13 Dec 2008 |
|
Renewing my Nigerian-ess: A Friday at the Nigerian embassy, London. As soon as I di There was always going to be two alternatives. I opted to renew the passport, since the expired one had only been in use for just over the last five years. The other alternative was to apply for the new e-passport. Either way, it was time to renew my true Nigerian-ness. A return trip ‘home’ was imminent. Or so I thought. Each moment, my mind pored on the problem, I feared. One needn’t regurgitate the many ‘interesting’ stories-of-our-embassies around the world as discoverable once you are away from home enough to ever need the services of our embassy. At any rate, the circumstances – cosiness or otherwise, of a camping tent, offshore, will always mirror the mix riches and colour of the real home. But every such moment, I let my medulla oblongata appease me with the way my grandma used to say it: ile eni o ki n so wipe, eni tun ti de” That is, your home will never suggest to you: here-you-come again….awful or scary, dirty or majestic, home is home. So, Friday morning, I took my exit from the London Underground, calmly walking home from embankment station. I had earlier taken a visit to print application forms from http://www.nigeriahc.org.uk. The design of the website is a quick reminder of the ultimate mediocrity that effectively sets the bar; project Nigeria! Just fire up this http://www.sudan-embassy.co.uk/en/ and I will leave you to do the mental comparative analysis. By 10AM, I had found my way into the basement being used for consular services at 9 Northumberland Avenue. Scanning the entire facility with that mental-alertness-times-two brain-processing-speed that I last activated while trying to stay secure on the streets of Lagos, there were scattered empty seats, but there was no point, finding one. At least yet. The waiting crowd was substantial but I know this is not necessarily beyond normal, so I relaxed, and continued my Friday gallivanting… trying to feel free at home. Soon as I noticed there weren’t any attendant to welcome me home, I activated my 7th Agbari...Quickly ensured I read all the notices, as pasted on boards here and there. I had already snapped a ticket – you know one of this little gizmo’s that automatically feeds you paper, with your number on the stack of people printed on it. The device was tied with a rope to one of the cylindrical towers ahead of you, as you descend home. Not so bad. Improvisation. If it works, it is constitutional… This long, I had felt homely enough; the chatter of random one-on-one discussions going on began to make sense. A number of us sat down, perhaps trying to decode the high frequency, but reasonably low-volume pidgin, Ndigbo and Yoru-kure that were being deactivated like world one bombs, being let lose….as everyone tried to make sense of the processes at home. For one thing, the automatic ticket counter, was permanently displaying number 13 since I took notice of it, so yeah! You guessed it, I thought “ this is all nonsense, I am home: what you see is not what you get…. This tickets won’t be worth the paper they are printed on. Essentially, there was too much guess-work left for the sons-and-daughter of the shoil. Where do I pay the renewal fee? This ticket showing D47 that I am holding, do I await the announcer to call me? These people that are being attended to, what category are they? Yu hear say Supreme Court go deliver dem judgement today ? Hahahahaha, Na dat one be your problem so, or to collect una passport here today sharp sharp...
These were some of the lines that I picked up from my hommies. By now, I had stepped down my brain-processing power to London frequencies. It is not looking like I would get done this Friday so time to run green … There was a woman, sitting next to me. I learnt she had been booked to attend an interview – hers was for a new passport application, even on a date that turned out, the consulate was shut down, while staff went on the recent Eid holidays. Inefficient. There and then, I noticed the folks that are being attended to as foreigners - physical Nigerians, but documentary Britons, were actually being called to the counter quite rapidly. International Image & reputation. Wait, there was this brownish (oh! compared to me, that colour is actually white…) entity moving up and down the VISA section. Does she work here ? Apparently yes.
How can you expect our foreign In-Visitors not to be welcome by a member of their own, even at home when we are on their shoil. Hmmmm! It doesn’t matter if my old university friend would have called this shade of ‘white’ omo-ashewo but then, home is now buoyant enough to hire and retain foreign experts. Nice!
In between, a man had surfaced, surrounded by a number of people. There were no announcements this time as to this change in tactics, so you still had to activate your eight sense to figure he was directing flatmates who are in for passport renewals. I joined the fiesta quickly. Thereafter, I somehow found my way onto a queue that had developed randomly and quite quickly somewhere to the rightmost side of the floow but I wasn’t sure what it was for but I stayed in line. Even our 'oyinbo' servant expressed involuntary boredom at the apparent hi-dosage of procedural inefficiency that she is subjecting her kind… abi what body-expression is this one ?
Soon as folks discovered she was at their service, they quickly woke her up from her slumber…someone trying to find out where/what’s next .here.
A sneak peek through the transparent glass separating us from the king and royals at home reveal a mix of thoughts. It was immediately obvious that the staff were working at full capacity, but stretched. More disturbingly was the regularity with which they seem to need to consult one another. And there was the occasional men that turns up, at their back and shifting attention from their primary assignment of dealing with us. The most curious of all was this man, wearing free flowing Agbada with a nicely coloured cap. He seemed to have all the trappings of home’s standard definition of “awon oga”.
The lady that processed my credit card payment had advised me (at last!) how I would be called-in over the hour. Indeed, I heard the shout of my names over the speakers not terribly long afterwards. I walked up to desk 2, signed a piece of paper, and my renewal was done with. I had only been at home for just above 90minutes. I went back to the friends I had discovered at home, just before finding my way out of home, to assure them, they could go
to sleep, in anticipation of their names blazing out from the speakers. As the doors opened, and the zero degree breeze blasted past, I could not quite conclude whether home was the best, or the worst. And the fears of the past felt so long ago. The one thing I had been convinced of: in the seeming chaos that convention suggests our lives are hatched, patched and mould at home, there was one huge but hidden benefit.
Home forces you to expand the conventional capabilities of your thinking faculty. It reinforces your adaptability and attitude to rapidly changing situations. And people. And ultimately home is what made me the totality of who I am, and has to be continually renewed, until home is home again. I grabbed two bars of sneakers chocolate as I made my way into the underground once more, terribly missing home….
‘Dapo Osewa. Chadacre House,
London
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
scovered the expiration of my international passport few weeks back, a familiar but quite distant sense of fear began to grip me. 
# 
Your Comments
Please make The Square an enjoyable experience for everyone by refraining from gratuitous ad-hominem contributions, defamatory comments and off-topic posting. Such posts will be removed.