by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
We made one stop before hitting the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway: police headquarters, where we picked up an armed guard. His name was Sergeant Bisong, and he sat in the front of Dr. Okaa’s car wearing a bulletproof vest, his submachine gun across his lap.
We were stopped at seventeen police checkpoints on our two-hour journey to the burial. We did not have to pay our way out of any of them, and did not once have to get out of the car. This, I concluded, was what our guard was really for, more than to protect us from unofficial brigands. We were Friends of the Police.
The burial was that of an old man, a janitor by trade but chief of his village, who had recently died. His son, improbably, had recently ascended to the board of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation. To honor his father’s memory, the son had paved the last mile or two of the previously dirt road to the village. He had assembled three massive party tents. He set up live remote closed-circuit television broadcasts under additional tents for the dignitaries who couldn’t fit inside the local church, which was most of them. And me. As we waited for the service to begin, we browsed through a commemorative magazine produced for the occasion. Each page had a reproduction of a letter of condolence from somebody important—other oil company bigwigs, state governors, clergymen, and chiefs such as “His Majesty Kaegborekuzi I, the Dein of Agbor.” And then we ate fish and chicken and drank beer and watched dancers for several hours—but not too late, because it was important to drive home while it was still light.
Daylight matters in Lagos, too, when it comes to safety. An acquaintance of mine whom I’ll call Sven is the local representative of a multinational corporation. He also lives in a walled compound in Ikoyi. Peacocks wander his gardens; he has three cars and two drivers; and among his house staff is a chef talented in continental cuisine. Spending an evening at his place, after a night with no fan at Bill and Biola’s, was more than a little refreshing.
But there was only so much you could do to insulate yourself from Lagos. To get back and forth from the airport, his lifeline to the outside world, Sven had to travel the same roads as anyone else. One of the worst spots was near the Oshodi Market on the Agege road, where it intersects with the Apapa-Oworonshoki Expressway—not far from the Anthony ambulance post. Oshodi was a notorious slowdown spot; the rise of the overpass somehow brought traffic to a near standstill there, seemingly no matter what time of day. It was prime territory for vendors, who wandered freely among the snail-paced vehicles. And also convenient for thieves, who used the occasion to take a good look through the windows of expensive cars. Sven had lost his laptop to armed robbery there; he wouldn’t share the details, only swear that he would never again pass by the Oshodi Market after dark. If a flight he was taking left at ten p.m., he’d leave for the airport at three and spend the intervening hours in the airport’s executive lounge.
At dusk the ambulances retreated to their bases. Ganiu and the nurses returned from the Third Mainland Bridge to the base at Lagos Island General Hospital. Typically the ambulances did not go out at night; it was too dangerous. If calls came in after dark, I was told, the dispatcher would decide whether the location was safe enough to make an exception.
So I waited, on a Saturday night, in the emergency room of Lagos Island General Hospital. I started out in the Dispatch Room, where a young woman sat at a small desk upon which were a telephone and a Bible. Lagos had a new medical emergency call-in number: dial 1-2-3, I was told, and the phone would ring here. But, after a couple of hours passed without a single call, the woman retired to a couch and promptly fell asleep. I wandered out into the ER and met the attending physician, young Dr. Joseph Nugabod (“Call me Doc Boddy”), who let me tag along as he treated a drunk teenager who had been hit by a car and had a pretty bad head injury. Doc Boddy couldn’t do an MRI or CAT scan, but he stitched up some cuts and otherwise cleaned the man up as best he could. An orderly kept him for observation.
If we were lucky, he said, we’d have a slow night. It was much better than the alternative. A month before, they’d been inundated with burn victims from an oil pipeline explosion on nearby Atlas Creek Island that killed two hundred people. (Poor people had been “bunkering,” illegally tapping a pipeline for fuel, when a spark had ignited the oil.) Two years before, a munitions store had blown up in Isolo; Doc Boddy said over a thousand people had died in the panicked aftermath. Tonight would probably be more typical: okada accidents, and shootings of and by area boys.
“In fact, there is one here already. I will introduce you.” Doc showed me into a room where a young man lay without a shirt. A bandage around his chest was partly soaked through with blood.
“This is Mr. Conover,” said Doc Boddy to the patient. “Would you like to tell him about your accident?”
The man glared at Nugabod and we left the room. “He claims he walked into a sharp pole, you see,” explained the doctor. “What I see, quite clearly, is the entrance and exit wounds of a bullet. And of course I had to report him to the police—we always do with a gunshot wound. If I did not, the police could accuse me of harboring knowledge of a crime, of being in cahoots with gangsters.”
Dealing with gangsters and area boys was one of the more challenging aspects of Doc Boddy’s work. Recently he’d treated a well-known mobster, who was called Stainless for the finish of his pistol. His presence, however, sparked several skirmishes between rival gangsters on the hospital grounds, and finally, to Doc Boddy’s relief, he was transferred to Ikeja on the mainland, about ten miles away. A sign taped to the entrance of the ER announced in large type: GUNS ARE NOT ALLOWED.
A sign on the emergency room door at Lagos Island General Hospital
Something like 60 percent of admissions involved road accidents, the majority of them involving okadas. Two men came in around midnight, one a driver (who got the worst of it) and the other his passenger. Apparently, a car began backing up as the okada came up behind him. The driver of the okada then lost control and they collided. The driver was a big, muscular man, parked in the hallway on a gurney, with a badly cut-up arm (again, the gauze was soaking through with blood), abrasions to his neck and jaw and to his head behind the ear, and, said Doc Boddy, a blunt chest injury. His passenger, inside a room nearby, had a head injury. Both men would be X-rayed.
“I don’t know whose fault this was. But some of the okada drivers start drinking in the morning. Nobody wears a helmet. Most have no training at all.” It was also not a crime to drive drunk.
The next patient to come in, around three a.m., was also involved in an okada accident. A fifty-something woman had been crossing the street when a speeding okada hit her—and then sped on. Doc Boddy explained to me that her right tibia and fibula were both broken. She had a very large gash on her shin, and had lost a lot of blood. Hospital staff had already given her a pint of blood, and Doc Boddy said she might get up to three more. I made the mistake of watching as a nurse arrived to change the bandage: it was a terrible wound, and the woman was in a lot of pain.
“I don’t think she’ll survive,” Doc Boddy said to me in a low voice as we left. “She’s lost so much blood.”
We got cups of tea, and I asked about the paucity of ambulance calls (the supposed ambulance dispatcher remained sound asleep on the couch). The phone had not rung all night, and this in a city of 14 million people! Doc Boddy explained that communications workers had been on strike for three days, and one of the casualties was the emergency call service—it wasn’t working.
He continued to speak candidly. The bottom line, said Doc Boddy, was that few people would think to call an ambulance. “White men think to pick up the phone,” he said. “The black man just brings the wounded in himself.” But why, I asked, when the service was there—and free? Well, he said, it was so new that most people didn’t know about it. Uncertainty over whether an ambulance would respond at night didn’t help matters. In addition, most people didn’t have extra minutes on their mobile phones—emergency calls weren’t free. Many, in fact, didn’t have phones at all
.
In my mind, when I arrived in Nigeria, a delayed ambulance was one of life’s catastrophes: medical help tragically forestalled, with needless death the possible result. But now the picture for me was changing. Ambulance service was an aspect of Western modernity that perhaps didn’t fit this new kind of city. With enough money you could bring in an idea like that, just as you could build a skyscraper, but that didn’t mean it would become an organic part of local life. Maybe non-mobile clinics made more sense. Lagos barely even had a fire department; I’d seen an abandoned firehouse off the freeway, and been told there were fewer than a dozen trucks for the entire city. These emergency services didn’t function as coherent system. Rather, they were latent possibilities, ideas that were merely being tried.
In the ambulance parking lot at Ikeja, I’d seen a vehicle that was different from the others and seldom used. The ambulance was a gift from Cook County emergency services, in Chicago. “It’s always broken,” explained Moshood Kazeem, the administrator at Ikeja. “You see, it needs air conditioning, because in the back there are no windows that open. But it’s expensive to fix, and we can’t get the parts.” The secondhand ambulance, a gesture of goodwill, had become something of an albatross to LASAMBUS. It was useless and a money sink, and it possibly made the Nigerians feel inept.
People typically arrived at Nigerian emergency rooms using other means of transportation. “Actually, it is usually a danfo or taxi,” said Doc Boddy. Even without an ambulance, “people will find a way.” He meant a path, a route, a means of arrival, a road.
One of the nurses at Point 5, observing the knot of policemen who hung around the ramp nearby, had commented: “As we say here, the fear of LASTMA is the beginning of wisdom.” I wondered about the person at the top of the traffic police bureaucracy, wondered if there was a glimmer of method behind the madness. Could he be the most corrupt of all? I had the idea that interviewing Lagos’s top cop would be tantamount to encountering Kurtz, way up the tropical river in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. And who wouldn’t want to do that?
The “river” in this case was the Apapa-Oworonshoki Expressway, and the chief, Young Arebamen, was not hard to find. His office sits atop a four-story walk-up building just down the highway from Point 5. The corridors are on the building’s exterior, out of the range of air conditioning, as is the reception area outside his office, where two uniformed officers sit at desks and another, wearing a gun, stands guard. A dozen citizens, men and women, had arrived before me. They sat on hard benches waiting for an audience with the chief.
A local reporter had given me the chief’s cell phone number and I’d made an appointment with him directly, so I got to jump the line. Arebamen was a fit man in his late forties, wearing not a uniform but dark slacks and a cream-colored button-down shirt. He stood up from behind his desk and reached over it to shake my hand. He wanted me to see him in action before the questions began, so after ushering me to a black leather couch, he called in two citizens from the queue. The first was a gray-haired man, well-dressed and with a folder in his hand. He asked the chief to reduce the fine levied against his driver (25,000 naira, or US$212), which had to be paid before the car would be released; his driver had been caught going the wrong way down a one-way street.
The chief, speaking in English (perhaps for my benefit), reminded the man that his driver had committed a serious crime, and that the usual punishment—mandatory psychiatric evaluation that could last several days—had somehow been spared the driver. He was sorry, but there could be no further reduction in penalties.
Next up was a woman who had left her car on a bridge while she did some shopping. The car wasn’t confiscated, but she had received a 10,000-naira (US$85) ticket.
The chief probed her circumstances and, seemingly impressed by her contrition, reduced the fine to 1,000 naira. He pointed toward the door, but the supplicant persisted, asking him to erase the fine altogether. At this Arebamen became strict and dismissive, pressing a button under his desk. A guard opened the door, she was shown out, and the theater was over. It was my turn.
Arebamen acknowledged that there was corruption. He blamed it on lack of training, a culture he’d had to inherit (he came from the Nigeria Police Force, where I later learned that he had a reputation for honesty), and low pay. A higher budget would increase professionalism. As a symbol of his want, he asked me to look around the office. “Do you see any screens with traffic conditions? Don’t you think that would make sense, in a city of 14 million people?” I agreed but found myself riveted by a set of photos behind him.
Photographs of traffic officers injured by motorists paper the wall behind the desk of Young Arebamen, head of the LASTMA police in Lagos.
I don’t know how I hadn’t noticed: the glossy photos were practically a wallpaper, so many of them covering the wall behind his desk. Each one showed an officer who had been attacked. They had swollen eyes, split lips, bloody noses; all of them had been beaten by drivers. “It’s a very dangerous job; there are many motorists who are not law-abiding.”
I’d had a photo like that taken of me at Sing Sing after I was spit on and punched in the head by an inmate. But I didn’t especially sympathize with these officers. I’d seen LASTMA men in action and knew that nine out of ten of them had probably provoked their attacks.
“You know that some of them deserved it,” I said.
Arebamen sharply differed. “Nobody deserves this,” he countered, gesturing angrily at his men. “There would be little order at all without them.” If you looked at it that way, he was probably right.
I was thinking about that on the day of my final interview, with Ayobami Omiyale, the chief of another group of highway cops, the Lagos State Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC). He had invited me to interview him at home, and I was being driven in a taxi to the Alakuko district, near the city’s northwestern edge. Our conversation would focus largely on the mentality of Lagosian drivers, particularly what Omiyale called the Road Accident Immunity Delusion Syndrome, which was pretty self-explanatory, but would touch as well on fatalism and the idea of the road as harboring evil. Many Nigerians, said Omiyale, saw the hand of God in any accident involving themselves. The Yoruba concepts aiyé and òtá were part of this; òtá were one’s personal or spiritual enemies and aiyé, as explained by Damola Osinulu and other scholars, was a spirit world that could work against the individual, and “against whose strategies, tactics must be deployed.” It reminded me of Nigerian novelist Ben Okri’s idea of the road as a creature with a malevolent, consumptive power of its own (in The Famished Road).
I particularly remembered this story of Omiyale’s: Many drivers, he told me, carry a protective talisman. One driver in a fatal crash—the driver who lived—carried a shell on a string in his pocket. As he reached for his wallet, to show identification to Omiyale, he saw that the charm had broken and threw it away into the weeds.
“You see,” the chief explained to me, “it was his good-luck charm. And because he was still alive, he gave credit to the charm. But obviously it had broken in the effort to save him, and had no power left.”
This literal belief in charms was a bit different from my own, though perhaps not entirely—I had been carrying an umber-colored, charmingly twisted piece of a stick in my daypack on all these trips—something my wife had picked up on a hike and given to me, declaring offhandedly that it was good luck. Which I supposed it had been, and would be—until it wasn’t anymore.
As was commonly the case, the electricity was out as my taxi took me to Omiyale’s, and therefore so were the traffic lights. Each major intersection was thus an exercise in brinksmanship, in closely following any car that seemed to have momentum, because the idea of alternating was lost in the volume and lack of well-defined lanes. My driver had nerves of steel, and had passed through several chaotic junctions when we came to one that looked relatively uncrowded. It looked as though we’d be able to creep through without even stopping when the lights came back on and, seemingly
within a space of two or three seconds, a policeman stepped into the traffic in front of us, blowing his whistle and pointing accusingly at my cab. He directed us to the side of the road where there were several others in uniform, told the driver to put the car in Park—and then reached in and took the keys! The driver prepared to get out to discuss the matter. On his way, he reached above the visor and pulled out a 1,000-naira ($8.50) note. That happened to equal the agreed-upon fare to the house of Omiyale.
“It wasn’t your fault!” I said. “You couldn’t have known the light would come on at that second. Don’t pay him!”
The driver nodded and shrugged. “He’s got the keys,” he said.
It was all over but the arguing. The driver hemmed a bit, but I could see his heart wasn’t really in it. The money landed in the policeman’s palm. Soon the keys were back in the driver’s.
A different kind of stress lay ahead. The road we were on became a highway, which meant only that it was divided, with maybe twenty feet of dirt separating the two directions. The vehicles in our direction slowed to a crawl. A vestigial median divider disappeared and, as traffic jammed up, cars going our direction, seeking incremental advantage, left the pavement and drove onto the median, filling it up. In other words, our side of the road literally expanded, becoming maybe six or seven vehicles wide. The median was slanted and rutted but soon we were on it, too, inching ahead, looking for an opening, however small. Spaces too tight for a car were soon occupied by motorcycles. These buzzed everywhere, many with customized narrow handlebars to let them squeeze through narrow spaces.