Ugoji Egbujo
This is one hell of a season. A seat on a bus from Lagos to Owerri soared to N60,000. That used to be the airfare when we thought the madness of the economy had reached its peak under Buhari. Recently, some people paid up to N300,000 to fly economy for 45 minutes from Lagos to Owerri. Imagine a medical doctor who works his socks off at LUTH. He has a wife and three children.
They would have needed three million naira to take a one-hour economy trip to and fro Owerri for a mere Christmas holiday. As a senior doctor at a premier hospital, on N500,000 a month, that could be his entire salary for 6 months. The government thinks he is patriotic for not joining the Japa brigade. But he wastes his only life in penury. This season, his family wouldn’t have travelled even by road. Many years ago, he could handle the flight tickets without losing sleep. Now, he is comprehensively poor.
The roads are a nuisance. The only good road from the Lagos end is the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. After that, every other road appears to be in shambles. Umahi is betrothed to the coastal road. Were the other neglected roads just bad, the commuters would have persevered and savoured the rich landscape. But these bad roads are littered with infinite police checkpoints. Infinite and infernal bottlenecks. At some locations, the checkpoints are only a pole away from one another.
The busy policemen are unmindful of the absurdity of the contiguousness of the checkpoints. They are too engrossed in their shenanigans to notice. The police bosses go through these routes and feel no shame. Families who have paid through their noses to travel are subjected to the torture of incessant stops in the blazing December sun. The prevailing attitude at these checks oscillates between cheerful self-abasing beggarliness and ruthless extortion in the season of happiness.
Many years ago, the Customs only mounted a few checkpoints near the borders: Seme and Idiroko. Now, they are everywhere between Sagamu and Benin, scouring documents and haggling bribes as if the cars were parachuted into the country. The federal government loves to talk about boosting tourism. But turns a blind eye to the naked anti-tourism state of the country. The multiplicity of predatory checkpoints makes travelling by road, which should be adventurous, a bad idea. What will attract foreigners to Oguta Lake and Yankari Games Reserve if local people can’t move around?
The ubiquitous and suffocating presence of the police on the roads is a dramatic irony. Many Nigerian holidaymakers believe travelling by road is suicidal. Kidnappers can appear anywhere along the highways and take hostages. The kidnappers don’t reckon with the police. The standard recourse after highway abductions is ransom negotiation. Police always advise that. On Christmas day, some travellers passing through Agwu in Enugu state lived that nightmare. They were stopped and abducted. Their cars, with doors and boots left wide open, were abandoned on the road.
The roads are bad and unsafe. The trains don’t run everywhere, and where they do, they are poorly charted and utilised. The planes are too few. Our major airlines used to make multiple trips to the southeast airports daily at Christmas. Apparently, they have lost most of their aircraft. Yet passenger handling at check-in is clumsy, and schedules are never respected.
A few days before Christmas, many airlines had a rough time processing passengers promptly. People boarded and waited two hours for their flight doors to be closed. The other problem is the luggage handling times at landing. The carousels crawl. Some passengers had to wait more than an hour before their bags emerged for claim at the Port Harcourt International Airport. Lagos terminal one is often worse. It appears the bags are retrieved for the cargo holds of the aircraft in twos and threes. Travels are supposed to be fun
Costly and hectic travels weren’t the only problems of the season. A healthy goat used to cost 30,000 naira. Now, it’s cost N120,000. Last Christmas, a good cow cost about N600,000. Now, it costs 1.5 million. A bag of rice at 100,000 is beyond the reach of most homes. The cost of basic food is a fundamental problem. The recent food stampedes don’t even tell half of the story. The return of kwashikor must be imminent. Christmas always involves the exchange of gifts.
But it wasn’t never a season for cajoling and begging. Now, impoverished families are everywhere, frantic without dignity, looking out for freebies. Fathers who could slaughter a goat to feast their family at Christmas and feel the pride of a breadwinner have swallowed their pride. Without the small feasts, without the new clothes, what then is Christmas? The inadvertent consequence of the obliteration of the middle class is the rise of rogue role models. Yahoo Yahoo practitioners and drug dealers are steadily acquiring quick societal validation through dubious Christmas philanthropy across the country.
The mood across the country is low. Many feel threatened by the daily struggle for survival. A woman being choked by her economic situation can’t appreciate colours and flowers. The Christmas carols aren’t loud. A foreboding overhangs the nation. It’s a season of gifts. However, the purchasing power of white-collar workers was wiped out during the course of the year. Rendering former self-sufficient people incapable of buying Christmas gifts and partaking in the rites without tears. The unspoken question on many lips is, “Just how much longer will this predicament last?”
The stampedes don’t tell the whole story. They all happened in the cities. True hunger resides in the villages and slums. There, as was reported a few months ago, people have adjusted to feeding like vagrant cattle. Most of the maize I planted in my village was stolen. That used to be a taboo. But perhaps the gods have since stopped counting sacrileges. Many children in the villages are malnourished. The commonest sources of protein, fish, meat and legumes are now luxuries. Rice and yam are now forbidden, too. Christmas was a season for relaxation, reminiscence, and merriment among kith and kin, particularly in the village. But now, the sight of the children drains away the joy. The stories of abject hopelessness by their parents compel pity, sober reflection and sorrow. So rather than joy and happiness, the season has provided an awakening contact with utter misery.
From Orodo, compliments of the season.
