Although each individual post office was just a building, it’s tentacles reached far and wide and touched virtually every building in the land. The letters posted in each post office was moved through one of several agencies associated with the office. Perhaps the most important agency was human, as the letters had to be sorted out by people who had been appropriately trained for the job. In other parts of the world, places where they have to deal with a very large volume of mail, machines are used to deal with sorting mail. This is especially true during the Christmas period when the post office has to employ an army of casual workers to shift out letters and other items of mail which had to be delivered before Christmas. Many Nigerians who were students in Britain in days gone by retain happy memories of the stipends which came their way at Christmas, courtesy of the Royal Mail which briefly opened her doors to them in those hectic days leading up to Christmas.
As soon as letters were appropriately sorted, they were sent on to their respective destinations in all sorts of vehicles many times travelling through the night to deliver letters to destinations all over the country. Night travellers were likely to meet mail vans as well as those notoriously quick pickups ferrying newspapers across the country, delivering news to all nooks and corners of a country in the grip of satisfying sleep that came after honest labour. Apart from these all important mail vans, letters were also distributed by contracted transporters like the famous Armels Transport with the guarantee of faithful delivery whilst even the trains which roared their way through the countryside carried mail. The roads over which mail was carried may have been narrow and winding; they may have been untarred and the bridges encountered all along the way may have been designed to carry only one vehicle at a time but they were adequately maintained by the men of the Public Works Department (PWD) whose work camps were a prominent presence and like that of the Police, could be taken for granted all over the land. The delivery of that letter casually dropped into a mail box on the Marina in Lagos and received by a friend or relative in Afikpo a couple of days later would, if it could talk, have a story of adventure to tell of its journey through the Nigerian postal system as it was put into the hands of the recipient by the familiar postman who arrived at the point of delivery on a government issued bicycle.
The P&T was an institution with a vast and necessary reach and as with all institutions had her own rules of engagement and discharged her duties with due diligence. It had an unwritten but powerful social contract with her numerous and diversified customers, big and small all over the country. Countries all over the world, at least those of them that have a reputation for success, are governed by these contracts whilst on the other side of the coin are the broken countries in which the social contract is casually violated, almost as a matter of principle. In Nigeria, the will and the drive to deliver letters on time began to unravel, first imperceptibly and then quite overtly at some point in time until the postal service which became the butt of sick jokes, sickened in its turn and died. It took longer and longer for posts to be delivered until the guarantee of delivery died a natural death. Hitherto reliable postmen no longer saw or respected the need to make any delivery and dumped mail in some convenient spot but not before extracting anything of value contained in the post under their care. Such chicanery could only have been possible in an institution which had lost its way in a country which had lost all forms of social cohesion and degenerated into an incoherent mass, rather like a terminally diseased heart going into atrial fibrillation at the point of shutting down forever.
It has become very easy these days to point accusing fingers at certain people for the mess we are now battling with but the sad reality is that more than anything, what is wrong with us is the serial collapse of virtually all our institutions especially as in this case, the Post & Telegraph service. It has to be pointed out however that we will only be using the P&T as a convenient scape goat were we to neglect to point out the culpability of other public institutions in what has now become the failure of the whole. The point is, nobody is interested in looking out for public over the private which is why you will need to look into private pockets for money which should properly be going into the government treasury to serve common purposes such as the provision of social infrastructure; good roads, bridges, railroads, sporting facilities, educational institutions and so on and so forth. We now have individuals who are richer than the country and spend ‘their’ money to scratch their back, never mind that the general populace no longer have any back to scratch. The situation has degenerated to such a point that people, those who have a great deal of money in their pockets are well advised to prepare a detailed written explanation for how it came about that they have cornered such a large amount of money. This is in the unlikely but necessary event that the Nigerian situation may change to such an extent that pointed questions are asked about how come they are thriving furiously in the middle of a desert, far away from any oasis.
The postal service was designed to serve everyone and in doing so, make it possible for societal purposes to be achieved. However, it’s continued usefulness needed to be guaranteed by individuals who had been trained, some of them at public expense to administer what in effect was a public utility company. The P&T was not expected to run up stupendous profit in the manner of Amazon but it was given the wherewithal to ensure that letters were delivered to their respective destinations within a reasonable period of time. It has to be said that this limited objective was once achieved even with time to spare. But that was in those days when we could rely on responsible authorities to be alive to their responsibilities. In the case of the P&T, one can imagine that it’s managers, eager to put up a show for their friends and family began to think that it was in the interest of their job if staff cars were purchased from the public purse for their own personal use rather than delivery vans which actually carried the mails which the company or, in the jargon of the day, the parastatal had been paid through stamp sales and fat government subvention. In time, the management came to the irresponsible conclusion that the postal services existed for the sole purpose of their own personal aggrandisement. After that, it became impossible for the general public to be served and letters became an irrelevance, if not an actual nuisance and like many other things, the art of letter writing was lost among us and lost forever. Now, we are all condemned to communicating with each other electronically by email and suddenly the thrill of actually sitting down to compose a letter was exchanged for the rather impersonal exercise of typing out a letter on some compliant keyboard and despatching it with a single click of a button or a mouse attached to a computer. Instant delivery is assured, blocking out the thrill of actually having to pick up a physical entity from a pigeon hole in an office or your own box at the post office or even from a postman with whom you may have developed some form of relationship over the years. In any case, a letter was more than the message it contained but was the manifestation of a way of life. In many cases, it had a life of its own and was like an impossibly elastic umbilical chord which bound, in its most basic form, two people together in their own personal form of a social contract. When I was away from home for any extended period of time, one of the highlights of my day was receiving a letter with a Nigerian stamp on it even if it was the flimsy airmail which did not allow for many words as it’s forte was in its quick delivery. I felt like celebrating the arrival of a letter, usually in a blue envelope, covered with stamps, the value of which compensated for the weight of the letter and the effort which went into writing it and when it came from a special person the ecstasy of the expectation of the sweetness enclosed in that rectangular cover was enough to make my day and at least reduced the pain of separation over a substantial period of time. In short, every letter had a romantic appeal of its own as it sometimes relieved anxieties which had built up over a period of waiting for that delivery. For those who have probably never received a proper letter delivered in an envelope decorated with a stamp, that feeling of holding a personal letter in your hand is indescribable.
For many years, I listened every Sunday evening to a BBC programme called Letter from America delivered by Alistair Cooke, a Briton who from 1946 to 2004 wrote a letter to the world from his perch in America. Throughout that period, he regaled the world with letters on a wide range of topics on his observation of life in America. Listening to it was like receiving a personal letter from a friend, a special friend or if you like a pen pal who lived in America and did not expect you to take the trouble of making a reply. Alistair Cooke was blessed with long life and one interesting thing about his life was that he died within a month of having to give up the writing of his weekly Letter from America. That may have been an example of an incomparable attachment to letter writing but call me an incurable romantic but even at that risk, I consider that the bond which Alistair Cooke had developed with those letters kept him going long after his contemporaries had shrugged off their mortal coil. The email or WhatsApp message is unbeatable for speed but what about the passion?
