Tag: highways

Those of my generation, that is, the baby boomers as well as those who are one or two generations younger are likely to recognise the phrase used as the title of this piece and others before it. For those who have forgotten, it was part of an advertisement which for several seasons ran on all media every year at Christmas time. It was sponsored by a plastics manufacturing firm which, like many such companies, has long become a victim of the malaise which has assailed the Nigerian manufacturing sector, is now extinct. The essence of that advertisement was to discourage people from driving too fast in the time leading up to Christmas. However, I doubt that this advert made much difference to its audience because the prevailing belief in those days and even now, is that the demons which inhabit our roads become especially spiteful and uncommonly ravenous at the period when an old year was being rung out. Beware, the dangers of the ember months! That remains a constant admonition so that all those travelling along any Nigerian road during that extended period are made aware of the dangers to which they were exposed. One would have thought that drivers were being urged to take extra care whilst using the road. Wrong! At least from the point of popular belief. The real message was that everyone was to ensure that they were in good standing with those tempestuous spirits that ruled the highways before making any trip on them. That popular jingle which became characteristic of the Christmas period of those days is now terminally quiet but its spirit lives on even as the echoes created by it continue to reverberate right up till now.

You really do not have to be acquainted with laws of Physics to appreciate that your power to control a moving vehicle diminishes as the speed at which the vehicle is moving increases. It is really a common sense thing but anyone who travels along the highways in Nigeria soon observes that this piece of common sense is only conspicuous by its absence from Nigerian roads. The contempt for caution is so prominent here that it is apparent that virtually every Nigerian who sits behind the wheel of any vehicle is instantly transformed into a spirit that is every bit as capricious if not as vicious as the spirits which in popular imagination, are supposed to inhabit the road. Nigerians are notoriously lax about keeping time for any appointment but when you see any of us driving on the road, you are given the impression that everyone is in a hurry to keep an appointment for which  they whizz along the road at break neck speed. This is why accidents here are often, if not invariably described as ghastly. Many years ago, a Nigerian lady who lived in Britain was trying to describe the scene of an accident that she had seen on a British road. She was so badly shaken at the sight of the mangled vehicles at the scene of the accident that the only way she felt she could effectively convey her feelings was to describe it as a ‘Nigerian’ accident. The last time she had seen anything so horrifying was back home in Nigeria where such an appalling scene was not uncommon. Another aspect of vehicular accidents in Nigeria is that the badly mangled carcasses of the vehicle involved in an accident may remain in place, apparently forgotten long enough to be the cause of another accident. After all, the spirits are in a constant state of hunger and need to be fed. In the end therefore, those spirits conjured out of nothing in our deadly imagination are held responsible for any accident. In this scenario, the driver who may be high on some potent distilled spirits or the fumes coming off some notorious plant substance is treated like a victim of something beyond his puny human strength. You will be amazed as to how many of the drivers involved in these accidents blithely walk away unscathed from the mess they have created.

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Whilst it is true that driving at high speed can be exhilarating, it would be extremely foolish to ignore the dangers associated with it. For a start, just how fit for purpose are the vehicles which take to our roads at any time of day or night? The sober response to that query is that not many of them would be allowed out onto any European road. For example, in Britain, there is the dreaded MOT test which every vehicle above three years old has to pass before they are given a license to be on the road, any road at all. This test is repeated at every subsequent three year interval and any vehicle that fails the test at any point in time is immediately committed to a junk yard where it is permanently removed from circulation and scrapped. Here, we are charged for something called the road worthiness test. All you are required to do to pass the test is pay the prescribed fee whenever you renew your annual vehicle licence and you are good to go even if your vehicle is precariously balanced on three wheels at the time your renewed vehicle licence is being handed over to you. Given our shoddy vehicle licensing process, it is safe to assume that more than half of the vehicles plying Nigerian roads at any given time have no business being there at all as they are the potential cause of an accident just by being on the road at all. This is not taking into consideration the number of vehicles which have been in the care of a typical Nigerian mechanic for any length of time.

The Nigerian mechanic is qualified to be assigned to a special species outside the human race and that is a fact, an indisputable one. I wonder who the first Nigerian mechanic was because whoever he was, he deserves a posthumous award for sheer bravery and enterprise. How did he get it into his head to take on the spirits which were in control of the vehicle engine and be initiated into their mysteries? It is unlikely that our first mechanic underwent any formal course of training. More than a century after him, the Nigerian mechanic still lacks formal training and everything considered is on the verge of becoming an endangered species. Not long ago, a mechanic apprenticeship was well sought after. Not so anymore. A mechanic workshop is, these days, a rather lonely place, denuded as it is of aspiring mechanics. The profession, if you can call it that, has no appeal to the youths who in the absence of a tertiary education diploma prefer to become apprenticed to an internet fraudster or put the rest of us in constant danger by becoming an Okada rider. After all, he does not need any period of apprenticeship for that.

The typical Nigerian mechanic approaches his tasks by feel as he is severely limited by the simplicity of his tools and his limited knowledge of the mechanics of the engine he works on. He therefore has a cavalier attitude to his work. He is not averse to simply tossing out any defective parts or just replacing them with something that looks like the real thing as long as the vehicle he is working on can leave his workshop under its own steam. His task is not made any easier by the proliferation of the inferior or even outrightly fake replacement parts with which he carries out the needed repairs on the vehicles in his care. Today, the vast majority of vehicles on Nigerian roads have been imported after years of admittedly pampered use in Europe or the USA. For all that, they are not new, some of them being more than ten years old and no longer able to pass the fitness tests in their country of origin. These days, the spare parts needed to make those vehicles fit for service on our roads are also described as fairly used. I find it illogical that used spark plugs are preferable to brand new ones but if you put your vehicle in the hands of a mechanic in Nigeria, that is the logic you must be prepared to accept. The reality therefore is that your vehicle is not fit for the purpose of being driven on the road at any speed let alone the high speeds at which vehicles are propelled along our ricketty roads.

It is now more than a century since vehicles powered by the internal combustion engine were introduced to Nigeria. They are now found in every nook and cranny of the land stitching the country together even as they dictate the pace of the economy in every way conceivable. They do these and more in such a way that without them one cannot imagine any form of sustainable social intercourse going on within the country.

In all the time that they have been in operation here however, it is doubtful if Nigerians have really come to terms with the mechanics of this invention, perhaps the most characteristic invention of the twentieth century. The internal combustion engine is totally mechanical. At the heart of this contraption, you have a closed compartment within which a mixture of air and volatile fumes created by a jet of petrol are ignited by a spark leading to a combustible event which in turn  leads to the release of a great deal of energy. This is then channelled to the wheels causing them to turn and the vehicle to move. Ordinarily, it is difficult to ascribe any spiritual dimension to this phenomenon but I am afraid that there is incontrovertible evidence that all those who earn their living working on any aspect of motor transportation in Nigeria are convinced that the internal combustion engine derives its demonstrably awesome power from a collection of powerful spiritual forces which will bestow their favour only after appropriate propitiation from those that use it. It is the implicit belief of transport workers of all hews that they are no more than agents of these spirits which as all spirits go are as capricious as the wind; useful but totally uncontrollable by the uninitiated. They strive to give the impression that in ministering to their machines, they are performing some rites which involve some form of communication with the spirits which rule the engine.

Given the inability of mere mortals to direct the affairs of unseen spirits, it is not surprising that the supervising god of this portion of human endeavour, at least in my neck of the woods, has been identified as Ogun, mighty in all his ascribed turbulence. Ogun is recognised as the patron of all those who work with metals, especially iron or steel from which all parts of any vehicle is crafted. It also befits his role as the maker of roads to be responsible for the welfare of those whose livelihood is wrung from their activity on any stretch of road. To venture forth on any road therefore, at least in the imagination of all those who work in and around vehicles, you need the favour of Ogun more than the fitness of your vehicle or the skill of your driver. It is however no longer fashionable to offer prayers directly to Ogun, although hard core transport workers are very active participants in Ogun festivals and regard themselves as devotees of the god. The same thing goes for all those who travel in motor vehicles because even as the lips of travelers are offering prayers to more modern deities, their heart is full of supplication to Ogun. At the base of such prayers is the wish that the traveler does not set out on a journey on any day that the road is hungry for a taste of human blood. The road in this case fits the description of Ogun’s much vaunted preference for blood over water. In this case, obedience to the will of the God is superior to all the efforts made to put the vehicle in which the journey is to be undertaken in serviceable condition. For a safe journey there are not many who would leave home without saying the appropriate prayers for traveling mercies. Given this background, it is not surprising that in the good old days of petrol scarcity, there were testimonies from some powerful pastors who announced to their enchanted congregation that with prayers to their personal God, they were able to drive their vehicle over vast distances without a drop of petrol in their tank thereby disobeying, with divine help it must be said, all the laws of physics and thermodynamics. The internal combustion engine has therefore been domesticated and incorporated into folk lore in a way that is peculiarly ours but hardly helpful to the cause of safety on our roads.

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For all the mystery attached to motor transport, it is easy to forget that the activities associated with it gives a form of livelihood to the largest group of Nigerians but for those involved in working on the farms. Drivers, mechanics, electricians, so called vulcanisers, panel beaters, painters, upholsters and the ubiquitous agbero all make it possible for our chaotic transport system to function after a fashion. Each person that works within the system belongs to a union which is led by officials who rule their chiefdoms with a heavy hand, maintaining their own brand of discipline through the use of gangs of young men with a predilection for violence of the extreme kind. And yet the guiding principle within these unions is democracy. Just like the country, they hold periodic elections with rival groups fighting it out, not in terms of winning votes but of inflicting more physical damage to people in other groups than it is inflicted on the winning group. These contests take place at local, state and federal governt levels with the winners at each level forming an alternative government to those at local government and other levels. Some of the state union chairmen are comrades in arms with their respective governors and go about their business in government issued official cars. This must be so because there are governors who owe their exalted  positions to the patronage of the chairman of theit state motor transport union. This cannot be otherwise because all political parties have their shock troops who are recruited from the motor boys who love nothing more than raising hell and are always ready to go to war as long as their price is met. Their loyalty is never on the basis of ideology or some strongly held belief. It goes to whoever pays the highest price.

Right from the beginning, all those who chose to work in the transport system have been young men with attitude. They have always been drawn from the very bottom of the social pool. And yet, we have all this time given them the responsibility of driving all the vehicles which are supposed to take us safely from place to place. Ordinarily, not many of them are able to make enough money over a long period of time, to buy a vehicle of their own. And, for those of them that eventually manage to do so, it is almost invariably an investment to keep body and soul together in the form of a retirement benefit. Our roads have been surrendered to a large group of people whose only reason for being on the road at any time of day or night is to make as much money as possible within the shortest time possible. Given that premise, it is clear that safety considerations rank very low on the priority list of the majority of those who take to our highways each and every day. This being the case, most Nigerians have no choice but to set out on journeys on nothing more substantial than hope and a fervent prayer.

When the British arrived in what is now Nigeria in the closing years of the nineteenth century, they came with a clear mission; to extract from their colony, the raw materials with which to feed their industries and export them back home at minimum cost. In order to fulfil their mission, they immediately began to build the roads along which the raw materials they had extracted were to reach the ports for onward shipment to Britain. One of the first steps taken to consolidate their hold on the new colony was to straighten and widen as much as they could, the old footpaths which existed in all parts of their newly acquired territory. They were quite successful in this enterprise especially since it was complemented with the railways, the construction of which began at the same time as the roads. This made sense as it was the railways which at first did all the heavy lifting as the previous means of moving produce on the roads was by human porterage and the odd camel or donkey.

By 1926, the existing roads had become inadequate, especially because motorised vehicles had become available and needed asphalted roads on which to move efficiently. The colonial government therefore took the decision to build what they described as Trunk A roads throughout the colony. They might have been grandly described as Trunk roads but in reality they were narrow, winding and quite dangerous in parts but they did the job for which they were designed and evacuated produce from the points of production to railway stations and the ports for onward transmission to Britain. It is funny that these roads were in no way comparable to the magnificent roads with which the Romans criss-crossed their vast empire more than two millennia before, some which are still in use today. Some of these roads were built in Britain but our colonial masters did not seem to have seen the remnants of the old Roman roads as a template for the roads which they were building in their own colonies. It has to be said for all it is worth however that the Trunk A roads were carefully maintained by the Public Works Department (PWD) which kept them free of potholes. For this purpose, the PWD had work camps all along the Trunk A roads as these roads acquired a life of their own, as with their use, a sort of culture developed along the roads and was sustained by the people who had seen the utility value of the roads as they were being built. For example, the roads were quite long and journeys along them could stretch over a couple of days and more. On the Western Trunk A road which passed through developed urban centres, it stretched from Asaba all the way to Lagos and passed through relatively big and long established towns all along the way. Benin, Owo, Akure, Ilesa, Ife, Ibadan, Sagamu, Ikorodu before reaching Lagos. A culture which was associated with the road, grew in all those towns and made them memorable to all those who at one time or the other, travelled along it. As far as I know, the importance of that road to Ilesa, where I now live, is shown by the observation that its commercial importance was drastically reduced when Lagos bound traffic was diverted to the Benin – Ore road shortly after independence. The Trunk A roads of those days were tarred but virtually all other roads were left to the mercies of rain, wind and sunshine. The vehicles which plied those roads together with their passengers were invariably covered in a fine but tenacious coat of dust such that your journey was not truly over until they had taken a bath to wash off the effects of their journey. The use of some of those designated Trunk B and C roads were actually quite seasonal and they were hardly kept in a state of repair. Even today, those early colonial roads still exist but are now recognised as Federal roads (Trunk A), State roads (Trunk B) and Local government roads (Trunk C).

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Although the new roads were primarily designed to move agricultural produce, the period of the building of those Trunk A and others led to the development of passenger transport which may, or may not have been factored into the plans which led to the building of those roads in the first place. After all, passenger transport did not contribute to the movement of cocoa or palm oil to the ports. It was soon clear however that there was the need for passenger traffic if the usefulness of the road was to be sustained. This aspect of road development was left to local entrepreneurs who began to build fleets of lorries which moved both freight and passengers, some of them over vast distances. Although those lorries were no more sophisticated than motorised wooden boxes, each of them represented a very substantial investment and enormous prestige for the owners. Nothing represented wealth more glaringly than a lorry which carried the name of the owner or owners as the case may be over vast distances or even within a defined locality. Furthermore, it was also not practicable to put a solitary vehicle on the road as any need of any but the most trivial repair could take the lorry out of commission for long periods of time. Consequently, any transporter worth his salt needed to maintain a fleet of vehicles. This dictated the formation of partnerships of varied longevity because it was soon discovered that joint ownership of vehicles was a tricky business indeed. The giant of motor transport in those days was Armels Transport, not surprisingly, a company whose origin is shrouded in mystery but which at a certain point in time dominated the  Nigerian transport sector to the virtual exclusion of any other transport company. Many companies dealing with the transport of

goods and passengers all over Nigeria have emerged since then but no other transport company has stirred the imagination quite like the Armels Transport of my early years. The company operated on a schedule which was adhered to come rain or shine and you could send anything to anywhere through Armels. There are still a few toothless oldies around who remember as children, being sent safely and punctually to far destinations through Armels. The company which had its origin in Benin City was involved in the transport of goods and passengers. It was so trusted that it was a dedicated mail carrier on contract to the colonial government. It also carried passengers in perceptibly greater comfort and safety than her competitors and was consequently heavily patronised by the emerging middle class. The company was bought over by the Midwest government in 1971 and has since been swallowed up in the morass of the Nigerian business environment.

Another example of a transporter of that era was Ojukwu Transport, an enterprise which was begun with one second hand lorry in 1930 but had grown to a fleet in excess of two hundred only twenty years later. The company concentrated on ferrying goods, mainly on government contract, from the East to Lagos. Although it was founded in Nnewi, its headquarters was and indeed is still in Lagos even though you are never likely to see a vehicle with Ojukwu Transport stenciled on its side. The company appears to have been swallowed by history and there are not many people who have memories of travelling by Ojukwu Transport as it was mainly involved in carrying goods on behalf of the colonial government. Her heydays were the war years when it provided lucrative transport services to the British Army, a service for which its proprietor was not only handsomely paid but was also decorated with a knighthood by the grateful owners of the now defunct British Empire. The days of hauling raw materials from the East to the ports are now firmly in the past as the country has transformed from a producer of agricultural raw materials to the collection of rent from our troubled oil fields. All in all, it appears that nothing lasts forever!