20 May 2008 |
|
Forwarded by Ahaoma Kanu Buildings fall down, pensions aren't paid, politicians are murdered, riots are in the air ... and yet I love Nigeria Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Tuesday August 8, 2006 The Guardian The signboard near the international airport in Lagos reads "Welcome to Nigeria, the Happiest Country in the World". I drive past it often during the first few days after my return from the US because I am waiting for my luggage; British Airways doesn't know where it is. I borrow clothes from my sister and see how fatly complacent BA is. I can't help thinking that it doesn't make an effort at customer service because it is certain that Nigerians will continue to patronise them. Our Big Men and Big Women - the ones who say a plane is "full" because first and business are sold out - are particular about British Airways. A colonial hang-up, no doubt, the word "British" must make it something to covet. My luggage arrives after two whole days. As I am driven away from the airport, I swear I will never fly with British Airways again. I will stick to Virgin: its staff are more civil to economy passengers and the food is better. T Another one does this two days later in Lagos. I see the ruins on television, a whole house reduced to a near-flat pile of broken things. I have just finished a novel about the Nigeria-Biafra war and often imagine buildings collapsing under the weight of bombs. Now, it is the bombs of inefficiency and indifference that destroy buildings. I read about the shoddily constructed four-storey structure, and the people settling down for evening meals when they were squashed by cement. Neighbours hacked at the rubble with axes. People trapped in the rubble made phone calls to family asking for help. First, their phone batteries died. And then they died. Rescue workers came 12 hours after the collapse and, in a twist that would have been hilarious if it were not so heartbreaking, they reportedly took a break at night to sleep and returned in the morning. As usual, a construction company named Julius Berger was called in to help. Reading about this in the paper, looking at the photos of people crowded around the collapsed building, makes me angry. It reminds me of the plane crash that killed my close friend Okoloma Maduewesi last December, and how it was reported that the fire trucks at the Port Harcourt international airport had no water. What does it take to have a national emergency agency with equipment in every state capital? Why should a country resort to calling a private company for help at every emergency? I think of more questions days later as my parents and I are driven to our ancestral home town, Abba. Elections are only months away. Political posters are everywhere: pasted on signboards, wrapped around tree trunks, emblazoned on huge boards. Men - and a few women - running for president, for governor, for senate, for house of reps. The presidential posters are the biggest. A large one on the express road has a photo of General Babangida, the former dictator who annulled a presidential election, above the caption "I Believe in the Unity of Nigeria". I point it out to my father and laugh. My father is looking at a lorry ahead of us, packed full of placid cattle. Look, my father says with a chuckle, the cows are tied together with a rope. No wonder they are so well behaved. He finds pleasure in the tiny things in life. The road is full of huge potholes and I get a little jumpy, and wonder what it takes to fill them up. This is why religion is a thriving business: people travel from a town to another without a mishap and it becomes a miracle, a testimony in church, another reason to give money to the pastor. We stop to buy a newspaper. The major headline is of another man who has been arrested by the anti-corruption body, EFCC. We wonder what he has done to offend the president; everybody knows the EFCC investigates people with who, as we say, the president has a quarrel. On the back page, there is the fiery face of the leader of the Nigerian Labour Congress, a man I much admire, who quaintly calls himself "comrade". The federal government has decided to sack 33,000 workers, a "right-sizing" they say, rather than a downsizing. There is a resigned bitterness in my parents' tone when we talk about this. They are retired university staff, both owed years of pensions. Now they are paid 60% of their pensions each month. Last month, they went for a verification exercise, where poor and unpaid pensioners were made to travel to Enugu and stand in the sun for hours to be counted, to prove that they were not "ghost" pensioners. Two men died after that. One was a lecturer, the other was an electrician at the university who had often done the electrical work in our house. Yet as our car swerves to avoid the potholes on the road, I think how I love being home. I love this flawed place. I love that this is where my belonging is least contested; this is where I care the deepest. I travel back to Lagos because I have to renew my visa at the American Embassy. I notice with some surprise that the staff show a level of civility. They no longer shout insults at people. I watch the lines of applicants, people knotted up with anxiety, clutching sweaty envelopes full of documents. I eavesdrop on some of the visa interviews. When the American voice says, "I'm sorry, you don't qualify for a visa," a woman's shoulders slump; when a man is told, "Your visa will be ready in two days," he bursts out and says, "God bless you!" Later, my sister asks when I am going to apply for American residency; this visa business has to stop. I hesitate. She looks at me and says I can't live permanently in Nigeria. Can't I see how difficult it is? I do see and yet I don't want to live permanently outside Nigeria. I wonder if the reason I feel this way is because I have options, because I can leave. As I begin to write this, a candidate for Lagos State governor, Funsho Williams, is murdered at home. Our electoral process is heating up. There is talk of rioting. I am staying in my sister's house. There is no power, as usual, and the drone of the neighbour's generators gives me a headache. It is so horribly noisy that when, finally, the power comes back for a while and the generators are turned off, I am amazed that this kind of silence is possible and grateful for this incandescent stillness.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
he long airport road is bordered by
an untidy tangle of grass and shrubs and, further down still, by dusty
buildings that look exhausted, as if about to collapse. One just might. In the
past few years, at least 20 buildings have collapsed in cities all over
Nigeria.
# 
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.