Edozie Udeze recounts his traumatic journey from Lagos to Abuja by road saying it’s like a journey to Golgotha.
It was Sunday, October 7th.
At first I couldn’t think of any other alternative but to travel to Abuja from my Ikorodu, Lagos, base by road. In the past three years, I had not been to Abuja by road. This was essentially due to many ugly and horrifying tales told by travelers who did so. The Abuja – Lokoja – Abaji road is bad. In fact, it is hell on earth. You can’t travel up to ten meters without seeing or witnessing one scene of accident or the other. There are so many of such frightening stories, that I was often flustered to contemplate about embarking on any journey to the Federal Capital Territory by road.
The road to Golgotha
But this time was different. One, the aviation sector is in tatters. There had been stories of travellers who had slept from many days at the local airport because their flights were either delayed or cancelled. That, indeed, put me off and I felt it would be better if I was disappointed on the road, because then, it would be easier to find an alternative. That was basically why I chose to embark on the trip by road.
Unfortunately, my nightmares began even before the vehicle (a Toyota Sienna) took off from Ikorodu. After waiting for about two hours for the vehicle to load, the driver, a hungry, skinny and cranky looking fellow probably in his mid-twenties, suddenly opened the bonnet of the car. All he did was to remove the car battery. Hissing severally in the process, he said; “Oh, I hope this battery will make it to Abuja!”
Instantly, another awful looking fellow who seemed not to be in a hurry for anything scampered around and bellowed into the air, “Take the other battery jo. Abi that one too no good?” he asked. The driver immediately folded his shirt sleeves, peered into the vehicle to see our reaction. He then opened the engine of another Sienna, a moribund car that seemed to have been abandoned for months to replace the battery. After a while, the car roared into life and we became assured that the vehicle was in good order for the long journey.
The journey began by 8:10a.m. Instead of taking Ikorodu – Sagamu road through Ogijo and Odongunyan, we veered into Ikorodu – Epe – Ijebu road. The driver and some other passengers who were familiar with the terrain quickly explained that that road has been impassable in the past one year. Even the one we took was no better. The road is so bad that the driver never sped beyond 60km.
A little before Ore, the vehicle began to groan, emitting all kinds of noises. The driver hurriedly parked and all of us immediately jumped out in fear and trepidation. The water in the radiator had suddenly dried up. The fan had stopped working, and the car engine had begun to emit smoke. While on it, a vehicle towing van arrived. We were provided water from the jerry can. After an intermittent hour or so, we took off again, breaking the journey briefly at Ore for refreshment.
The journey from Ore to Akure proved most traumatic. There were road blocks right from Ondo town into Akure, manned by heavily armed soldiers. The road blocks are more like blockades because the soldiers only allowed the use of one lane which they also made into a zig-zag form. The idea, I was told, was to slow travellers down considerably and then make them submit psychologically to the intimidating presence of the soldiers. And this tactics worked, for no driver in his right senses ever does the wrong thing once he is approaching the road blockade. You either smiled mechanically or pretended to love the soldier attending to you.
You can spend up to twenty minutes at one road blockade waiting for the soldiers to wave you through. All a soldier would do was to peer sternly and threateningly at the faces of the passengers. Then he would raise his left hand with some level of arrogance while fiddling with the butt of the gun. All these were deliberately done to frighten the daylight out of you. Then he would contort his face and bark with some bottled up venom: ‘move on!’
A praise gone awry
At Owo, a few students were seen clearing a bush by the road side with shovels. A soldier had overheard one of them chattering away that these soldiers are too slow. The students’ punishment was to clear the road and fill one of the sack bags with sand. The students were sweating and carrying out their punishment under the scorching sun when we drove past. The same soldier who inflicted the corporal punishment is very notorious on that axis. He his nick named ‘Terror number one’ by commuters.
Our driver told us about a certain driver who saluted the soldier one day by calling him Onye isi, meaning the leader, but the soldier claimed he called him Onye ohi, a thief. No amount of plea or explanation from the passengers could assuage the soldier. Consequently, he delayed them for three hours and asked the errant driver to frog-jump from one end of the road blockade to the other for one hour. It was when the driver collapsed as if he would give up the ghost that he pardoned him. But then, he had warned: “Next time, I go rake you die, bloody foolish man. God punish your generation.”
At Akoko, in Ondo State, the problem with the vehicle again resurfaced. This time there was a more durable solution. The water hose from where the water was leaking was discovered. After refilling the radiator and fixing the hose, we took off again. By then it was a little past three o’clock in the afternoon. There was grave fear in our minds; everybody was sceptical about how we could manage the situation at Lokoja. “Ah Lokoja,” one of the female passengers who passed through the route two days earlier, yelled, “We spent five hours there three days ago.” This revelation further dampened our spirits.
And truly the Lokoja situation was horrific; it was so harrowing that right from Okene, the nature of the bad road and the number of broken down trucks and accidented vehicles naturally frightened us. Lokoja indeed looked like a ghost town, sort of a war zone, long abandoned; a place where the relics of the past stared one in the face. Some houses, filling stations, eateries, motor parks, village settlements, markets were still submerged by flood water. People wore long and sad faces, frowning intermittently to register their agonies.
Business had come to a standstill. Social life was zero and non-existent. Women sloshed around with their babies and wore their faces in tattered gloom. The little spaces on the road sides served as both home and market stalls for many of them who could still gather some energy to hustle for a living. The whole atmosphere was horrendous and the people did not seem to find hope in their present circumstance.
The man sitting behind me then said, “This is small now. Last week, we diverted into Lokoja to Makurdi. The whole town was under water. Inside Lokoja alone, we spent ten hours and later got to Lagos two days after. People were crying and begging for food and water.”
Cursing the leaders
The long stretch of vehicles from Okene to the end of Lokoja towards Abuja covered over ten kilometers. Many passengers disembarked and began to trek to wait for their vehicles on the Abuja end of the road. Here there was no hurry. All you needed do was to hang on in clusters of groups, discussing Nigeria’s problems. The long stretch brought out the worst in the soldiers as people kicked, caused and hissed endlessly.
“E no go better for our leaders,” many people caused. “Dis government na yeye. If na abroad, them for don do an emergency bridge for this small portion of the road,” one Charles travelling from Warri, offered.
Actually as at that Sunday, the portion of the road still submerged by flood was not up to five yards. This was what could have been properly fixed and managed either by filling it with granite or building an emergency bridge to ease off the tension on the road. Many passengers saw the diversion as unnecessary and inconsequential since the terrain was marshy and hazardous. Vehicles found it near impossible to manoeuvre and meander through. Not only that its slippery nature was too cumbersome. The road itself was waterlogged and clumsy at a point and therefore difficult to drive through.
So with the deliberate presence of soldiers and the long stretch of impatient drivers and their vehicles and tired passengers, both from Lokoja end to Abuja, the journey amounted to a trip to Golgotha. At Lokoja we spent three hours to reach Abuja by 11p.m. Before we got to Abuja however, the vehicle again cracked. The bolts and nuts of the tyres due to constant wear and tear on the roads began to cringe with deafening sounds. This was a little before Gwagwalada. With the help of a torch light from one of the passengers, we fixed it and then continued. The passenger thereafter boasted thus: “Ah I am a professional traveller. There is always a torch-light in my pocket and in all my travelling bags.” The man said he is a staff of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture, Abuja.
Darkness in the federal capital
Abuja town was a different experience entirely. Half of the city was in total darkness on arrival. Then being a Sunday, it was difficult to get a vacant room in a hotel. After visiting four hotels, I finally got a guest house on Moses Majekodunmi Street, in Utako area of the city for the night. By then it was well past midnight for a journey that began by 8:10a.m. Before now, the journey from Lagos to Abuja usually lasted for 10 hours.
Nowadays, it is no longer the same. Passengers see and encounter hell on the roads. Drivers cannot wait to fix their vehicles because of the hurry to make money and also because of the speed with which the bad roads affect and destroy their vehicles endlessly.
The soldiers on the road, are they for security? If they are, what are they securing? Are they really there to safe guard Nigerians on the roads and make Abuja safer for all of us? I am damned if this is really the correct situation. Abuja itself is not safe, for no one is inside the city to subject you to thorough searches as they do on the roads.
There must be a better way to secure a city and arrive there without hassles.
