Tag: Fashola

In one of his sermons, the numinous Christ differentiated the broad way from the narrow way. The narrow way leads to life, the broad way to destruction.

That was my thought when the Lagos State Government introduced the new traffic law, the most ambitious and comprehensive of such legislation in the history of this country. And who else to do so but the governor of example, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN). When the news made the rounds, I also anticipated a row, the voices of dissent and resistance.

It has been called draconian, ruthless, inhuman. I call it the law of the narrow gate. Back to the numinous Christ. He said the broad way attracts all sorts of people, the wicked, the good, the fools, the heartless and the lawless. A cocktail of such human types would lead to destruction. It is the way of indiscipline, the albatross of chaos.
So the law says: don’t eat, don’t drink, don’t beat the red light, don’t bring your okada to the major spines and arteries of the cities, don’t ride okada with two persons, keep away your cell phones, don’t drive the danfo with nonfunctional lamps, drive your heavy trucks only at night, et cetera.

And I say why not! Go to the Lagos road and you will know why. A man in suit navigates a one-way street with the reckless gusto of the shirtless danfo driver. The rabble has converted the dove. It is time to reverse that. Recently, the streets were lined again, and the purpose is to keep commuters on their lanes. Only on Saturday, I watched a man in a new Honda Accord hug the street, as though he could not see the border between my lane and his.
The road fines are heavy, and that is how it should be. When I first started driving in the United States, I was almost tempted to throw out the foil wrap of a cake I had just consumed on my way from Denver to Boulder in the state of Colorado. It then occurred to me that there was a sign that a fine of $1,000 loomed. For a cake that cost me about one dollar? That is the discipline we need to abide by the law.

The road is not just the road. It is the place where we all meet. The President’s siren blares when he commutes, CEOs and the drivers are forced into the same space. The driver can hear some of the conversational intimacies of the most powerful man in town when even the wife is as far away as Madagascar. The road accommodates the slouch and the efficient, the rascal and the devotee, the sinner and preacher, the drunk and the sober, the virile and impotent, the blessed and the cursed, the damned jalopy and the chariot of the Lord. The road, whether it is as thin as needle or wide as the heavens, becomes a broad way. Broad is the gate and wide is the road that leads to destruction, many there are who find it.

Wole Soyinka wrote a play at our Independence in 1960 and it was aptly called The Road. The Nobel Laureate, ever a traveler, is a devotee of the road. He has shown this in his marquee plays, poems, memoirs and novels. In real life, he became the boss of the Federal Road Safety Corps. The phrase Aksident Store haunts me from The Road. It is the store where all the vehicular scraps from around town are kept by a sort of tout called Professor.

The new law is to avoid the accidents and pare the rate of scraps of tragedy on our roads. Obedience of the law is better than the sacrifice of the limbs and health of our commuters.

As a reporter in the United States, I once visited the Denver jail for a night, and what struck me was the number of people behind bars for what is designated as DUI – driving under the influence. Of alchohol, that is. That was Denver, a tranquil cow town of low blood pressure with minimal traffic infractions.

The road is the place of all human activities. There many wars are fought, many peace treaties signed, many lovers consummated. There children are born , David beat Goliath on the road, Samson mauled a lion barehanded. Also: Ija Ore in the Nigerian Civil war, the walk of Moremi into myth, the pogroms and festivals of our people, the Battle of the Bulge in the Second World War when Germans ensnared Americans by changing road signs, the conversion of Paul, the road to Golgotha, Mohammed’s trip between Mecca and Medina, Budda’s nights of solitude as shown in Nobel Prize-winning novel Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, the young wooer of big words in Soyinka’s play whose bag got empty and sent for a bigger dictionary, the actions in Death and The King’s Horse man, the mad man in Achebe’s short story, the slaying of Ikemefuna in Things Fall Apart, the assassination of Murtala Muhammed and John Kennedy. Every day when we wake up, we might as well remember the song of the American rock star, Bob Seger: Here I am/ on the road again/ there I am/ up on the stage.

In the movie, The Great American Traffic Jam, everything happens from the birth of a baby to the pursuit of a criminal to the glitter of a band with guitars blaring.
The American novelist, Jack Kerouac dramatised the rebellion of the young and restless in the 1950’s with the novel On The Road where a group of lads travel all over America in search of meaning they cannot not find. The road is nothing but a process. It is not where we are going to but where we are going through. Just like searching for regular power supply, real federalism as well as end to armed robbery, ethnic and religious bigotry, rigged elections, etc. We are forced on it whether it is well travelled or not. That was Christ’s point.

If we don’t make it a good one, the road becomes the end of the road. Another novel, The Road, by Cormac McCarthy tells of its apocalyptic potential. We neither want to make the road an endless search nor the finisher of our souls.

No law is perfect. When the Americans developed their constitution, they admitted it would be improved along the way. That is why they have several amendments. Somebody asked me how she could carry her baby from her home to the main street without Okada since there are only Okada. While the spirit of the law is to save the child, the convenience of mother and child may not enjoy infrastructure as yet. That is the challenge to make more roads open to such families. It is work in progress.
The spirit of the law is in the right place, and most of it is right. That is where we should focus. Governor Fashola wants a way of life in which a narrow gate leads to life, not to death and destruction.

We follow Ebenezer Obey’s line, “ Irin ajo la wa yi o/ ori gbe wa de le…” That is the high way, which Prophet Isaiah says the unclean will not take. That is Fashola’s way of life for Lagosians, a road pruned of dirt and deaths. It is in that spirit that Soyinka writes, “Traveller, you must set forth at dawn/I promise marvels of the holy hour.”