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Ember

As  the year’s fires burn to embers

Calendars draw to the months of ember.

Chaos stalks the days that fall,

In the ambush of all hallows and the year’s pall.

Tis the season for terror and mayhem,

Tis the time for murder by young men.

Lie in bed till morning.

For when gunshots not tales greet the moon,

Hark the forerunners of mourning.

The ones you seek do not come.

Who will dress them in myrrh,

And bring their widows gold?

Who will rain them with tears,

And see that their young grow old?

The ones you seek judge their lives too weighty for you,

So go home another way,

Young men seek to rob you.

Take another way.

The young men lie in wait for you.

Chibundu Onuzo (c) 2012

I See Lagos

I saw my first dead body in Lagos. I think I was 6. It was a man. If he had been alive, people would probably have called him a mad man. He had dreadlocks, matted and reddish brown from the sun. He was dressed in a long, grey, shirt rag. His body was beginning to swell on the side of the road. His mouth was open; a white paste spilled out of his lips.

We were on the way to school. My car zoomed past the sight, barely slowing down. I asked the driver what happened? He said the man had probably been run over while trying to cross the express at night. It was the military that had done it. He was certain. I could believe it.I always saw the soldiers zooming at fatal speeds in their black vans. If you got in their way, they could come down and flog you with their whips. Or if it was night and they were drunk, they would just run you over. I could imagine that they had not bothered to stop when they saw the man they had hit was just a mad man.

That was the Lagos I saw when I was growing up. Now Babatunde Raji Fashola (Senior Advocate of Nigeria) and Governor of the state I call home, is asking us to see a new Lagos. Like a pastor in church, he is asking us to speak what we want to see. O ye of little faith, speak what you want to see. The voice in the first clip says, "I see a Lagos where I can wake up by 7am after a good night's rest. Get to my train station by 7.30am, travel in comfort enjoying the beautiful scenery."

Like Sarah, I laughed when I heard what the man in this clip was seeing. The thought of someone in Lagos who lives on the mainland waking up at 7am and being on time for work seemed so preposterous that all I could do was laugh. O me of little faith. I had sat too long in third mainland bridge traffic to believe. Yet I am not so cynical that I cannot join my fellow Lagosians in this act of seeing a new Lagos. So here are the things I see in Lagos in the next few years. It may be a dream but the dreamers are often the most realistic of us all.

• I see a Lagos where there are no children swilling dirty soapy water over my car windscreen because they are all in school and the facilities provided for them there are world class.

• I see a Lagos where former agberos have acquired skills and gained employment . They are now pillars of their community, stressing the importance of education.

• I see a Lagos where affordable housing is made available for the millions living in shanty town conditions.

• I see a Lagos where graduates come out of university and face reasonable competition when looking for work.

That's the Lagos I see.

To find out more about the I see Lagos project, click here.

Sirens

Everyone is a big man in Lagos. Even those you look down on are big men in waiting so be careful how you speak to them. One day, you might be insulting them, the next, they are driving past you in their convoy and splashing rain water on your new clothes. That's how it is in Lagos. Here today, there the next. I love the social mobility of this place. I hate that the most popular way to show that you have arrived is with a siren convoy.

You see, a big man cannot wait in traffic like the rest of us. Even when the most pressing matter on his plate is to go home and cut his finger nails, he still cannot wait in traffic like the rest of us. Come on, can't you see how demeaning that is. A whole big man, sit in his air conditioned car and actually wait to get somewhere. No. Abomination. Switch on that siren now! And it's funny, the Nigerian psyche has been so brutalised by decades of military rule that no-one questions what right this big man has to turn on his siren and force a way through traffic. It's amazing. Once people hear the siren, almost as if by magic, a way begins to be made in the most gridlocked traffic. It is like watching a modern parting of the Red Sea.

Last week, I was sitting on third mainland bridge when one of these big men decided to switch on his siren. The driver taking us home is a rather strong headed individual and he refused to stop or clear to the side for them to pass. That is, until the armed guards in the big man's convoy got out of their vans and began to bang people's cars, telling them to stop and move to the side. Of course the driver stopped after that. Who wan die? As the convoy drove past, I saw the number plate of the main vehicle. It said ADMIRAL 1. If I had a stone on me, I would have hurled it at that car and probably been arrested for attempted murder, like the unfortunate hawker who threw a sachet of Pure Water at a governor's convoy. Thankfully, there was no stone and so I am not typing this from Kiri Kiri maximum security.

As the convoy passed, the driver said, "They didn't born us properly. That's why we must sit in traffic." It's true. We were the one's that were born with one head while they were born with two. That's why a big man cannot queue in this country anymore. For goodness sakes, where are the dividends of democracy, those thieving politicians are always talking about. You mean after a dozen years of having the vote, I still have to clear road because an Admiral is passing? Are we at war with anybody? Is he rushing to command a fleet? If not, he'd better sit in traffic like the rest of us.

The Governor of Lagos State, Babatunde Raji Fashola, is famously known for not using a siren when he moves about Lagos. As I have heard him say in an interview, "Sirens are for emergencies. Using one when I move around implies that we are constantly in a state of emergency in Lagos. Which we are not." Unfortunately, B.R.F is leading by example and we all know how famously bad Nigerian leaders are at following good examples. It's about time someone started legislating against this big man syndrome that expresses itself in the unnecessary use of sirens.

I know out of all the problems that face Nigeria, you may think that sirens are the most insignificant but I beg to differ. They are the most visible sign of the culture of impunity that exists among our big men and leaders. A culture that says I am not subject to the same laws as everybody. That's why they steal, that's why they kill, that's why they inflate contract prices. When sirens start getting silenced, other illegal practices may soon follow the same fate.

From the Passenger Seat

In my childhood, most of what I saw of ugly Lagos (the one plastered over the international media despite middle class protest) I saw from the passenger seat of my father's old, square, blue Mercedes. We never took public transport. We rarely walked not even when our school was fifteen minutes away. Public Transport in Lagos can be a dangerous thing, walking on the road is arguably even more dangerous, so everywhere we went, we went in the old, square, blue Mercedes.

We travelled Lagos in that car and on our travels, I couldn't help seeing ugly Lagos because you see, the more you travel around Lagos, the more you realise that quite a large chunk of Lagos is ugly Lagos. The houses with gaping tooth windows, the gutters swilling into the street, the holes that stretch from left to right side of the road: they are everywhere.

"Show them Lekki!" the insulters of the BBC's 'anti-Nigerian' documentaries cry, "show them VGC! Show them the nice areas that have good roads and big houses and milk and honey not mud and slime flowing through their streets. Show them!"

I know Lekki; I know VGC,;I know old Ikoyi and it is true, they are beautiful places. But before I can reach Ikoyi and taste its bourgeois pleasures, I must first pass Isaleko and its slum housing. Before my shoes stride across the painstakingly cobbled streets of VGC, I must glide past the villagers of Osapa and their electricity free, water free, noise plenty shacks.

Ugly Lagos is everywhere even right in the heart of bourgeois Lagos, right in the centre of Ikoyi herself.

And so I saw ugly Lagos in the passenger seat of my father's old, square, blue Merc as I drove from one middle class play ground to another. I rarely stopped to get down and see except when visiting a relative of mine who lived in ugly Lagos.

She lived there by accident (if such a thing is possible). Her house had once been on prime property, belonging to respectable, pristine, Lagos society but slowly, without anyone noticing, not even her, ugly Lagos, crept, and crept, and crept closer until one day, she woke up in the middle of a slum.

This relative of mine has moved now -the neighbours were giving her headache- and she is once more firmly ensconced in good looking Lagos. The old, square, blue Merc is gone now. It died of old age. Still the passenger seat remains, albeit in another vehicle and still, I see ugly Lagos from its comfort.

Maybe I should start thinking more about how to clean up ugly Lagos or one day I will wake up in the middle of ugly Lagos and there will be nowhere to move to.

Rich Guilt

Growing up in Nigeria, I did not know there was anything wrong with it. My parents were comfortable, I went to a nice primary school, nice secondary school and though I was neither naive or stupid enough to think everyone lived like me, I never dwelt on these others. I knew they were there, you only had to drive through Lagos to see them, but I did not realise how minor my minority was.

It was only after I journeyed over the seas that I realised there was something wrong with my country. Sometimes the things in front of your face are the hardest to see. Poverty was so close that my vision blurred when I looked at it, my mind drifted when I encountered it but from a 6,000 kilometre remove, I could suddenly see Poverty with stark clarity.

It is strange, the things my subconscious has kept intact, things that made no impression at the time. Listless jobless men on slum balconies, roads paved with mud and dotted with tar, six year olds hefting trays of groundnut on their heads - and the more I remember these things, the more a feeling like guilt begins to grow.

Thinking rationally, it is clear that if blame were to be apportioned for the failures of Nigeria, my name would not be near the top. After all, I am not a politician, neither is my father; I have never stolen money meant for education, roads, electricity, transport, water, healthcare, security and neither has my father nor his father before him.

Yet though dismissal of my rich guilt is the only rational thing to do, rationality can be over rated. The fact, that I was born well above the poverty line, the fact that the probability of this happening is so minute it is miraculous, the fact that the government is letting the country go to ruin and the middle classes are content to have their private schools, private generators, private estates, private bore holes, private hospitals, all these facts make me very uncomfortable.

It occured to me one day that this thing that I call rich guilt is not that different from the phenomenom called 'white guilt.' According to Wikipedia:

'White guilt refers to the concept of individual or collective guilt often said to be felt by some white people for the racist treatment of people of color by whites both historically and presently.'

According to me:

'Rich guilt is the invidual or collective guilt some (comparatively) rich people feel for the rubbish treatment of the poor both historically and presently.'

Perhaps rich guilt is one of the key factors that will change Nigeria. It's driven some to paint Mushin, start free schools, speak out against the government, stand for government and dig boreholes in their villages. Rich guilt has developped a social consciousness in Nigeria and as long as it spurs to action and not hot air, it will continue to develop more.

Naija oni baje!

Writing About Lagos

After living in England for five years, the worst things about Lagos have become my favourite: the smell, the heat, the rancidity, the traffic. To digress, I love sitting in Lagos traffic now. Driving in other countries is sterile in comparison. You leave your house, you enter your car, you get to your destination. In Lagos it's more like, you leave your house, you enter your car, you buy MTN credit, you stop okada to ask for directions, you buy roasted corn, you pass two men fighting in front of their rumpled cars, you get stopped by traffic police for loading credit while driving, you plead temporary insanity with one thousand Naira, you see the fight has grown to ten men wey the matter no concern, you buy Lucozade boost, you get to your destination.

When I left Lagos five years ago, it was many things but never overwhelming. Lagos was Lagos, full stop. While editing, my agent pointed out that I had too few descriptions. Readers liked the atmospheric stuff, they wanted to taste a place, smell it, feel the dust in the back of their throat, all that jazz. My response was wonder. What kind of person would want to smell Lagos, or taste it, or have harmattan crawling in their throat?

I started writing descriptive passages that same night and this was when Lagos began to overwhelm. You see something clearly until you try to hold it. What does Lagos really smell like? It is smelly, we know but what does smelly smell like? Bad but bad is not good enough, too vague, what are the shades of smelly, the ingredients that make you drive past and hold your face? I don't know. I've written about the smell in Lagos, the traffic, the reflecting heat that bounces off walls but I still don't know. I've written about touts and policemen and the signs chalked on empty walls and the nice grass in Ikoyi and broken flats in slums and the mud in the markets but I still don't know.

Hopefully those of you that know Lagos will recognise it in what I've written. There was a five year remove so pardon the holes. For those of you that don't know Lagos, if my Lagos is fantasy, then hopefully it will be a readable, likeable fantasy.

Eko oni baje!