I want to qualify my study of last two Fridays on the Benin-Sapele-Warri Road/Highway by presenting some readers’ deep admiration for what I did. You may call it a debate which tries to recreate or to reinforce my undertaking.
I am beginning with two inventors, two profound critics and artists who many persons, readers, of this column are familiar with: Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano and Professor Ademola Da Sylva.
Enjoy their notions, impressions and perspectives which rain forth in profusion of profusions.
Professor Ibrahim Bello-Kano
Prof TA the Wordsmith, the Semanticising Imagist, I enjoyed reading your dystopian travelogue, your journey into abysmally black hole roads, your long journeying through muddy roads and motorised re-cycling from Junction to Junction, replete with fearful expectations of, for, and from the Nigerian “kidnapping road-stoppers.” As I grow older now, I am beginning to despise long road journeys. Years ago I suffered now and then from sudden attacks of Wanderlust. Not anymore: I am not willing now to truck or ‘small-car’or ‘motorcycle’ through apocalyptic muddy roads or glitterized death traps.
The three cities you ‘discoursed’ about, Warri, Sapele, and Benin, are on my visiting list. I’ve been to Benin three times on university accreditation/ resource/verification occasions but never the other two cities. Sometimes, my old and weakened Wanderlust comes back to me and whispers in my ears, “Visit Benin, if only to meet your admired Wordsmith, one retired Professor, who suffers, as you do, from an incurable non-medical, Shakespeare-inspired Logorrhea.”
Yet: I’ve visited, or had a vicarious occasion to visit, those three cities ‘in or via or within’ your essay on those cities, the very cities you’ve semantised in figural etches on a vast canvas of clever and ethereal word-y and word-ing RETproduction. But Prof TA, you’ve spoiled my secret romantic lust for journeys and journeying through cities, now that you’ve evoked the three great cities in metaphorical “re-dressing down.”
In closing, I must thank you, Prof TA, for your ironic synecdochying of the very cities I should visit or should have visited. Your descriptions of the apocalyptic journey into the Great Three have spoiled it all; namely you’ve forced a very figural realism into a non-realistic setting, complete with phantasmagoric DIS-couragings for an IPPIS-pauperised northern Professor of Non-fiction Prose.
Now, that ridiculous Professor would have no option but to ‘visit’ the Great Three via Prof TA’s mesmerising dystopian re-descriptions. Nevertheless: thank you, Prof TA, for evoking an image that has trumped over my non-clinical Freudian lust for the Other. The Great Three separated by a thousand miles from my native Kano.
I was once caught up in a very bad gridlock on the Zuba-Kaduna, express way, then undergoing reconstruction by Julius Berger company. We were in a big, off-road capable 4Runner, with a V8 engine. We decided to be patient and not bulldoze our way through.
I quickly noticed that the gridlock was being made worse by the indiscipline and the horribly selfish behaviour of the primitive driving culture of, first the commercial bus drivers AND second, the truck and fuel tanker drivers. Those two categories of drivers were reckless and had no respect for basic safety regulations or what we call ‘defensive driving.’ Other small car or SUV drivers were also aggressive. The gridlock brought the worse and worst in people. We literally spent more than 18 hours there.
A simple display or resort to the cooperative principle or orderly patience would have solved the problem in just 2-3 hours, but, alas, people there were at their very worst in selfishness and crude self-serving tactics. So, not absolving the FGN organ charged with setting the road right, I must say that the primitive behaviour and tactics of the Nigerian road user is also a factor in traffic jams and possible loss of life in such situations. Your columns of the past two weeks evoked the evocable of by-gone times of the Wanderlust. But you have immaculately recaptured times for me, the by-gone times that have returned in “How to enter Sapele and Warri from Benin now.”
The tanker and truck drivers are the worst humans all across the world, not just in Nigeria. Just Google truck crashes, truck-train crashes, and the inhumane driving culture of tanker drivers and super supply trucks, called HGVs. I’ve videos and videos of tanker and truck drivers stalling on rail lines despite warnings to stop for a fast approaching train. Drivers whose vehicles are high in the air, trucks, tankers, HGVs, and large SUVs tend to be arrogant, inhumane, rude, and reckless.
They habitually look down on small vehicles and think themselves the titans of and in the road. If you ever are a traveller between Kano and Kaduna, on a 6-lane super highway, you’d see trucks, tankers, and other HGVs in c
ollisions, and in other horrible accidents caused by those humongous vehicles.
Professor Ademola Da Sylva
It is unfortunate that innocent souls are made to suffer such an avoidable calamity of this magnitude! On a second thought, I find three categories of people that are culpable here: the first culprits are those that have been governors in the past, beginning with Alamieyeseigha, Ibori, et al. Second culprits are the Niger Delta Development Commission members who ended up awarding contracts to ghost contractors, squandered as well as looted humongous amount of money during the COVID-19, although they were investigated but till date nobody has been charged to court or jailed. Finally, the third set of culprits, are people of Delta regions who kept cheering on their rogue-leaders with heroic welcome even as ex-convicts! The FG might not be doing enough, but come to think of it, if you add together the amount of Federal allocation that had been sunk in the regions, it is enough to build three Dubais in the Delta regions.
Unfortunately, our crop of politicians in government, behave like a band of hyenas or jackals, and the captive State is like a helpless buffalo in the midst of the blood-thirsty hyenas. The buffalo stands no chance of surviving; it is torn into shreds even without first killing it!
The hyenas depart with their different parts of the prey as trophies! That’s what we have witnessed, largely, in the past sixty-three years of our so-called Independence! We all are to blame for the systemic dysfunction and total collapse of fiscal policies that we witness today! If, indeed, the fuel subsidy over the years is a fraud against the State, what steps have been taken to bring the “fraudsters” to book?
The humongous funds pumped into Electricity, what steps have been taken to bring the culprits to book? So many questions begging for answers! If you want to know why Nigeria is not working, simply watch how Nigerian drivers behave at places with gridlocks, like right now at Ologbo to Koko, or ask IBK and his experience on the Zuba-Kaduna Express way.
Folks become grossly indiscipline and extremely senseless. They end up compounding the already compounded problems! It translates to how we run our affairs in the country! I guess we need a regime, like the Singaporean leader, Lee Kuan Yew’s, that is capable of getting our mental contact-set back to its original factory setting! You know what? In my two Kobo musings I am also wishing all of us your readers and non-readers a fulfilling new Nigeria!
Your “How to enter Sapele and Warri from Benin now” is revealing in the way and manner it captures the pains of the people of the Niger Delta in which we non-Niger Delta people similarly feel our collective suffering as exploited and oppressed Nigerians in all fronts.
Who can grow weary of the respective spirits of our inventive artists and scholars whose glances are the glances of glances? I urgently reply by saying thus: None.
To be continued.
THEGUARDIAN
