15 Feb 2007 |
|
A picture of Nigerian life THE past few days have been particularly difficult. Monday: I had managed to go through the stress of Lagos traffic, on my way home. In front of the office, there is the Oshodi-Isolo expressway, but every evening, I have to monitor the traffic carefully before setting out. There are trailers coming from the Apapa wharf bearing unlatched containers, there are crazy commercial bus drivers too, lorries and all kinds of trucks, all converging almost simultaneously, with every driver so desperate to outdo the other. There are no traffic officers to be seen. Vehicles move from the expressway onto the service lane. I watch the scene every evening convinced that drivers on Nigerian roads require psychiatric tests. I watched the traffic for a while but today, I really wanted to go home early. So, I joined the traffic. First, getting onto the service lane was quite an ordeal. Every other driver coming from the Aswani end could see that I wanted to drive out of the company gate onto the main road. But no one was willing to allow me an inch of space. I tried to wave at the motorists, almost genuflecting for them to see. I was ignored. One or two drivers tried to drive into my car, and swerved at the last minute. Nigerian motorists are inconsiderate. They do not observe traffic rules. They are uncivil. Driving on the road is like having dinner in the Devil's lair. What was I expected to do? I was expected to jump into the traffic; measure the space before me carefully, and make a move. It is risky. Two vehicles could run into you from both ends, especially as there were other vehicles being driven against the flow of traffic. I finally got onto the road. An articulated vehicle, with an unlatched container was doing a break dance ahead. The container was swinging dangerously from left to right. I took the precaution of making sure the doors of the car were not locked, so I would be able to jump out in case the container gave way and tumbled forth. There have been such accidents around the city. These trailers carry heavy containers during rush hours wreaking havoc and nobody stops them. The owners of the vehicles are said to be so powerful that the government cannot call them to order. Not locking the car doors poses its own problems. In a typical traffic hold up in Lagos, hoodlums could open the doors of your car and dispossess you of your belongings, right in the full view of other motorists,. There are boys also who trade as the traffic crawls, selling everything that you can find in a super market including potato chips, fried meat, telephone recharge cards, household utensils, drinks, and imported toothpick (from Ghana and China!). Most of the boys are thieves, ever ready to run away with your money if you patronise them. They sell fake recharge cards, or old copies of newspapers and magazines passed off as current editions; there have been reports of some of these boys pulling out guns and robbing people....I made it in one piece to the International Airport road, a complete eyesore of a road. So much money has been spent to upgrade and beautify this road which welcomes foreign visitors to the city of Lagos, but it is one long stretch of ugliness. It is occupied by overgrown weeds, area boys, women selling roasted corns by the roadside, young men selling petrol in jerry cans, make shift car wash centres, sellers of herbal concoctions, furniture makers, area boys, illegal bus stops, and the odd fellow emptying his bowels by the roadside. I turned towards the local airport. Traffic was at a standstill here for more than one hour. One Very Important Nigerian was said to be travelling to Abuja. So the rest of us, rushing home from different parts of the city had to be kept waiting until the big man was airborne. It happens so often. I listened to music and hoped that hoodlums would not take advantage of the situation and begin to attack motorists. We were kept waiting by angry-looking police men who dared anyone to move his car and get shot. If you were killed in such circumstance, you would be accused of posing a threat to national security! I finally got home, after enduring traffic hold ups at every turn, potholes, police men who had erected checkpoints for what they call "stop and search" . The entire neighbourhood was in darkness. For about three days, there had been no electricity in our area. I put on the generator. Soon all the neighbours switched on their own generators too. The estate, which is often ordinarily quiet, was now a musical studio with a strange rhythm issuing forth from a medley of generators: the new, the second-hand, the home-made, the imported, all in varying stages of use or disuse. It is a familiar scenario. The noise level is so high: to be heard in your own living room, you have to shout. In the next compound, a neighbour's generator is directed towards my bedroom. I am unable to sleep except on those days when his generator is off. Learning how to live without electricity, in the dark as it were, is one of the major facts of Nigerian existence, a test of human endurance. There is no getting used to it. The generator never serves the purpose. It could break down. The engine oil could suddenly get short. And then the noise, oh that is crazy. And the pollution in the environment...It gets on your nerves. It gets you exasperated. All of a sudden, my generator coughed and stuttered, then it went off. We have a back up. Something called inverter. It was switched on. Lights again. The advantage of the inverter is that it makes no noise. But then it doesn't last for too long. I had planned to work on an essay for a book project, but how can anyone think properly under circumstances such as these? I checked the generator. It had run out of fuel. The inverter also later went off. It is dry season. The heat was so unbearable. I tried to turn a newspaper into a fan. The children were uncomfortable. I tried to fan them in turns. One newspaper was not enough. I increased the number to two. Eventually, I dozed off. The day had ended. End of a familiar and regular routine. Tuesday: I woke up feeling tired, aching at every joint. My laptop lay where I had left it. The reference materials I had been working on remained untouched overnight. I needed to sort out the problem of fuel for the generator. I sent for Egunje. He arrived and took two kegs to go and get kerosene for the generator. It is a kerosene generator. I had always dreaded the idea of storing petrol for the generator. Too many Nigerians had died simply because they stored petrol in the house for the generator and something went wrong. It wasn't long before Egunje called from the fuel station. There was a long queue and the fuel attendants were asking for bribe; besides the pump price per litre of petrol, diesel and kerosene had gone up. Since December 2006, Nigerians had been battling with a crippling energy crisis in form of the scarcity and rising cost of petroleum products. I asked Egunje to return, and take more money. We spend more money buying fuel for the generator than on any other item. Shortly after Egunje left, there was a knock on the door. It was the landlord's son. He brought PHCN bills for the previous month. Tariff had gone up by about 200 per cent! The bill made no sense whatsoever because in December we didn't enjoy power supply consistently for up to five hours at any time. PHCN officials simply fix whatever rate pleases them. Tariffs are determined not by actual consumption but by the location of your house, the type of building, and the whims of the PHCN marketing officers who have been told to get money for the company by all means, foul means preferably. I protested to the landlord's son about the injustice, and the madness of it all. His riposte was that his parents would not like the house to be identified as the abode of a certain troublesome social critic, so we should just pay the bills and quickly too. PHCN officials do not like to be criticised in any way, your house could be marked and that means more improbable bills. Unfortunately, there is nobody to complain to, no protection whatsoever for the consumer of electricity. The landlord's son waited. According to him, PHCN officials were in the estate the previous day looking suspiciously at houses and checking their books. He suspected that unless we paid our bills, they could disconnect the house from the PHCN pole. And that would mean more trouble and more money. Having started the day on this stressful note ( a daily occurrence by the way), I headed for the office, beating potholes, traffic hold up, the police and hoodlums. The office depends for the better part of the day on generators. This is the ordeal that is faced by every company in Nigeria. In the course of a day in the office, the source of power supply switches to and fro between PHCN and generators. It is amazing how businesses manage to survive in this country. Michelin has had to close down its operations because its owners could no longer cope with the crisis of power supply. Many other companies have also quietly closed shop resulting in a sharp rise in the unemployment index. Getting home later in the day, there was no light still. Later, the indicator showed that PHCN had brought light. We put off the generator. But almost immediately, there was darkness again. This was the first time that PHCN would offer electricity in so many days and it didn't last for up to five minutes! Wednesday: The landlord's son brought proof of payment of PHCN bills. As he had suspected, PHCN officers had visited the estate to disconnect cables, but our building and some others were spared because he had taken the precaution of photocopying the receipts of payment and pasted them on the gate outside. You need to do this, even after paying your bills! I learnt from him that power supply had gone so bad, not just because there is a problem with power generation but because a new manager had just been sent to the PHCN office in our area. When a new manager arrives, he announces his presence by starving the area under his jurisdiction of electricity. The only solution is for artisans (whose trade is electricity-based) and landlords in the area to contribute money and bribe the new overlord... But this is only an aspect of the drama of everyday living in Obasanjo's Nigeria. The neighbourhood where I live is even relatively lucky, after all we get occasional supply of electricity for five minutes! There are parts of Nigeria where there has been no power supply for months, and yet the residents pay PHCN bills. A future government would have to ask questions about the amount of money (about N400 billion!) that has been wasted on the power sector in the past eight years, and the poor quality of lives.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
# 
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.