While waiting to get counted—a wait that turned out to be futile despite living in the heart of Abuja (Wuse Zone 6)—the mind, unbidden, went combing the memories of childhood.

Back in the ‘80s, Ikot Ekpene, a middling Akwa Ibom town, used to have a central point on the Ikot Ekpene - Aba Road known as Control Post. If you came from the Aba end and made a right at Control Post, you would shortly come upon a middling neighbourhood of bungalows and a few storey buildings populated by civil servants, nurses, teachers, some business people and their families. This was the neighbourhood where this writer, along with some others spent a portion of his childhood.

In those carefree days, life consisted of play, school, food, sleep and then a lot more play. One game played often was a local hide-and-seek variant called ‘ekpa-ekpang’. Leaves, bits of rubber and other oddities wrapped tightly into a rough ball was the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ itself. The object of the game, being no different from any other hide-and-seek game, was for the seeker to find and hit one of the ‘hiders’ with the rough ball and through that act transfer the burden of seeking which occasioned another round of the game.

Apart from the fun of running around, the somewhat graphic nature of the gamesong was at least part of the reason ‘ekpa-ekpang’ was very popular with the admittedly naughty children of the neighbourhood.

A ‘radio-friendly’ translation of the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ song may read something like:

Ekpa-ekpang heh!

Ekpa-ekpang heh!

Ekpa-ekpang hits you,

You lose control!

Children, hide in the land of the dead of your fathers,

Land of the dead of your mothers!

Go, all of you, just go!

Oftentimes, until mothers came hollering and literally dragged participants away by their ears, ‘ekpa-ekpang’ could go on late into the night, especially on those days when the moon smiled with portentous mischief on the earth.

Into this jolly mix came a holidaying Lagos-based kid of our age. The chap, who because his name has refused to comeback would have to live in this reminisce as Lagos Kid, was boastful and loud in the way only a Lagos-bred child could be. Yes, for real. And all the Lagos-bred folks who are now spoiling for a fight can wait in the trenches. Your correspondent is not a politically-correct writer so we can surely do that another day.

Anyway, despite his faults, or maybe because of them—who knows with these things—Lagos Kid wormed his way into our circle. And the ‘o’ in wormed is not a typo. For instance, we were super-impressed when he told us that his father was a general as we had never been face to face with the child of a real life general before (it later turned out the poor man wasn’t even in the army, let alone a general, but just a junior Customs officer at the time).

The award-winning tale Lagos Kid told us though was that his father had just bought the biggest and fastest car in the world, supposedly a Mercedes Benz 1000 ‘Top Cylinder’!

We knew of Mercedes Benz 500. We even knew of the six-door 600. But we, not being Lagos kids, neither knew of this Mercedes Benz 1000 ‘Top Cylinder’ nor had we any way of knowing we’d been fed ‘the mother of all lies’, as Saddam Hussein would have put it! We were simply green with envy and ate more such tales out of Lagos Kid’s mouth, including the patently false information about the existence of a sequel to Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon, purportedly titled Exit the Tiger!

It is all too possible that Lagos Kid was just having a bit of fun with us since we were only country cousins to him in a manner of speaking. However, the day he dared to tamper with the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ song, he truly ‘entered the tiger’.

Thing is, in spite of all his sophisticated Lagos ways, Lagos Kid wasn’t too cool to join us in ‘ekpa-ekpang’. We noticed though that unlike the rest of us, he didn’t sing the gamesong with gusto. Indeed he hardly sang the song. It turned out that this worldly-wise kid was uncomfortable with the mention of excreta somewhere in the song. The offending bit came by way of a projection that if the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ struck a person, the hapless fellow was bound to lose bowel control and immediately mess himself up.

On account of his discomfort, Lagos Kid suggested we use a popular nursery rhyme as a substitute. We simply weren’t having it. How could ‘ekpa-ekpang’ be ‘ekpa-ekpang’ without the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ song? There was no way we could play the game with some lame nursery rhyme.

In his usual ‘I’m smarter than all of you’ way, Lagos Kid made matters worse by insisting. And by then we’d had it with him. It was bad enough that, to us he was a spoilt general’s son who got to ride around heavenly Lagos in the wonderful-sounding Mercedes Benz 1000 ‘Top Cylinder’ while, for the most part, the best our folks could do was the jaded Peugeot 504 L. How dare he try to mess with the ‘ekpa-ekpang’ song?

Someone warned him not to say another word on the matter as we all considered it closed. He thought he could smooth-talk us into seeing things his way and launched into a cocky, long-winded explanation. We set on him.

All the Kung-fu techniques Lagos Kid bragged about learning from Exit the Tiger exited his system and we gave him a sore tale to take back to Lagos!

Wondering why this memory should resurface this past census weekend, the idea that some Nigerians in public office deserve nothing but the Lagos Kid treatment resonated. This is a position one has canvassed in the past simply because this country and her citizens have been taken for a ride too many times.

On the census, at this time your correspondent, being more interested in learning of your own experience, will make do with just whining about not having been counted. When the National Population Commission starts reeling out the figures which—we can be certain of this—few would accept as anything approximating reality, that’ll be the right time to beef. Meanwhile, what’s your take on this whole Charles Taylor business?

Robot  # 1 | 05.04.2006 19:26

The chap, who because his name has refused to comeback would have to live in this reminisce as ...Read the full article.