31 May 2009 |
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Democracy Day On The Highway By Reuben Abati I joined the traffic at 10 pm on Democracy Day, heading towards a destination that ordinarily takes ten minutes (!), but I was in the traffic till 6.30 am the following day. The crisis did not end until around 1 pm on Saturday, after road safety officials intervened to restore order. I took time to investigate what happened. The drainage pin-holes on what motorists call the long bridge segment of the highway, close to Lagos, was blocked. Sachet water nylons, accumulated debris and sand and odds and ends. Nobody had ever thought of clearing the holes. And so when it rained heavily ("Even the Heavens wept on Nigeria's Democracy Day", someone said), motorists and travellers suffered. The highway was flooded. Once it gets a bit late, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway is taken over by heavy duty trucks and trailers, all bearing all kinds of merchandise: petroleum products, giant generators, cement, cartons of fruit juice, vegetables, imported goods, including brand new cars and so on. Cars were sandwiched between these frightening contraptions whose proliferation on Nigerian roads is made possible because the country does not have a functional railway system or a productive economy. Everything came to a standstill. On Democracy Day. The go-slow was the most horrific I had seen so far on a road that is notorious for ever lying in wait to disrupt appointments, destroy lives, damage vehicle engines, and cause sheer agony. How ironic, I thought. While their Exellencies ate their Democracy dinners, and savoured the sycophancy of contractors as well as the genuflection of present and future in-laws and the obsequiousness of office-seekers, we, the people, groaned in pain under the various circumstances where poor governance had placed us. On Democracy Day, more than half of the country was in pitch darkness. In Lagos, the football-crazy crowd of Nigerian youths had to watch the Nigeria-Ireland international friendly with the aid of generators. While the powerful and their friends dined, they forgot to offer the people something symbolic beyond mere words: an uninterrupted supply of electricity on May 29 would have imbued so many Nigerians with so much hope. But back to our journey on the Expressway.... This expressway which links the commercial nerve centre of Lagos to the rest of the country is without doubt the busiest highway in the country. About a month ago, President Yar'çdua had announced that the road had been concessioned to Bi-Courtney Nigeria Ltd under a public-private sector participation intiative. The concessionaire is required to run the expresway for 25 years after turning it into an Apian way of four lanes on both sides, in addition to the provision of facilities and structures along the way, which would guarantee safety and the ease of movement. Ahead of that, the Federal Government is trying to patch the road, between the Lagos end and the Redeemed Camp on the outward bound. It has managed to effect more repairs and more changes than the Obasanjo government which spent hundreds of millions of Naira on the maintenance of this same road. But even this is not enough. Regular users of this road also known as the "Church Highway", include the faithful who troop to the various places of religious worship along the route in search of Divine annointing and redemption. There are also residents of the many estates and neighbourhoods that are springing up on both sides of the Highway. Their population increases every day. They live in Ogun state and work in Lagos. There are also travellers going to the East, the West and the North. But despite on-going maintenance efforts this road remains problematic. The surface of the lanes, constructed in the late 70s by the military has become so bumpy in many places that you have to hold on really tight to the steering wheel otherwise you could be propelled by the forces of gravity into another vehicle on the side lane or straight into the bush. And after the Redeemed camp, motorists going towards Ibadan or Benin/Ore have to be full of prayers to avoid an untoward encounter with misfortune in the shape of policemen asking for bribe and who may threaten to shoot you if you make the mistake of talking about your rights. Other ogres lying in wait include local council officials who insist on asking you to pay for everything including having the audacity to pass through their area of jurisdiction, there are young girls also begging for a free ride, but who are actually searching for victims. Someone added that there are also witches and ritualists on the Nigerian Highway looking for prey. Nigerians roads are built and advertised as a great achievement by the incumbent poltical leader and like most things Nigerian, they are hardly ever maintained. This is the story of not only the Lagos Ibadan expresway and its extensions, the Ore-Benin Expressway, the Ibadan-Ilorin Expressway, but of virtually all roads in Nigeria, especially in the South. The rainy season usually exposes the failure of the Nigerian state in this regard. Whenever it rains in the city of Lagos for example, movement of any sort becomes impossible. The absence of the state while the people suffer makes it all the more peculiar. The Federal Road Safety eventually showed up yesterday to clear the mayhem on the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, but it was not available 24 hours earlier when the people needed help most. I talked to persons who said they joined the traffic jam much earlier than I did. It was worse than moving at snail speed. We drove bumper to bumper, truck to car, lorry to bus, waddling through floods on the highway, not knowing what lay ahead, completely at the mercy of the elements and the occasion. It continued to rain heavily, later it drizzled. The mystery of it all was the common fate that we all shared and the obvious walls between us: different vehicles, different destinations, but we occupied the same field of agony, on a day government said we should be celebrating. Despite the difficulty of our circumstances, most of the drivers were reckless. Each motorist looked for an extra inch, and if you were slow to accelerate as the traffic crawled, someone else immediately drove into your space. My foot was constantly on the brakes to avoid any collision in that mess. But the main stress came from the big trucks and trailers most of which appeared not to have any brakes. There were drivers' assistants all over the expressway, wielding wooden wedges which they threw in front of the tyres of the truck that they piloted whenever it was required to stop. These men did not mind the rain or the flood; they were busy shooing motorists out of the way of the trailers. I thought of what would happen if someone forgot to put the wedge before the tyres. I kept trying the best I could not to stay in front of the trucks but they were everywhere. By midnight, the situation had been made worse by the number of broken down vehicles. We queued up behind a particular trailer for about 30 minutes before we suddenly realised that it had parked up. But it didn't matter, the traffic wasn't moving anyway. I thought of Nigerian democracy. It was like the traffic gridlock in which we were trapped. As Fela put it in one of his songs, we were suffering and smiling. If you wanted a sachet of water at that late hour, there were people who showed up, selling water and biscuits. I was hungry but I couldn't risk buying anything. We were told as children that spirits turn into human beings once it is past midnight. Imagine buying biscuit and water from a spirit on the highway! At a point, I also felt as if I needed to visit Winston Churchill, but it looked quite dangerous to step out of the car. There were some young men, not showing any affiliation with any vehicle, just going up and down, looking at the cars and staring at motorists. Each one of them carried a nylon bag. It would be foolhardy to try to find out what they had inside those bags. To worsen matters, everywhere was dark. I was surrounded only by the eerie sounds of horns, the pit-a-pat of rain drops and the sound of moving vehicles. I needed to conserve fuel, so I kept switching the engine off and on. By 3 am, I was already tired. I thought of all our political leaders and I imagined that they would all be in the comfort of their beds, snoring the night away. If they were to find themselves on the same road, their security aides would chase the rest of us into the flood and carve out an escape route for the big man, and leave us behind. I heard a persistent honking of the horn as we moved closer to the end of the long bridge around 4.30 am. The driver of the Baby Benz beside me had slept off; he was holding up movement as the traffic crawled a bit more. I suddenly saw two body forms spring to life. There were two persons in the car and both had slept off. I didn't know whether to laugh or not. But my turn would soon come. I also ended up sleeping off. I was awoken by the sound of heavy banging on the body of the car and someone screaming: "Stupid man, move your car. Does this place look like your bedroom? You people don't know when to sleep and when to remain awake". Behind me was this huge truck which looked as if it was having problems with its hydraulic balance. I moved the car with immediate effect, only to crawl to a halt after a few metres. As dawn approached, I saw a number of persons coming from the Ibadan end of the Expressway carrying their luggage and making their way on foot towards Lagos. One man and his wife and baby had more than enough luggage to carry but they chsoe to walk. I wondered what lay ahead of them. There were also single, unaccompanied ladies, trying to cover their jerry curl hair-dos from the rain shower and still trying to catwalk through the confusion. Some women are stubborn. No amount of deprivation would make them abandon their feminine gait. Imagine a lady still catwalking through the flood. "My sister, how now?" It was a man in the battered car that was now beside me. He was talking to a lady who was walking past his car. I had switched off the air-conditioning and wound down the glass a little. The lady ignored him. "Sista, I dey greeet o. Happy democracy day" "Nonsense democracy day", the lady shot back, quickening her pace as she disappeared into the distance. I tried to check her out in the side mirror. I couldn't see much. My car would later misbehave. I had switched it off and on so often, something must have triggered an alarm in its brain box. Around 5.15 am, the car suddenly packed up on me. Bedlam. By now, we had met the vehicles coming from Ibadan, facing the wrong lane, and we had been forced into one lane. A broken down vehicle could only add to other people's agony. "Idiot, take that your car out of the way." "…loshi somebody, move, ". "…ga were, gbe moto e danu." The car was soon surrounded by desperate persons who offered to push it out of the way. And they did. I called Egunje. What should I do? I was advised to allow the car to rest for a while and then start it again. How many minutes? 20 minutes. The car was tired. So, I stood by the roadside and joined the emergent crowd of volunteers who pushed broken down vehicles and offered lane directions. One bus driver started playing gospel songs. He was transporting a wedding team that was heading towards Lagos. They were anxious that with the environmental sanitation exercsie in Lagos, their plans could be disrupted because no vehicle would be allowed into Lagos once it is 7 am (until 10 am) on Sanitation Day, being the last Saturday of every month. I chatted freely, and there was a general consensus that Nigeria is not a serious country. A gentleman driving the same model of car as mine, later suggested that my car must be having a battery problem and that I should use his battery to start it. We looked for a spanner. Someone produced it, in addition to a torch light. We removed the battery in Sola's car. But I then thought of following up on Egunje's recommendation. I started the car, it whirred into life....
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