Power to the People!

Not long ago, but which in what COVID times seems a far-off galaxy, I lived in a small despotic West African country. It is a country run under harsh measures, with even harsher punishments for those who dare to question the ultimate authority – the president. He, it should be noted, came to rule through murderous machinations that removed his uncle from power.

And power is one way in which he exerted control. Switch the electricity off as the blanket of night falls and it is harder for the ‘common’ people to meet, to plot, to demand greater freedoms. It is a ploy used by many over the years – the plantations worked by the enslaved also used the tactic to lessen the chance of rebellion.

But even if the power was on many did not have the luxury of being able to afford it.

We had moved into an as-yet unfinished apartment. We had doors and windows, a floor and a roof, plumbing and power…. sometimes. I had been promised a generator but that was months away. Days after moving in, I watched the sun drift behind the hills beside us to leave the jungle a jumble of dark greens and greys as the frogs began their nightly chorale.

A movement caught my eye and I saw a flicker from a flashlight and what looked like a very tall man dressed in very little. In the half light of a brief equatorial dusk, it took me a moment to realise his height was unnaturally elongated by the fact he had clambered onto the roof of a dilapidated car that graced the entrance to our mud-baked and overgrown road. He looked to be hanging.

“Stephen!” I called down to our guard, a delightful Ghanaian who had about as much chance of saving us from anything as my dead grandfather, “Stephen, there’s a man on a car by the electricity pole.”

“Oh, madam, he is stealing your power.”

It took a moment to digest this information. And another moment to shrug. This was WAWA at work. West Africa Wins Again. The chap had no chance of getting electricity to his shack, so why not nick it from the house down the road? Good luck to him, I thought as our power winked off, on, then off again. It could have been deliberate, it could have been a malfunction.

Not long ago, but before these COVID times, we were fortunate enough to find another ‘in-need-of-work’ place on St Croix, the largest of the US Virgin Islands. We fell to renovating with a vengeance with the immeasurable assistance of Barry Allaire and his duo of merry men, Mingo and Easy. They made a somewhat daunting task very much easier. 

The plumbing wasn’t too bad but, oh my, the electrics were not good. I spent a lot of time on island by myself and as darkness drifted across the bay silhouetting yacht masts in a melange of pinks and mauves, I would turn on a light only when absolutely necessary, and never more than one at a time. Oftentimes a fizz would accompany the action. We rewired – thank you, Leroy – and my confidence grew.

However my new found belief in power was short lived. I came to understand another acronym, although not nearly as catchy as WAWA. WAPA is our Water and Power Authority. After nearly eight years of intermittent power or brown-outs – those rolling, blinking outages that cause permanent damage to electronics and white appliances despite having surge protection – the phrase “We’ve been WAPAed” has entered the family lexicon.

I fully understand the fragility of power services during hurricanes that are hurled our way at, sadly, more and more regular intervals. What I do not understand is why a power company in America is allowed to function badly, with seeming impunity, through continuing performance failures, compromises to payment and billing systems including the, almost, unbelievable loss of $2.7 million when invoices were paid to a purportedly legitimate vendor. A scam referred to by WAPA as a ‘Business Email Compromise’. I wonder if that scam will be found by the FBI to have been initiated in West Africa. In which case WAPA and WAWA are not so far apart.   

Why are heads not rolling at the continued farrago of an “autonomous agency of the Virgin Island Government” that does not deliver power? To the idle bystander it could be construed that local accountability has gone the way of federal accountability.  

Not too long ago and in these COVID times, in frustration, I posted a comment on social media. It read, “I have lived in 12 countries, a number of them considered 3rd world developing countries. Never, ever, have I had such a poor power service as I get here in the US Virgin Islands”. Comments flooded in. From those known and unknown. Comments like, “Have you lived in Nigeria?” Yes, I have. “Knowing that you’ve lived here in Thailand that is really saying something.” Yup! Closer to home people said, “And at such a high cost” and “The worst”. There were many more such helpful insights.

What they all failed to mention is that I do not now live in a developing country. This is the United States of America. 

Please, WAPA, power to the people!