Self-Devpt. Nuggets™

From 12 noon to 2.30 p.m yesterday, I had a meeting in Cotonou with a client. Then right after, I took off for Lagos. It’s now 1.51a.m, today 7th June 2014, and I’m typing this from my home in Lagos, Nigeria. A Lagos cab I hired from Mile 2, just dropped me off over ten (10) hours after I left Cotonou’s Seme border!

In other words, it’s taken me almost half a day to complete a journey that normally takes 2 to 3 hours!

Why? Because of some crazily inexplicably terribly massive traffic holdup along the Mile 2 axis!

Thousands of Man hours Wasted Weekly…

The taxi driver that drove us (me and 3 other passengers) from Seme border to Mile 2, explained that people who work at Cotonou and other border towns often return to Lagos, for the weekend, on Friday.

However, he also noted that like me, he’d only heard about how bad the traffic jams often got on such days, but had never experienced it until today.

If other Nigerians on the road felt they deserved a better way to spend their Friday evening, they certainly did not show it.

While we kept lamenting how bad it was that we had to lose so much time sitting and waiting for traffic to move inch by inch, others seemed to even thrive in all the chaos.

And believe me, there was massive C-H-A-O-S!

Nigerians are not known to be patient people. At the slightest sign of a delay with regard to anything they want, they promptly begin exploring alternative ways to achieve their goal.

And that’s not generally a bad thing.

Only that in the case of Nigerians, they often tend not to have any qualms about how they go about it. Both good and not so good methods appeal equally to them. So they begin driving against traffic, creating illegal lanes, and trying to all get in front at the same time.

Until everyone gets stuck, and there’s a jam.

Then untangling themselves becomes a problem. The usual flinging of insults at one another is stepped up to a whole new level. More creative use of adjectives and expletives are employed.

What made it all the more interesting was that we never set eyes on ANY of the "famous" Lagos State Traffic Management Authority (LASTMA) officers.

Not even one of them. Or maybe they got tired of the mess and left before we arrived.

I asked the driver why they were not around.

He replied that the LASTMA guys have only one job they recognize as theirs to do. And it has little to do with managing traffic. Instead what interests them is the opportunity to make money by "catching" traffic offenders, towing people’s vehicles and other opportunistic stuff of that kind.

I believe this is one of the reasons Nigeria and Nigerians are such a strange lot.

For me, this experience is one that I am determined NEVER to have again in my life.

Never again will I make the mistake of traveling after 2p.m on Friday to Lagos. Never, ever again will I travel to Lagos without first checking to ascertain the state of traffic along the roads on the Nigerian end.

And if you’re smart, you won’t either. Take it from me, sitting in a taxi for 10 hours can be a most unpleasant and frustrating experience. No one deserves to experience such depravation. It;s a pity the relevant authorities have yet to take concrete steps to eliminate this problem.

Yet it’s causing so much socioeconomic damage. Such a pity.

UPDATE(@0846): I forgot to mention that apart from the extreme form of travel related stress, we also had to contend with serious threats to our physical and financial well being.

Here’s the verbatim text of a phone text message I sent out this morning, that should give you an idea of what we had to contend with:

Can you believe I arrived Mile 2 at 12.30a.m? Crazy (traffic) holdup since 4p.m. It was terrible! Touts were robbing people in dark areas. And we got warnings of (armed robber) ambushes on certain routes. Had to hire Lagos cab N3k to get home. Slept at 3.30 after publishing my website article. Need rest. Coming here so stressful!

.

And if you’re wondering what happpened to the Police…

Well, that was the exact same question we asked ourselves, each time we saw colourfully decorated – but unmanned -bikes with “POLICE” stickers, parked around the rowdy Mile 2 park area!!!