NigeriansTalk

Nneoma intro­duces the #ligh­tup­nige­ria move­ment and offers some sug­ges­tions for mov­ing forward.

turenchi: Is Yaradua on Twit­ter? Will he see #ligh­tup­nige­ria if it trends?

Admit­tedly, I am usu­ally the last per­son to latch onto a trend – peep-toe shoes, over­size hand­bags rem­i­nis­cent of those used to carry baby para­pher­na­lia, mobile microblog­ging, the dance craze that was Yahoozee and the like. But I don’t think I am far behind with this one, except that maybe it took me about 72hours to finally under­stand it…a thou­sand years for some inter­net junkies…but I think I deserve at least a pat on the back…

pyoowata: okay, i get it now… #lightupnigeria

The, at best, epilep­tic pro­vi­sion of elec­tric­ity first by NEPA and now PHCN, remains a thorn in the flesh of our nation. Our inabil­ity to power our homes, hos­pi­tals, busi­nesses and uni­ver­si­ties crip­ples our progress and in fact, pushes us back­wards. Energy, in these times, is the lifeblood of any inde­pen­dent state. Our col­lec­tive fail­ure to har­ness our own resources for the devel­op­ment of Nige­ria leaves all of us hope­lessly anemic.

abi­o­laal­abi: reuben abati came to test us, we showed our detest, now we gasto protest this NO-LIGHT sit­u­a­tion #lightupnigeria

Dis­par­aged by the likes of Abati and other mem­bers of gen­er­a­tions past who can’t under­stand our hip-hop and national terms of endear­ment, Naija youth, (oh, yes, I said it…NAIJA, baby), have decided to press for­ward to shape a future of their own choos­ing. Ligh­tup­nige­ria is a grass­roots attempt by our youth to make use of Web 2.0 tech­nolo­gies as a force of change. “Enough is enough,” is the cry of our gen­er­a­tion towards a power-less sit­u­a­tion we have learned to accept as the Niger­ian brand. Through Face­book, MySpace, Twit­ter and the blo­gos­phere, many are hop­ing to shed light on our debil­i­tat­ing energy famine. A sim­ple Google search will dis­play the scores of blog­gers that have writ­ten about Ligh­tup­nige­ria. Ligh­tup­nige­ria has also been taken to the streets and as of what I heard from the grapevine, eLDee, yes the Big Boy, him­self, is mak­ing an appear­ance on Galaxy TV Enter­tain­ment News to say a bit about it. Also, accord­ing to the Face­book group leader, a meet­ing of like minds is sched­uled for Fri­day, July 17 at the Sil­ver­bird Gal­le­ria in V.I.

GFADA: Abeg mek una #ligh­tup­nige­ria before I bump my head for dark­ness again.

At the cen­ter of this cam­paign are the key­strokes, #ligh­tup­nige­ria, which is part of an effort to draw inter­na­tional atten­tion to this cam­paign and hope­fully ruf­fle some feath­ers up there at Aso Rock. #Hash­tags were orig­i­nally designed as a means to track par­tic­u­lar top­ics or dis­cus­sion streams on Twit­ter. Reach­ing a cer­tain thresh­old of hash­tags con­verts such streams to a Twit­ter “trend.” Trend­ing has evolved into a means by which to track large-scale phe­nom­e­non such as national dis­as­ters or polit­i­cal move­ments sim­i­lar to the recent Iran­ian elec­tion protests. Niger­ian twit­ter­ers, nai­japulsers, and the like are encour­aged to add the the words #ligh­tup­nige­ria to each of their out­go­ing mes­sages. From the seri­ous to the not-so-serious,

oni­martin: RT @SL419: This guy dri­ving in front o m is such a retard!!! #ligh­tup­nige­ria and light the bulb inside his brain

…we have responded.

Per­son­ally, I am excited, hope­ful about Ligh­tup­nige­ria — though old age threat­ens to increase my skep­ti­cism. As of yet, I am not aware of a cen­tral­ized web­site, out­side of face­book, for the cam­paign. This was an ama­teur mis­take that was also ini­tially made by Min­is­ter of Infor­ma­tion, Dora Akun­y­ili in her “Good Peo­ple, Great Nation” Nige­ria Re-branding cam­paign. From what I have seen so far, infor­ma­tion remains scat­tered through ran­dom blogs, tweets, and face­book pages. But then again, my think­ing may be out-of-touch and igno­rant of the trend to engage in neb­u­lous, decen­tral­ized movements.

Beyond a cen­tral­ized meet­ing point, Ligh­tup­nige­ria could do a bit more in its aes­thet­ics and brand­ing. Har­nesss the cre­ativ­ity of our youth. I could eas­ily see the motto of “Enough is Enough,” to some­thing like: “#ligh­tup­nige­ria so can­dles can go back to being roman­tic!”. Even while grow­ing up with NEPA, our youth have been proven their abil­ity to make use of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy for a vari­ety of purposes…good and bad (…and very bad). Mak­ing use of our home-grown cre­ative cap­i­tal to pack­age the cam­paign would pro­pel the move­ment for­ward. And yes, as shal­low as it may seem, a t-shirt or plas­tic wrist­band wouldn’t hurt too.

I would per­son­ally encour­age Ligh­tup­nige­ria to do more in “tak­ing it to the streets,” as we say in col­lo­quial par­lance. Con­sid­er­ing how our chronic energy short­ages have denied mil­lions of Nige­ria access to the inter­net, it would only be appro­pri­ate that other tra­di­tional media out­lets are also equally employed for the dis­sem­i­na­tion of infor­ma­tion about Ligh­tup­nige­ria. Refus­ing com­pla­cency and engag­ing in aware­ness cam­paigns are a great first step. Shout­ing “up up NEPA,” with one breath and then decry­ing “Never Expect Power Always,” with the next, wasn’t get­ting us any­where. So in that regard, I applaud those who are spear­head­ing Ligh­tup­nige­ria. How­ever, I have not been able to find much on the long-term goals of the cam­paign beyond Twit­ter “trend­ing,” and maybe get­ting a few min­utes of shine time on the CNN. Ide­ally, such a cam­paign should liaise with other like-minded orga­ni­za­tions. It would be amaz­ing if Ligh­tup­nige­ria could ally itself with orga­ni­za­tions that are inter­ested in the respon­si­ble use of our nat­ural resources or groups that pro­mote greener technologies.

ugo­dre: Imag­ine life with­out gen­er­a­tors, imag­ine hos­pi­tals with­out power out­ages, if I ruled d world I’d #ligh­tup­Nige­ria

The prospect of an energy suf­fi­cient Niger­ian is excit­ing. For far too long we have accepted per­pet­ual habi­ta­tion in the Dark Ages as our plight. Sto­ries about the dev­as­tat­ing effects of fre­quent power out­ages abound like pyoo wata (…I know, shame­less plug). Ligh­tup­nige­ria is a huge step in the right direc­tion and goes fur­ther to demon­strate that for this gen­er­a­tion of Nige­ri­ans, the future is indeed bright.

ken­niy: RT @SL419 Im proud that I am part of the gen­er­a­tion that CHOSE to #lightupnigeria