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This frustration
comes in many shapes and sizes, but for those of us who live in Lagos, Nigeria’s
largest city and former capital, dealing with road traffic is the most exquisite
frustration of all – a perfect example of how the things which should grant us
speed instead immobilize and debilitate us. In Lagos the struggle with
overcrowded roads is complicated by exhausted buses that tend to give up on the
most crucial flyovers, by road junctions without traffic lights or wardens, or
by the seasonal fuel queues. Road transportation options cover a very wide
spectrum: from the molue, the geriatric, clumsy, uncomfortable
yellow-painted buses, to the roundlight, the latest Mercedes Benz with
two pairs of round headlights that currently represents the summit of material
achievement. Other options include danfos, also yellow-painted passenger vans,
smaller siblings of the molue. Danfos, yellow taxis and the unpainted,
moonlighting kabu-kabus tend these days to be tokunbos, used
vehicles imported mostly from Belgium. How you end up travelling is decided by
your pocket, and for most people who cross the city back and forth every day to
work or trade or in search of either, the molue is a lifesaver – and also
occasionally a life-taker.
Molue and danfo
drivers are considered to be some of the rudest and toughest people in the
country, possibly in the entire world. It would be amazing if they were not.
Having to deal with those choked roads all day and, on top of that, harassed by
the police and protection rackets that control the bus parks, one’s quota of
goodwill towards the rest of humanity is bound to dwindle rapidly. The molue/danfo
driver is either a very skilled or a very bad driver, depending on the
circumstances and your perspective. To be able somehow to place their clumsy
buses on and speed along narrow pavements, and to dash through tiny spaces,
requires great dexterity. In Lagos a two-lane street can, with the right amount
of determination, be converted into a four- or five-lane broadway.
The molue/danfo
driver is by far the most inventive and aggressive of all, but if you drive
around Lagos long enough you will imbibe the culture. Nearly every bus or car,
including many roundlights, carries the scars of battle – paint smudge, deep
scratches, crooked fenders, cracked lights. The heavy cost of replacing a
headlight or restoring a bent fender becomes insignificant in comparison to the
resolve not to yield ground to anyone. You grip the steering wheel with all your
strength and, shouting a warning or a curse, you step on the accelerator and
swing the steering wheel. And if your opponent doesn’t back down, things reach
their logical conclusion and you rush out of the car to quarrel and curse, still
possessed by that madness. Fault usually remains unresolved. If it’s clear your
opponent is at fault, but they begin to plead for your forgiveness and the
people around join in, soon the whole world is pleading with you. You have a
broken light that will cost you thousands of naira to replace and you are
either a hardhearted fellow who insists on receiving compensation (often
equivalent to trying to wring water out of stone) or you eat the cost.
The choicest
curses of the molue drivers are reserved for those in private cars – in the
lingo of the road battles, the ‘slaves’ and ‘bastards’ who are drivers to the
car-owning class. Class warfare is thus conducted on our streets every day – and
gender warfare too. Women car owners receive a special dose of hatred for
subverting the ‘natural’ order of things by owning cars when millions of their
God-ordained superiors have to ride in or drive molues. Women are presumed awful
drivers, too slow, too careful – qualities despised on the roads of our city. A
woman learns to give as much as she gets. Into this mix, throw the sirens (and
the armed men and convoys) that accompany powerful government officials and bank
bullion vans. A stranger to our city, already stressed to the limit by other
road aggravations, who hears the sirens rushing toward him and looks back to see
the flashing lights and armed men waving their automatic weapons, would be
forgiven for abandoning his car and taking to his heels.
And, if the brew
isn’t interesting enough, add the floods of the rainy season. They sometimes
rise so high they seep into the interior of the car, into the engine. At
roundabouts and junctions especially, flooding takes up a good part of the road
and slows down already sluggish traffic. An impatient plunge into these flooded
areas sprays you with water. Cars sometimes come to a halt a few feet ahead,
smoke pouring out of the engine. You need to be extremely civilized to resist
the temptation to jeer at their drivers.
When you do
manage to get to a stretch of road – no matter how short – that is not clogged,
there is a wild sense of liberation. Molues, roundlights, tokunbos, everyone
flies off immediately at top speed like race drivers. And this isn’t just on
major roads: many a child sauntering on a little street has been killed by a
driver enjoying their few minutes of ‘liberation’. When we are set free we
nimbly dart in and out of lanes on the expressways, testing the possibilities of
our long-suffering cars, like children finally able to play with their toys.
Inevitably, tragedy strikes at these moments of sweet freedom. With the cost of
spare parts rising all the time, as the
naira continues to plummet, and given the hit-or-miss approach of our
mechanics, brakes have a tendency to fail without warning. We see on the roads,
and read in newspapers, about molues that plunge into the lagoon, about lorries
that fly into crowded markets decimating scores of people each time. Perhaps the
most horrible accident of all occurred when a molue (probably carrying cans of
petrol, because it was a time of petrol scarcity) crashed on the Third Mainland
Bridge and burst into flames, immolating about 30 passengers. I arrived at the
scene soon after the accident and they still sat stiffly on their seats in the
black shell of the bus, staring straight ahead like a class of over-obedient
school-children, bone-thin and very black.
The late Fela,
poet of the pain and absurdity of Lagos, summarized it in a 1980s hit song as
‘Suffering and Smiling’. ‘Smiling’ probably includes the grim fatalism with
which we go out to confront everyday life and the miraculous humour with which
many of our people still bear such suffering. (A friend who’s been abroad
recently observed that the humour in the buses now has a strained, brittle
quality).
The return to
civilian rule in mid-1999 brought us a new State Governor who is attempting some
sensible things, but he faces a complex task. He has proposed compulsory annual
vehicle inspection, causing a huge outcry from the owners and drivers of molues,
danfos and taxis. Spare parts are expensive and the proposal would provide new
opportunities for extortion to the police and the bureaucrats issuing inspection
certificates. It appears the Governor has remained resolute and some form of
vehicle inspection will commence one day – which should lessen the number of
vehicles that expire on flyovers (but would also reduce the number of buses
available, as many molues are certain to fail even the laxest inspection).
There are now
young men employed by the state who help to direct traffic at some junctions;
there are not nearly enough, but it is a start. Some road repairs are taking
place, which have worsened the traffic jams in parts of the city, but when
completed they should bring a little relief. But in order to achieve real change
a re-examination of our approach to transportation policy is badly needed.
For too long we
have viewed public transportation as another source of enrichment for public
officers. Contracts to purchase buses for public use have filled the roads with
repainted old contraptions from Europe and Asia that soon fell apart.
Occasionally one hears talk of a mass-transit rail system, but such noises have
come and gone over the years and nothing has materialized, apart from a messy
dispute with a French consortium which was once awarded a contract soon
thereafter cancelled.
This neglect of
public transportation has resulted in Nigeria becoming the world’s largest
dumping ground of used cars, in Lagos streets being choked with long lines of
smoke-belching molues. To reverse this trend it is essential to make the
improvement of public transportation a national priority and at the same time
discourage the use of private vehicles through substantial road taxes and
similar measures which have been successfully employed in some other large
cities.
At the root of
the current savagery on Lagos roads is the general belief that life is a
pitiless race in which you trample or are trampled. We reproduce on the roads
the battles we fight for contracts, public offices, licenses and other
preferences; what the late Nigerian social scientist Claude Ake described as our
militant materialism. And as in other spheres of our national life (and similar
trends are observable in many other parts of the world), we pay collectively,
through lives lost, time wasted, the huge cost of importing cars, a very high
price for this materialism. This cost seems too obvious to be missed by anyone,
but the culture of individualism easily overpowers rational policy-making. When
we are embarked on the rush to move faster and acquire more than everyone else,
we seem to leave our senses behind. In the process we remain stuck in
self-inflicted traffic jams while the 21st century gathers pace all around us.
Ike Oguine is based in Lagos.
Story courtesy of New Internationalist March 2002
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