We called them bolekaja. It was a metaphor of violence, of youth in disarray and a city out of joint. They had no respect for the full-clothed species of humans. With singlet threadbare, seamed faces and arms bustling with muscles ready for the punch, they dared each other over a kobo or a passenger or sometimes over the winking eye of a wench.
They are called the agbero when they are not bus conductors. This brand of young men determined where you went in town and how. They still do today. It tells you how long they have been around in Lagos, Nigeria’s iconic city.
Everybody craved the buses who did not own a car, when they were not standing and sitting in the larger contraption called molue. The other word for it was danfo. They are called yellow buses today. We cannot move in Lagos without them. They crackle, roar and snort on the road. While they puff about with smoke, the buff boys in charge carry the air of the powerful. They know they are indispensable.
The guy who wants quickly to reach the place of work. The happening girl clad in the best of today’s fashion. The market women. The boys and girls who have to meet an interview appointment. They all want to get there on time. They all know they want the yellow buses. They all know they have to choke into the casket-like interior.
They have to bear the sweat dripping on their fine suits. The fart, the fire hazard, the fiery tempers of others. They have to bear the foul, alcohol-ridden breath of the lowlife beside them. They may breathe laboriously and live dangerously while pondering their fates on the bus, on seats huddled together, going where? Remember Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities? “They were all going to heaven; they were all going the other way… it was the winter of despair.”
With the yellow buses, some of the passengers have, over the decades, gone mercifully to heaven. The others, well, have gone the other way.
Fela did not live long enough to bring his muse to the service of the yellow bus, or the bus to the service of his muse. He captured the years of the molue, the 99 standing, the suffocation, the growl of the massive casket. Suffering and smiling.
Now, the plan is to make it only smiling. The alpha Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, has proclaimed the time of mercy. No more carnage. No more sacrifice. Jesus said, “I desire mercy, and not sacrifice.” That would mean a certain sort of sacrifice though. The yellow buses must now go. In phases, that is.
We have about 30,000 of the buses in Lagos. They carry a few at a time. Why not bring bigger, more comfy ones, and have drivers separated from the age of caverns? So, the alpha governor has announced that the Lagos State government is bringing new buses. They carry a sort of divine halo of mercy for those tied to years of yellow bus hell. They have air-conditioners. They charge their phones. They have spaces. Leg room is often a great asset to a traveller. For air traffic, the difference between first class and coach is leg room, more than any other merit. It is luxury for the masses.
The governor is doing that with some doze of financial wizardry. While scandal has sullied not a few governors with the Paris Club windfall, Ambode is putting the money on the road. He would not join those who want to use it as private nest of vanity and profligacy. The money will eventually amount to N29 billion, and the government will add a billion to make it N30 billion as part of a N100 billion bond.
This makes the initiative a public-private affair. The yellow bus owners are not going out of business. They will buy into the new arrangement, and that makes them stakeholders. No one thought that molue would be out of sight in Lagos.
But for a big city like Lagos, the yellow buses are a blight. Big cities need mass transit, not a slow, plodding, convoy of raggedy, environmentally malignant, smoking, puffing contrivances. A city of over 20 million, and the fastest growing in the world, needs people to move in droves, not in trickles. This makes for freer highways. The yellow bus is no more urban. The new ones are urbane.
The Stadium and kalo kalo
First, we heard the good news, and then the bad. The National Stadium played host to the alpha governor and the sports minister, and there was a consensus of mind as to the need to revive that monument. Then the news came that some shadowy forces wanted to stop Lagos from doing a good thing. They wanted to turn it into what the Yoruba call kalo kalo, a sort of casino where they would lobby the lawmakers in Abuja to stymie it for a pot of rotten Naira.
Is it part of the plot against Lagos, to make Nigeria’s indispensable state the pariah? For over a decade, In Touch has been relentless in the fight to give Lagos its due, and against those spineless men who would not let it be. Kaduna lapped up the stadium from the Federal Government without a stir. So did Nnamdi Azikiwe Stadium and U.J. Esuene. Why is Lagos a problem? The governor has already laid out plans to make the stadium play for profit. We don’t want it broken.
I recall as a boy the first match, and how Yakubu Mambo struck the first goal on that green pitch from a pass delivered from the greatest player of all time, Haruna Ilerika. That is history. The governor wants to turn a monument back into joy and profit for all, and some people are looking only at profit. They probably want to kill the place and turn it into apartments that do nothing for the larger society, and make profit. They want to mangle it the way they have done some of our treasures.
It is in that spirit the governor wants to turn National Theatre, another treasure, in a move to revive the arts and culture.
