Amara has spent eleven years waiting for stable power. She stopped waiting in year three.

Amara Okonkwo runs a cold chain distribution business out of a rented yard in Onitsha. She supplies frozen fish, chicken, and dairy to hotels, supermarkets, and school canteens across Anambra state. She started in 2015 with one secondhand chest freezer and a generator she shared with the business next door. Today she has four industrial cold rooms, three refrigerated vans, and twelve staff.

She has never, in eleven years of operation, received more than six hours of uninterrupted grid power in a single day.

Her generator infrastructure cost her more than her cold rooms. Her monthly diesel bill runs between N800,000 and N1.1 million depending on the season and the pump price. At current pump prices in Onitsha, she's at the top of that range.

The Nigeria that her business exists inside has been reforming its power sector for over a decade. The Power Sector Reform Act. The privatisation of the DISCOs. The Electricity Act of 2023. Each one promised what the one before it promised. Amara watched each announcement from the same yard. Then she topped up the diesel.

"I stopped being angry about it after year three," she told a BusinessDay reporter last year. "Anger takes energy. I needed the energy for the business."

The state's failure to provide power didn't break Amara's business. It shaped it. Every decision she made, from where she located, to what equipment she bought, to how she priced her products, was made in the knowledge that the grid wasn't coming. She didn't wait for reform to make the business viable. She made the business viable without reform.

But viability isn't the same as fairness. Her competitors in South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya are not spending N1 million a month on diesel. They're not building their pricing models around fuel costs that can spike N100 per litre without warning. They have the grid. Amara has the work-around.

The reform story says inflation is falling, the CBN is winning awards, and the economy is stabilising. All of that can be true and Amara's diesel bill can still be N1 million a month. The reform lands at different speeds for different people. It tends to land first for institutions. It tends to land last for the person running four cold rooms in Onitsha on a generator she bought because the grid never came.

She's not waiting anymore. She built around it. What she built works. It just costs more than it should and runs on fuel she shouldn't have to buy.

It's not a tragedy. It's a tax for living in a system that never arrived.