some account trace the moment to Senator David Mark’s initiative for a cluster of rural settlements for that axis when he was Senate president between 2007 and 2015. Other accounts insist it was the handiwork of some civil servants pressing on their connections in the system. The long and short of it all is that there is electricity in the village now and Senator Abba Moro had the privilege of commissioning it as the Senator during whose time it was due for commissioning.
The technology
There is no knowing how regular the electricity supply to the newest consumers would be at a time electricity supply in Nigeria’s main cities such as Lagos, Kano, Portharcourt and Abuja is rarely stable. Or even how new and qualitative the plant is! It suffices that, statistically, there are more Nigerians with access to electricity with the entry of Ogene into that list.
What remains to be seen are the impacts of electricity supply on such a completely agrarian settlement still stuck in manual and rain fed farming. Certainly, the electricity supply program has not been linked to any developmental framework beyond electricity in itself. Still, it should be possible to, in another one year, draw out specific outcomes that this development might have triggered such as new forms of commercial activities.
Like most of the rural settlements around that axis of the local government, Ogene is out and out of any share of modernity. There is a dead clinic but a dead clinic is of no use to anybody. There is a typical public primary school but it is like all of them. The road into Ogene from the Enugu – Otukpo Federal Highway at Olanyega is as horrible as Ogene’s share of herdsmen’s intrusive pastoralism sweeping the local government area, with all sorts of implications for farming, productivity and peace! Theoretically, open grazing is banned in Benue State but even the law has its own paradoxes and difficulties, especially when it applies to remote places such as Ogene where the state is distant and law and order assumes the dynamism of that distance. It would be interesting to see what rural electricity brings to the table in a space such as this in modern day Nigeria.
