When the Lights Go Off: Living through power outages in Ghana – Eugene Dogbatse Atsu writes

There is a particular kind of silence I have come to recognize the moment the lights go out. The fan slows to a stop, the television screen fades to black, and suddenly, everything feels still.

In Dansoman, this experience, “dumsor”, is no longer unusual. It is part of life I have learned to anticipate, even when I don’t want to.

I remember nights when I had plans of work to finish, something important to read, or even just time to relax, and then, without warning, darkness took over. At first, there is always that brief hope: maybe it will come back in a minute. But minutes stretch into hours, and plans quietly fall apart.

As Kofi Annan once said, “Access to energy is fundamental to development.” I think about this statement, especially in these moments of blackout. Because beyond the inconvenience, I feel what it truly means to be cut off from productivity, from comfort, from progress itself.

What makes it more frustrating is knowing that I am not alone. I see it in the hairdresser down the street who has to turn customers away, in the cold store owner worrying about spoiled goods, and in students trying to read under dim torchlight. These are not distant statistics; they are people like me, adjusting their lives around something as basic as electricity.

The hardest part, for me, is the uncertainty. If I knew when the power would go off and when it would return, I could plan. I could prepare. But it’s unpredictable, which disrupts everything. It forces me to always have a backup plan, charging devices early, conserving battery, and sometimes even cutting tasks short just in case.

Over time, I’ve had to adapt. Like many others, I’ve started considering alternatives like power banks, inverters, and even solar. It’s a quiet kind of resilience, the kind that grows not out of choice, but necessity. Still, part of me wonders why adaptation has become the norm.

Because the truth is, electricity should not feel like a privilege. It should be constant, reliable, and taken for granted. Until that becomes reality, every time the lights go off, I am reminded that something so basic still remains uncertain.