BENIN-SHAGAMU ROAD AS METAPHOR OF A HOBBLED STATE.

By Peter Claver Oparah

On the Benin-Ore Road, I had done some works some previous years but each year meets the road in more terrible state of disrepair and inflicts more pains and sufferings on hapless Nigerians that are seemingly sentenced to the scourge of crooked leadership. This demands me to do more and after the experience on Nigerian roads (not Benin-Ore Road alone) yesterday, I was more than convinced that as the joke goes that God wept after being asked of the time duration for the solution of Nigerian problems, we are in for a life experience of harrow if nothing is done to re-direct leadership in this country. Who would have believed that after all the huffing and puffing of the last eight years, Nigerians would still be crawling through deadly, man-eating craters and life-threatening forest paths to move to the next possible destination? Who would have believed that after all the dubious professions of reformist intents, this country would be edged to the brinks of practical collapse where all infrastructures have been hobbled and life prodded to the Hobbesian fringe while our duplicitous leaders feed from the main fruits of the natural harvest the country is endowed with? 

Yesterday, Thursday, 9^th of August, 2007, I found myself migrating to hell and sneaking out. I was on Nigerian roads and by the time I finished, I had completed an unintended tour of close to half of the country, chunked out a full day and had a wrecked physiological frame to tell the story. We left Owerri in one of the latest models of Toyota commuter buses around 8.15 am. The bus, which was spacious and fully air-conditioned, had the maximum fifteen passengers as it left its garage in Owerri. We went effortlessly through the heavily politicized but now-abandoned Owerri-Onitsha Road, the good Onitsha-Benin Road and the tempestuous and stormy Benin-Ore Road. Thanks to the clement weather that never intruded on the flow of our journey, we made Ore at 1.20 pm, refreshed briefly and continued our journey. Having been warned not to attempt to take the completely collapsed Ore-Shagamu Road, we made a detour to Okitipupa, although we were guided more by intuition than a sense of direction of where the road leads. Far into Okitipupa area, we saw some other passenger buses, which were warning us that the road had been completely blocked by fallen trailers and that we should better exploit alternative routes. We reversed and attempted to wade through the dreaded Ore-Shagamu Road but we saw that it was needless unless we were determined to stay for days at a particular spot. Heavy duty trucks and luxury buses have added to the hell on the road by converting the few spaces available into permanent parking lots, waiting for God-knows-what. The driver made a suggestion; that we should contribute ten percent of our transport fares so as to augment the additional cost of diverting to Akure and accessing the Abuja route. This led to minor disagreement between him and some passengers who maintained they weren’t paying any additional fares after paying heavily for the journey. Of course, the air-conditioner we had been enjoying from Owerri was the first victim of this altercation as the driver put it off.  

But we were to reach an agreement later and decided to ‘assist’ the driver with fueling incentives totaling ten per cent of our original fares, so as to take a much longer and only alternative that existed. Off we went to Akure, through Ondo, on a smooth and narrow road and the journey lasted for another three hours because most of the East-bound vehicles were on that road. At Akure, my friend and school mate, Bola Ilori, the AC senatorial candidate for Ondo North senatorial zone called me and I informed him that I was in Akure. He said he also came into Akure for a meeting and demanded that I disembark and be his host in Ondo so that we would continue the journey the next day (today). I refused and he tried hard to convince me but I refused, even when he made the remark that I would sleep on the road. As distant as that prayer seemed to me, it was an impossibility considering that I guessed it would only take us three and half hours to make Lagos. He told me though that he was only warning me of that reality, founded on his own practical experience where he had to spend about two hours on a bad stretch on the Akure-Ife Road and that we should prepare for that reality. He was right because soon, we were on that spot where a carnival of trailers, luxury buses and containers were stranded on the deep craters that have divided the road into two. There was no sign of movement. Right there, we made a detour to bush tracks in the virgin villages of Igbara Oke and that was another experience of life in the jungle, as the muddy, untarred roads played an unusual guest to so many cars and smaller buses. We reached a particularly impassable stretch where we saw a campaign poster of the Ondo Governor, Olusegun Agagu and many passengers made a joke of how he managed to place his poster in such a place, in apparent indictment of the state of that alternative road. 

We eventually managed to free ourselves from the jungle and accessed the road again although we found out it would take a miracle for many trailers and Abuja bound buses to achieve the heroic feat we achieved and decongest the totally blocked road in one week! However, we continued the journey with some minor hitches occasioned by the tentative nature of the road till we hit Ibadan at around 7.30pm. As soon as we saw the ‘welcome to Ibadan’ signpost, we ran into one of the most excruciating traffic snares I have seen in my entire life. It did not take anything for us to know that a combination of the horrible nature of the road, the pressure exerted by the increased volume of traffic occasioned by the collapse of the Ore-Shagamu road and absence of road discipline was responsible for our present woes, which extended way beyond the roundabout that led to the Lagos road and continued deep into the Ibadan end of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. After nearly four hours, we freed ourselves from the gridlock and started the last lap of the eventful journey into Lagos around 11pm. We encountered another snarl around Ogere and after this, we made the bumpy ride into Lagos at about 1.30am, thus ending an eighteen hours fitful journey. For our safety and because security had totally collapsed, the driver deigned it wise to take all of us to their makeshift garage at Oshodi, where we passed the night and ‘slept’ with two hours open, watching the gyration of the notorious Oshodi gangsters just across the road, thus fulfilling the prediction of Ilori. I made my home around 7.00am, which is the actual time my journey ended, 231/2 hours after I set sail. But we found out that we were lucky as we were the first bus from the company to make it to Lagos. So many others never made it till we left around 6.30am. 

So after this, I decided to widen the article to cover all the death traps in Nigeria; the very roads Obasanjo and his band of thieving hustlers he humours as his reformers, transformed in eight years. As it is with Nigerian roads, so is it with all infrastructures in Nigeria that suffered the delimiting influence of the marauders that raided this country for the past eight years. This explains my own abhorrence with the attitude and pretence that corruption never extended to the ruinous activities of the moths and locusts that ran aground all federal institutions and structures with trillions of Naira going down with this delimitation for eight full years, just because this state of ruination is pleasing to the Capone of destruction himself, the architect of the jungle called Nigeria, General Olusegun Igbochukwu Obasanjo. He was the target of the prurient curses that flew among the distraught and stranded victims of his destructive epoch. I am not sure that by this time next year, we would still not be writing about the parlous state of the Benin-Ore Road, a worthy metaphor to the leadership deficit that enchains Nigeria since independence.     
 

Peter Claver Oparah

Ikeja Lagos. 

E-mail: peterclaver2000@yahoo.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 This is an eyewitness account; a first person narration. No one told me. I observed it myself. Not t...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 12.08.2007 04:41

denker  Villager

# 2 hand over nigeria to germans and all the problems would be solved in few years...:D:D:D Posted by denker| 12.08.2007 13:32

RAYNOSA  Villager

# 3 The truth of the matter is that we sometimes don't know how to make positive demand from government,or the people in business don't know how to push for change. I have said this before if all transport workers,users and victims of road accidents decides to boycott the use of the road until it is properly fixed.Since Nigeria is a country that is so much dependant on road transport,no doubt this will bring the attention needed. Another issue is this,now that the present government have decided to look at the road,what kind of road would they be fixing bet me they are just going to pour bitumen/tar on ordinary graded sufface,this would cost another Billions of Naira. Posted by RAYNOSA| 13.08.2007 08:43

RAYNOSA  Villager

# 4 At Least We Dont Need Any Tokunboh Engineer To Tell Us That If A Road Is Properly Done .it Should Last For About Thirty Years For Another Major Work To Be Carried-out,if At All Just Re-surfacing. Posted by RAYNOSA| 13.08.2007 08:50