Some days ago, a horrible and horrific accident involving two oil tankers laden with gasoline collided and exploded near the Sagamu junction on the Lagos – Ibadan expressway that has been under construction since the Obasanjo government in 2007. The cause of the accident, we are told, was because the drivers of the oil tankers were racing against themselves on a reasonably wide road and brushed each other before exploding killing instantly, the two drivers and other motorists who were unfortunate to be sharing the road with two mentally deranged individuals causing this terrible accident which careful driving and obeying the Highway Code would have prevented.

This accident is one of thousands of accidents on Nigeria’s roads leading to high mortality and morbidity with consequences of trauma and economic ruin for those involved and untold collateral damage on others. I have sometimes wondered what kind of driving tests our people go through before getting their driver’s licenses. In other sane climes, particularly in Canada and the USA, a potential driver goes through two tests before getting a license. The first stage is computer based test on road signs and Highway Code. If you fail this test, you will be given some weeks and up to a month to go study the art of driving in a civilized country. There are books one can buy to learn the rules.

Once you pass the test then one will be taken through a road test with a highway officer sitting with you in your vehicle to observe how you drive. You could be asked to stop and put the vehicle in reverse and your actions will be monitored. The way you make your turns will be carefully scrutinized. Your maintenance of your lane will be observed in terms of inner lane for fast driving and outer lane for slow driving. If one succeeds, a license will be issued but if one’s driving is bellow expectation, one will be asked to come back after some time in driving school. There will be no Nigerian fashion of begging and pleading. Compared with Nigerian system, we are nowhere yet and we need to begin a rational way of inculcating driving aptitude into our drivers.

Are we therefore surprised that our terrible roads full of pot holes that can swallow small cars  is one of the reasons for constant human slaughter on our roads. The situation of our roads would require another investigation. Suffice to say that our roads are a disgrace to our country, the biggest concentration of black peoples in the world. The pot holes apart from being hazards for drivers are also where armed robbers and kidnappers wait for their victims.

My readers may be wondering that what I am saying is not new and may even ask me what aspect of our lives can stand the test of comparison with life in sane places on earth.

In the last two weeks, we have been inundated with so-called discovery of how millions of barrels of crude oil  amounting to several billions of dollars that could have changed the face of Nigeria have been stolen on yearly basis perhaps for the past nine or 40 years . There is no agreement about the length of time that pipes running for kilometres from main oil flow through pipes into seafaring oil tankers waiting off shore to spirit the black gold to ports in Europe, Asia and America and even to Brazil and Ghana. If one is not strong-hearted, some of these revelations could make one lose his or her mind because it seems we cannot manage our affairs as people of other races do. We are the only OPEC country still vegetating at this primitive level of development of no pipe borne water, no electricity, no security, poor educational facilities, poor housing and almost absence of health and social facilities.

Our central bank which should be looking after our  country’s financial health has been hoodwinked by those in authority to print and print trillions of Naira that is neither backed by foreign exchange nor by production of goods and productivity in innovation thus leading to the virtual collapse of our sovereign currency. This total failure is due to the fact that those who have been governing us all these years seem not to have a sense of patriotism and are totally bereft of competence. It is therefore argued that pointing out the bad situation and carnage on our roads is just scratching the cancerous wound on the surface. Whatever the case may be, we just have to talk about one issue at a time!

Many years ago a cousin of mine came to me asking me to find him a job as a driver. This was sometime in the 1970s. I said I would talk to my friends in the private sector. Without ever thinking my cousin could have purchased his driving license before knowing how to drive, I gave him my car key to go buy me some groceries some distance from my house. After about ten minutes of not hearing the whirl of the car, I went out only to see that the young man couldn’t drive. I was furious and he told me he bought his license and would learn on the job! I sincerely hope the situation has changed. I think it must have changed but it has not changed enough. I once saw the driver’s assistant of an oil tanker get down in traffic snarl, lit his cigarette and began to smoke. I was a few vehicles from him. This was at the ever-busy Western Avenue or Funso Williams Avenue. I quickly parked my car calling on passersby to join me in appealing to this apparently illiterate man who had no idea that cigarette fire could cause the fuel laden tanker to explode!

There is need for massive road and transport education in Nigeria. Not everybody who wants to drive should be allowed to drive. Some of our drivers are partially blind and their eyesight needs to be checked regularly before being allowed to drive. Some drivers are absolutely insane! There is a need for regular test of all drivers specifically tanker drivers. Many tanker drivers because of the long distance they cover take hallucinating drugs to stay awake and to reduce the tedium and boredom of their jobs and because of not being totally sane, they kill innocent co-road users.

I will always remember the late Professor Olakanpo, a distinguished professor of economics in the University of Lagos in the 1970s who was murdered on the road between Lagos and Ibadan. When the tanker driver who ran over his car was arrested, he was totally inebriated and mumbled that he did not see the car he ran over and  that the car looked like a rat on the road and yet this was a long American limousine that the professor brought with him while relocating to Nigeria. His life was cut short and Nigeria was denied the service of a man who could have helped shape the course of economic development of this much abused country. Several others have since died and are still dying on the moonlike cratered roads of Nigeria. This is the time to do something about it and let us begin from control of the process of licensing of those who drive on our roads. We can restrict long articulated vehicles to night driving as it is done in other countries. They should also be told to drive at the outer lane not the inner lane of the road. All drivers should also be literate and able to read and write and tanker drivers should be mature persons with families to avoid drivers turning their vehicles to racing toys or weapons of human destruction!

There has been so much controversy on who owns Lagos in recent times between the indigenes and the non-indigenes, between “omo Eko” (indigenes) and ”ara Eko” (residents) that a little knowledge of the history of Lagos may remove the blinkers from our eyes. The indigenes of Lagos have a saying “Awori lo l’Eko” meaning Lagos belongs to the Awori. The Awori were the original settlers of Lagos and their settlements still exist in various Awori settlements from Iddo, Iganmu, Apapa, Isheri and so on up to Otta. These Awori settlements were founded around the 12th century during the evolution of similar political entities in Yorubaland.

It was not until the 15th century that Oba Ewuare the Great sent an expedition to the island now known as Lagos for the purpose of making it a slave port for evacuating war captives to Europe through the Portuguese, the first Europeans to make contact with the Benin Empire. The Bini settlement or camp (Eko) was separate from the Awori villages and settlements and there was no attempt by the Bini camp to lord it over the Aworis. Waves of people from neighbouring Ijebu, Remo and Egba territories came to Lagos virtually overwhelming the Awori and the Bini camp. But since they were all of the same culture, there was no acrimonious contention about indigenous rights and the rights of new comers.

The Bini Group hunkered around their settlement at Igha Idugaran (pepper farm). The prestige of the Benin Empire made the settlement to be respected and the place grew into a kingdom replicating in a small way the royalty of Benin and its palace chiefs. On the island the Portuguese named Lagos but which the Yoruba’s appropriating the Bini word for camp called Eko. The independence of the Awori settlements on the mainland continued to be respected even until today and throughout the colonial period.

The sister empire of Oyo also put down a toehold at Ajase, west of Lagos, which the Portuguese called Porto Novo for the same purpose of the slave trade. Benin influence on the island of Lagos is an historical fact, but this does not mean Lagos is not part of Yorubaland. The Benin influence extended to  the dynasties of such places in eastern Yorubaland like Ado, Ikere, Ita Ogbolu, Igbara Oke and Akure. This does not make the people from these towns Bini. The fact, for example, that the ruling monarch in England is German does not make England part of Germany. Also the Bini inspired monarchy in  places like Onitsha  and the western periphery of  Igboland does not remove the fact that Onitsha and kingdoms west of Onitsha are part of Igboland neither does the replacement of the Ogisos in Bini by an Oduduwa dynasty make Bini part of Yorubaland. What is important to note is the dynamic relationship of people in the Bight of Guinea in the past and that the whole area shares a common cultural similarity.

When the British took over Lagos and its mainland in 1861 after naval bombardment of the town, it signed a treaty of cession with the Oba who surrendered his suzerainty to the British crown. From that time onwards the people of the crown colony became British subjects while the rest of what later became Nigeria was “terra incognita “at least for a while until the heydays of European imperialism of the 1880s to 1900s. 

At amalgamation of all British territories in Nigeria with the colony of Lagos in 1914 with Egba land remaining still independent until its independence was abrogated at the outbreak of the First World War, Lagos became the capital of Nigeria. 

The then Governor General hated Lagos with its “insalubrious climate and seditious press “and its “trousered niggers, dressed in Bond Street attire who send their laundry for  dry cleaning in England” and decided to build a new capital in the Centre of the country. He found this centre on the river infested with crocodiles named Kaduna which gave the new capital its name. Lugard embarked on feverish development of Kaduna using the same tax on “trade gin” banned from the north as well as revenue from custom levies and proceeds from palm kernel and palm oil and cocoa trade. The development of Kaduna continued during the Great War at a less frenetic speed as before. The whole idea of moving the capital to Kaduna was ended by Sir Hugh Clifford, a different kind of Governor from Lugard. Sir Hugh Clifford the successor of Sir Fredrick Lugard said he was not prepared to administer Nigeria from “specially fabricated isolated centre in the middle of the country”. Development of Kaduna was however never quite abandoned and its effect is the well planned Kaduna city compared with the chaos of Lagos. Hugh Clifford tried to improve Lagos by developing the so-called “Ikoyi plains” in the 1920s.

Contemporaneous with the Kaduna project were two other new towns built by Nigeria. Port Harcourt was conceived by Sir Fredrick Lugard as an alternative if not an outright replacement for Lagos. Lugard felt Lagos Port was too shallow and its development constituted a drain on Nigeria’s exchequer. The principal officers in the Colonial office in London were not persuaded about Lugard’s project and to outwit them Lugard named the port after the Secretary of State for the colonies, Sir Lewis Harcourt. Sir Lewis fell for it and action for the new port began in 1913. The city around the port was well planned by British architects which accounts for the town’s sobriquet as “Garden city”. Any visitor to Port Harcourt before the deluge of people from the hinterland would have described it as “little Lagos”.

With the outbreak of the First World War, it became difficult to get British ships to bring coal from New Castle to Nigeria. Coal was absolutely necessary to run the railways which crisscrossed the country from Lagos to Kano and from Port Harcourt to Jos. Coal was also needed to fire the generators to light up the European Government Reserved Areas (GRA). It was in this circumstance that the colliery in Enugu was developed. The native Wawa people were too primitive to work in the mines so people were recruited from all over the country to work in the Enugu coal mines. Enugu owes its well-planned lay out to its colonial origin. Another town that developed around the tin and columbite mines in the plateau was Jos. In fact the European impact was such that a certain part of Jos was known as “Anglo Jos” perhaps until recently.

There is no doubt that our British colonial heritage brought together heterogeneous population many of who had very little in common.

Now to Lagos the big elephant in the Nigerian room. Lagos is like New York big apple which everybody wants to have a bite of. Lagos since 1861 up to the amalgamation of all British territories to form Nigeria became a frontier of opportunity for Yorubaland and others immigrants from all across West Africa as well as the returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone. After the amalgamation, Lagos was opened to all comers from the whole country. The colonial and post-colonial governments have spent considerable amount of money to make the place liveable.  Facilities such as new port, new airport and housing estate to decongest the unwieldy urban sprawl of Lagos sprang up. Those who were displaced by the civil war and other ethnic conflicts up country always found home in Lagos. Incredibly, people tend to find a way of living together in spite of differences in socialization from urban to village type of life.

Now this seems to be coming under severe strain by those who want to use the force of population to seize control from the owners of the place using spurious arguments about how one can move from one state to another in America to contest election. Africa is an old continent and not like America that is a recently settled country. Until recently you couldn’t become a German except by blood! It is foolish to deny the power of ethnicity in African politics as much as we deprecate it. It will be unreasonable for me to enjoy the right to contest in Lagos and in Ekiti at the same time or as Igbo propagandist TV has been threatening that an Anambra man will be the next governor of Lagos. Ideally that should be wished for through evolution but not by threat of unproved superiority of one ethnic population and tax contribution over those of the quiet majority who have been very generous to non-indigenes whose properties were preserved for them  during the civil war with accumulated rents collected unlike what happened in neighbouring states.  We need to build on trust that existed in the past and respect each other. There is no need for ethnic bellicosity and jingoism because at the end of the day, it is the poor people who are merely eking out an existence who will suffer. We need to preserve the past civility and not rock the boat because of electoral politics. “A ki je meji l’aba Alade”. Nobody disputes the ownership of Kaduna, Enugu and Port Harcourt; why is Lagos different?

When I was a child, I never had the chance or the opportunity to enjoy the company of my grandparents. My father, David Osuntokun, died before his father, Sapoloso Ojo. Papa Ojo was too old when I was young. My paternal grandmother died young. But on my mother’s side, I had the privilege of knowing my grandparents. My grandmother, Omotara, was very old when I met her and she was really too old to be interesting company to me. She was inherited by my grandfather, Adeosun, when Bolarinwa his brother and Omotara’s husband died as was the custom our people in the olden days.  Pa Adeosun was equally too old to be of any use as company to me in my youth. I also was not born in my home town of Okemesi but rather in Ilawe where my father had a depot as a business man, an Osomalo selling stuff in places like Ikere, Awo, Oye, and Egosi now Ilupeju.

This means I was physically removed from my grandparents and I never benefited from the rich stories they told my cousins who lived close by In Imesi. Even my father was an old man when I was born as the last child of eight children of my mother Elizabeth Ootoola. l write all these to show that I am a lucky man because I have seen my grandchildren growing up and they are benefiting from my being around just as I am benefiting from seeing and interacting with them. They may not know how much joy I derive from them. The most important aspect I benefit from them is their innocence, simplicity, naivety and trust in the fables I sometimes entertain them with. Of course they sometimes pose difficult questions to me which I mumble through without their satisfaction.

When I am with them, I try to bring them up in the way of the Lord as Christians. Even though they go to church once in a while but the coronavirus pandemic has in recent times made them home-bound most of the time which makes house worship very important. Secondly, some of my grandchildren live in the United States where violent racist  attacks on predominant black churches    are common and this have struck fear into my children who should have been taking their own children to church. This means the church has not been playing an important role in the lives of my grandchildren as it should have. The grandchildren are not very familiar with the Biblical stories of creation and the salvation credo of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Religion is not taught in American schools and in most schools in the western world. I remember teaching my American grandchildren the Lord’s Prayer beginning with “Our father who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name …” My granddaughter who seemed to be more interested  in our morning prayers once asked me “papa what about our mother who art in heaven?” Well, I was caught unaware and I started telling the poor child the story of Adam and Eve and the young child then said she understood then that Eve was our “mother in heaven”. I said no that she was not and I suddenly remembered how venerated our Lord’s mother, the Virgin Mary was and I tried unsatisfactorily to equate Mary with “our mother in heaven”. Hopefully this girl as she grows up will find the right answer to her enquiry . This made me feel that referring to God in the masculine sense may not be right because God is neither a man nor a woman. God is divine being above sexual classification of man or woman. I think the young girl had picked up the demand for equality between men and women in America and she logically felt “Our father in heaven” must be complemented by our “mother in heaven”. She was right logically!

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One day, as one of my grandsons rummaged through my travel bag, he found my wallet and opened it and lo and behold, she saw my wallet and brought it to me that he didn’t know I was a millionaire! This was because I had N50,000 in my wallet.  He thought our N500 was the same as $500 dollars. Seeing the bundle of N50,000  in N500 notes  made him think his grandfather was rich. He then asked if I was rich. I answered in the affirmative. Then to rub it in I said I had a solid gold wristwatch. I brought out a shining gold-plated wristwatch which somebody gave to me and I was looking to give it to someone but not a child. The young man told his father “in confidence” that his papa was a zillionaire! His father asked him how he found out a secret that I had kept away from my children, then the young man told his father about the golden wristwatch. My son later asked me to do his son a favour of wearing the wristwatch to bed that night. This was a request that I had no problem obliging my son. The young man slept very well that night and the following day handed over to me the “gold watch”.

I finally found an old student of mine to offload the golden wristwatch to and I hope nobody finds out the genuineness or otherwise of the “golden wristwatch”. This same little boy once asked me “papa were you born in the olden days?” I had no problem in answering in the affirmative. But this kept me feeling that I must look like Neanderthal to my grandson who could only imagine what it would have been in the olden days when his papa (grandfather) was born. These and more are some of the interesting life I am having when I see some of my grandchildren.

Sometimes I am challenged to swim along with them in some cold lakes as was the case in Lake Huron, one of the deepest of the Great Lakes straddling the United States and Canada. Or when I am asked to go for walks or to buy school supplies during which they will make me walk tens of kilometres while I am telling them how old I am. Then they will encourage me by saying that as far as they were concerned, I don’t look too old to them. Despite the compliments from my grandchildren, I suffered from the pain and aches of long walks or vigorous swimming the following day.

Anyone of my age would have problems manipulating the computers at the airports. In Canada, one hardly sees any immigration officers checking passports because one has to put one’s passport through electronic gizmos which when a print comes out, that’s what you wave at the immigration officers as you go into the country. God knows I have travelled to many countries in my life and in these days one has to flow with the new innovations coming out of the brilliant brains of young people making lives better for young and old people without knowing that those of us old people sometimes find the new things difficult to understand. This is why when I am arriving where I have children or former students, I always like to see them welcoming me and seeing me off at airports.

I remember going to Heathrow Airport recently and one of my granddaughters asked her mother why they were seeing me off and why I couldn’t just check myself in without apparently bothering them. She then asked her mother whether it was because I am old. The mother was beating about the bush so that I wouldn’t feel offended. I told the young girl plainly that she was correct and that I needed help because of old age. I get asked the same question by my grandchildren all the time why I needed assistance at airports. I suppose these young people do not understand that old people may look well; they are certainly not as fit as they used to be.

One day, I challenged five of my grandchildren to a short race. I knew of course I could not beat them. As soon as we began, they all one after the other flew past me giggling. I enjoy such occasions tremendously and I am sure my grandchildren will remember all these occasions when my time is up!