“I’m not moving back. My office is right there,” the woman tells me defiantly. She is clearly frustrated. I can see it in the sweat forming on top of her foundation. She has a sour face already creased with the stress of the early morning Lagos go-slow.
Her office, which sits across the street from my apartment, is invitingly close, tantalizingly so, but she cannot get there because the road is completely blocked. It is a two lane road with traffic moving in both directions, but every day for the last six weeks the road has been blocked by Nigerians doing what we do best, improvising against hardship and in the process creating more problems for everybody because much of our improvisation is born out of selfishness rather than community spirit.
My street is an arc that with two outlets onto a major Ikoyi, Lagos thoroughfare full of shops, business and at least (through the genius vision of our urban planning) six filling stations on a 2.4 kilometer stretch of road. At one end of my street is a massive Forte Oil filling station less than 100 meters from another massive Forte Oil filling station. Its attendants wear bright green and blast Naija pop as they fill tanks and Jerry cans with diesel. With the current fuel crisis, they have taken to closing their gates and letting in only a few cars in at a time. Some attendants take extra money to let people jump the queue. Some drivers don’t believe in queues and subsequently deciding that they can and will enter the filling station whenever they please. To do this they block the intersection and everybody suffers. But most interesting is that the queue of cars lining up for fuel complete blocks one lane of traffic and improvising, ‘chancing’ Nigerian drivers eventually started driving the wrong way against traffic to reach the end of this street. This works unless people driving the right way down the street, start driving the wrong way down the street. What ensues every morning is a frightening traffic jam in which the people driving the wrong way block the people driving the right way. The most stubborn or selfish people refuse to move and nobody gets anywhere any faster.
The lady in the car doesn’t want to move back. I get it. She is just meters away from her office but the problem is that her designated lane is crammed with cars queuing for fuel. She is one of many driving the wrong way against traffic. She is in the wrong but so close to her destination that she wants to just push forward. “Madam,” I say to her, “you’re doing the wrong thing and causing confusion for everyone else.” The cars behind her have all backed up. She is holding out.
Her attitude is not unlike the oil marketers who claim that the government owes them money. Only in Nigeria can a set of people who have spent years defrauding the government claim that they are owed something. But again, this is Nigeria where it’s not the principle but the power that matters. They have decided that they will shut down the country until they see the 200 billion Naira they demand. How many marketers are there? Certainly not more than twenty. Twenty people have decided that 179,999,980 of us have nothing better to do than to grow frustrated at long fuel queues and pay double or triple for bus fair. They haven’t asked themselves how much damage they are doing to the economy or whether people in ambulances have failed to reach their destinations because of the monstrous traffic jams created by their unyielding viciousness. They are doing the wrong thing and it’s causing confusion, but they are so close to what they want – money – and the path, even if it’s against the rules that keep us safe and keep society moving, does not matter to them.
The woman glares at me when I ask her how she can be so selfish and whether she doesn’t think the other people who are doing the right thing also have to get to work. She shouts at me that I’m the one who’s selfish. She says her “policeman” is coming to fix the situation. Sure enough an armed police officer with a weary face, red eyes and a Kalashnikov emerges from the office driveway and begins to clear a path for her to move her car. He doesn’t look at the chaos brewing around. He is an officer with a mandate to keep the public order but his own concern is the special duty of making sure this madam enters the place of work. When he is done shouting on us to “allow his madam pass!” he casually walks back to his post in the shade.
The road is now free as the cars begin to move again – until a few meters down they encounter another set of people improvising and the dance begins again.
