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Teachers' Reward

By Ehichoya Ekozilen   (Nigeria)

 

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Lagos – February 2004

“Teachers’ reward is in heaven.” Whatever that old barroom saying means, if it means anything at all, you often hear it around. But since I commenced the present round of job search it has taken on some meaning.
The other Tuesday - the day China confirmed that it also had avian flu - I had gone to the state library to look up the day’s edition of The Guardian. Tuesday’s Guardian carries the job vacancies and anyone looking for a job in Lagos does well not to miss it. If you cannot afford to buy a copy, you go to the public library.
Now this library has a rather curious policy as to giving out their newspapers. Other libraries I have visited give you the papers once they get them, but not the Herbert Macaulay Library. If you go to the library for the first time, here is what will happen.
As you are entering the library, you will see, to your left, a wooden cabinet with bags on it. As you approach it to keep your bag, the librarian will tell you to come over to where she is. If you put down your bag and make to go toward her, she will tell you to come along with the bag. When you get to her counter, you will see an open long notebook with columns for your name, address, signature, time of arrival, time of departure, and bag number. After you have filled out the register, she will give you two pieces of paper with the same number written on them. She will tell you to put one in your bag and the other in your pocket. As I made to go away, she told me that I had not entered the bag number into the register. I then entered the number written on the tags I was given into the appropriate column. And after returning your bag to the cabinet you will tell her you want to read the day’s The Guardian, satisfied in your mind that as you are early – it had just gone past eight – no one would be in possession of it. Indeed, no one would have collected it, but what a surprise you get when you are told that the newspapers are not given out until 12 noon. You find this strange. You ask why. But too many of these “civil servants” do not like questions. The way they decide to run their place, you just accept it that way. She tells you that is how they do it.
What should I do for the next three and half hours? I have no other place planned for the morning and it will cost some extra money to go home and come back. I sign the “Time Out” column, retrieve my bag, return the tags, and head for a cybercafé in Sabo, which is a few minutes’ walk away. I have no mail. I quickly log out to save money and decide to go see someone I know whose office is nearby, but he is not there. By now it is around 9.30. I decide to return to the library. I go through the ritual of filling registers, collecting tags and documenting my handbag once again and go to find a seat in the newspaper and magazine section. The latest book in this library was probably written by ibn Batuta. Do not look for any current magazines on the rack either. So I pick up some old ones, settle down somewhere and begin to read. There are “first ladies” doing funny things with state funds, a governor dropping the “Dr” title from his name to avoid being accused, like a fellow party man of his, of something with a name, and people fazed by another all-Williams final at Wimbledon.
By 12, there are up to four people waiting to go through the paper besides me. I am asked to deposit my identity card before collecting it. I have no valid ID card since I am not involved with any organisation and do not have an international passport or a driving licence. After some argument, the librarian accepts an outdated school library card. I am told I have only 15 minutes to use the paper. The paper has 95 pages.
I cover it in the decreed time, sure I missed some of the ads in my haste. But my haste is not such that I do not read a certain ad captioned, “Teachers’ Reward Now in America”. It says someone is recruiting teachers to go fill some vacancies in America. I pay scant attention to it, as I have not the mind, just now, to contemplate crossing Okun, the jeering, adamantine ocean that I have heard about since the time, in the village, upcountry, that I was still mastering one, okpa; two, eva.
But maybe you are wondering who I am. Let me tell you – you see, I have nothing to hide. I am a man. I live in Lagos. I am looking for a job. But to be sure, this is less a story of three – unemployment, Lagos, and me – than a personal reflection scribbled for its own sake.
I am primarily on the lookout for the job of a secretary or typist, for which, to begin with, I am of the wrong gender. Of course, with the contraction of the socio-economic space, one has to think of many things one can do. You may therefore think I am not resourceful. Why not simply go into private business? You cannot find the capital. Many banks will not give you loan because you are small and so have no connections or the ability to cut back. For honest bank managers that may be willing to give you, you have no collaterals and all. If you get the loan, the interest rate is well above 30%. If you go ahead and take it, the electricity company, managed and murdered by the morally moribund guardians of power in high places will have other plans for you. Knowing that poor power supply - here it is called “epileptic power supply” – will run you out of business, you may have to invest up to 50% of starting capital on what is called a “gen-set”, that is your own power supply. Then of course there is the problem of space. To get accommodation in Lagos, residential or business premises, you make a down payment of 3, 4 or 5 years rent. It is in very rare cases that you get 2 years.
If you cannot conquer this labyrinth of protean huddles, you do the right thing - begin looking in the Tuesday’s Guardian and writing applications so you may find any job and have something to keep you going till some deus ex machina comes along. Especially when you, for reasons of health, cannot go manual - like mining, or long distance truck driving. Not that those have a high rating for being lucrative or you could just walk off the street and pick them up though.
*
The following Tuesday - the day an anti-terrorism conference commenced in the Indonesian island of Bali - I am back in the library. As is becoming the practice, the librarian vouchsafes me 15 minutes. I pull a face to tell him there ought to be more time. For the next 30 minutes, I have the paper to myself. I look in his direction every now and then – I think the man has forgotten he has someone on a leash. On a particular page there are many ads, many of them in very small print. There is one headed “Very Urgent”. It lists almost every conceivable job, from “factory workers” to “hotel administrators”. I once answered that sort of ad and it turned out to be very successful. So successful it was for the advertisers that when it was over, they were five hundred naira richer.
I saw the ad in a Tuesday’s Guardian and went to answer it right away, considering that it sounded so promising and had an overriding note of urgency about it. The outfit is located near Oshodi, the notoriously rowdy and grimy bus terminus. When I arrived at the premises of PSS Limited, there were several other people waiting, some were leaving, some were coming in - the place was a Mecca of sorts. The young man who attended to me and my fellow foragers was good-looking, soft spoken and debonair. Besides his physical charm, he soon demonstrated such gift of the gab I believe he can talk the Swiss into declaring kola-nuts with alligator pepper a national delicacy. And I am no white man, much less a conservative one, and he was not selling West African stimulants. I was a Lagos bloke after a job, and burrowing in every anthill, rummaging in every marketplace, and exploring every treetop for it; and he was a job placer with the scruples of a piranha. He gave me a prospectus to study. It indicated that the firm had several places lined up where I could be sent to work. That when I was sent to a place, I could always come back for reposting if I did not like it there. After walking the streets of this city for months for a job that has remained a tantalising mirage, I could simply pick one today! It was too good to be true. What was in it for them? Well, not much, the situation considered. It said if you were ordinary level, you were required to pay three hundred naira; for a university or polytechnic graduate, five hundred naira; and for a post-graduate person, one thousand naira. Then when you get the job, half of your first month’s salary would come to the outfit. Given a good job, I would give that, and with all my love too!
When it got to my turn to be attended to by the spruce chap, he went straight to the heart of the matter. The first thing he had me realise, in case I did not know, was that considering my record, mine was going to be as easy as plucking a cherry. Did I not know that every company in Lagos had been searching for someone like me? I forked out three hundred naira from my pocket to pay and be sent to my company to be interviewed right away. But the wise and upright young man would not suffer me denigrate myself in such a manner. Why, having studied my curriculum vitae, he was persuaded that I was in the category of N500. Now I am not a university graduate. I am what you call a university “dropout”. That of course is not written on my CV. What he anchored his argument on was the word “Diploma” which appeared somewhere in the second page of the document. Around here “diploma” is not used to describe the certificate attained after secondary education. You get them from polytechnics, monotechnics and allied colleges. This diploma of mine was issued me by a “roadside” computer college some years ago. Why was I bringing myself down? the young man expostulated. Did I not want to get a job that became of my status?
Of course, something warned me, and I should have heeded, that something was not right with this caper; that this guy probably came straight from Blarney Castle. Why? Because of the very reason that brought me to this place. I am having problems finding a job because of long established economic principles. The nation’s economy is passing through one of those phases economies do fall into, draining hope, raising hopelessness, entrenching human suffering and infrastructural rot, with far-reaching implications for personal survival, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For there is at worst a contraction of the economic space, at best, a stagnation, or some insignificant growth.
It is all largely occasioned by a seizure of the marketplace by a select few along with their ensemble of clients and agents. Moneys stolen from state tills are, as a rule, not ploughed back into the economy. They vamoose. And because the bulk of capital is in the hands of this group, locked up with the self-righteous bankers of Switzerland and Europe, entrepreneurial dreams founder, miscarry, and die. “They” – the abracadabra intellectuals, royal practitioners, political fornicators, social idolaters, rogue nationalists, religious contractors, and election magicians – also control a disproportionate chunk of land and space. And there is a glut in the supply of labour. While clever geriatrics take the dye to their hair, and the scalpel to their years, to stay on at their sinecure jobs till death do them part. And many people are voting with their feet. Even with unemployment this is no cheering news. No; for the best of the best, who should be in positions to make things happen and create the jobs are jumping on Brain Drain Train. Add to these negations of the forces and factors of production a central bank’s voodoo management of the national currency and foreign exchange; hyperinflation; commercial banks which exist only to serve themselves; a middleclass whose gluttonous craving for anything foreign will soon see them importing ice from Iceland and greens from Greenland; bureaucrats and collaborationists who gleefully pull the strands off the scaffolding; the frightening lifting of “subsidies” as prescribed by some international regulators and local deregulationists; and some satanic, unfathomable, colossal foreign debts, which see a good chunk of communal income off to the store of the tribe of gurus who live and play some arcane chess beyond Okun – you need to see the figures and how they come about to realise I am not suffering from a narcotic rush of metaphors – and what the computer of economics totals and garbage out for you is festering unemployment. It is like there is a collapse of the social contract.
There are probably more job seekers in Lagos than there are Indians in Mumbai. That apocalyptic reality recently gained saliency when the National Assembly in Abuja declared about 400 vacancies. It got 30,000 applications! When I saw the number in the papers, it occurred to me to apply for a job reading CVs. Of course, I did not. These civil service jobs are secured almost entirely by patronage and back scratching.
So how could these Oshodiside people, on top of all these, have jobs for everyone who dropped by their property? But I am not of the city. It would seem I believe what I am told. I wanted a job which became of my status so I shelled out five hundred. I was instantly “posted” to a place at Soji Adepegba Close, which is near Ikeja Computer Village.
When I arrived there I found that it was a “business centre” - a place where people pay to have their documents typed and make phone calls. This one also rendered Internet services. Now I am not hot for business centres. But I was prepared to accept anything for temporary purposes. When I showed the proprietor my “introduction letter”, she murmured that she did not request for someone from these people, had never heard of them. She asked me to sit down all the same and gave me an interview. My typing speed was awesome, she said, but I was poor at graphics. Well said, for I had no much experience in graphics since I had not worked much in an environment that used it. What would I like to be paid? What I mentioned was too much for her, she said. Maybe an office would pay that much, she told me, but not a business centre. She offered to pay me five thousand naira per month. Since I lived far from Ikeja, cost of transportation would have rendered this unprofitable.
I could not go back to PSS that day because the money I had left on me would barely take me home. That is one problem you usually face when you are looking for a job - money. Since you are not earning, you have to rely on your wits to wangle money somehow to support your hunting project. Money to spend on application letters which hardly get a reply.
I never went back to PSS because I could not afford to waste any money going to Oshodi, sure nothing was going to come out of it. Not after an acquaintance told me that what these “job agencies” do is to keep sending you to place after place, hoping you will get employed somewhere.
Anyway, all that happened the last time I was looking for a job. That is, before I got my last job, the one I just gave up. That is what has brought on the latest round of search. Why would anyone give up a job which is apparently “stable” in this sort of environment? My cousin would not understand why anyone would be so stupid, when he had no option. It is precisely because of that extant reality that many sole proprietors are suited ogres that would make Scylla, were he to come around, a beneficent bedfellow. They show you their fangs every minute, knowing you cannot afford to get angry and leave.
Well, I might as well tell you since we are on the issue of my job project.
The day I was interviewed by the boss for that job, he said he would pay fifteen thousand naira per month, which was what he agreed to with the consultant that recruited me for him. But during the interview, it occurred to him that this amount was too much, so he added that he would pay thirteen thousand naira for the first six months, which would amount to “probation” period. I knew this was blarney. It was a ploy to bring down the amount. Apapa was far from where I lived so transportation would still take a good proportion of this pay. But it would provide some food and pay the house rent. (Not necessarily in that order, for in Lagos you pay the house rent first so as to be in good terms with the landlord.) Fine, then. But the next day when I went back to see the boss with recommendation letters as arranged, he had a surprise for me. It was twelve thousand, five hundred naira, not thirteen thousand, that he said he would pay. No, it was thirteen, not twelve-five, that you said, sir. He repeated himself and put a look on his face that said, “You can always go out the door”. Of course, he won. Who liked walking the streets from morning till night everyday?
I was disappointed. Why the decision to nick off five hundred naira? I was later to learn that the man had something about five hundred naira. If you came to work late by a few minutes, he cut five hundred naira off your pay for the month. Never mind you put in 14 or 15 hours a day, if you include traffic time, which was something I particularly liked about the job. Forget about overtime pay. It does not exist here. If something got misplaced in the office, it was five hundred off your pay. If he “caught” you using the office phone to make personal calls, or thought you did so while he was out, he threatened to take five. I heard “I will deduct five hundred naira from your salary” everyday. I like to think I am a careful man, so on most of the occasions I heard that sentence it was actually directed at others. (Tony once wondered why I worked the way I did. I asked if he thought it was right for him to pray for another job if he was not putting in his best in the one he had. There was nothing he could say to that.) When I was given my appointment letter, there was a specified salary of twelve thousand five hundred, without any reference to any changes in six months, six years or any time period. When the lady from the consultant’s office called to ask how things went, I told her this and she said she would discuss it with oga. She did and another letter was issued with a clause stating vaguely that there would be some increase after six months.
Needless to say, this oga is easily one of the nastiest people I have met. To be sure, he was a brilliant lawyer. He was not a wicked man really. He was not arrogant. It is just that he was innately excommunicated where fellow feeling is concerned. He never set out to maltreat anyone. He just did what he liked, detachedly, and if someone felt hurt, it did not matter, he did not notice. He was an educated bully whose attitude towards his staff, including the male junior lawyers, was “you can always go, I will replace you. But I know you won’t go because there are no jobs out there.” A capitalist with more than a sliver of Calvinism, he was a patrician corporate enslaver who, were he white and present in America in 1861, would have fought alongside the Confederates to protect the South’s “way of life”. This one would not have risked his life though. He would have supported the war project with his money and sent in minnows to fight in his place.
After seven months I brought the issue of the agreed increase by way of a formal letter addressed to Oga. The good honourable solicitor of the Supreme Court of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, however, could not find the time to vouchsafe to honour me with any response. Several days after, while censuring me for something else, he asked if I thought it was longevity that would give me a raise. “Longevity”, that was the word he used. I found this very annoying but I kept my countenance from falling. I never uttered anything about a raise again.
My cousin would not accept that these are enough reasons to give up a stable job – that was the word he used, “stable”. I do not think they are. So we are of a mind on that. But when you had to drop out of the university, and are determined to go back and do your studies, you always work towards it. Besides, there are people that you have abandoned. People waiting for you that you fear going to visit because you do not have “something on hand”. And when under these circumstances, you have a job that pays far less than you need to pay your house rent and eat, you can only do it for sometime before you begin to ask yourself questions; since you wanted a job, not to be rich or comfortable, but to enable you make some advancement. Feelings of being stagnant can then begin to disquiet you and may even plunge you into depression as you realise that if you did nothing, in 10 years you would still be there, just the way you are. You may think I am “catastrophizing” but any sack then would inexorably lead you, at that old age, to hawking bread under the bridge in Oshodi; or shining shoes in Somalia; or, if you are criminally bent, peddling drugs to London; or even, doing time in Guatanamo. Or, when you are too weak to work to earn your daily living, you could end up like the old fellow I once read of who locked himself in an abandoned house and ate wood. It is the fear of these that pumps resolve and power into a Lagos bloke. Especially, if he is already 27, the June of his life.
So when I found a computer school where the schedule would give me time to scout around for a job or do something by the side, I took it up. While waiting for that month to end, the boss got a spurious excuse to deduct a couple of five hundreds, and that settled it, even though the decision to leave had been taken at the end of the previous month. The previous month he had brought on the final humiliation. He fired the kid who doubled as his cleaner and messenger, promised to pay me to do the job. He then refused to pay what he gave his word on. By this time I had spent nearly a year and a half on the job, during which I had got an eight percent salary increase, as against a fifty percent increase in house rent, seventy-five in transportation, and forty in rice. So all that time on the job, and thoughts of buying a Webster’s dictionary and a used computer had remained those - thoughts. Of course, my cousin cannot understand this stagnation phobia, and neither do I expect him to.
But then, you can agree with my cousin and avoid all this uncertainty by remaining where you are and moaning over why life keeps turning the bad side of its face to you like Janus, the Roman god. You can keep wondering why only few enjoy the abundant resources of the earth. You can keep pitying yourself and asking why, why, why. By this time next year, if something has not happened to you, you will still be there, asking, waiting and vegetating. Of course you can wait for government to come and help you. You can expect handouts from a Good Samaritan cousin or, even, the NGOs and the professional international do-gooders who exist to fight poverty and disease and do this by spending eighty-five percent of their budget on four-wheel drives, jumbo salaries, furniture, meetings at Sheraton, procuring drinking water for staff from London, air shuttles to New York and Geneva; and 15% on poor people. Or you can go get “help” from one of “them”, the big man who lives down the road.
Anyway, that decision has seen me out in the present cold, walking the streets in search of a job. Since giving up the job, I have taken a couple of bold steps towards the direction of starting something of my own, but I have not had any success. I have even made efforts to have some of my works, utility books or fiction, published without any success. Oh yes, I am also a wannabe writer. And I can tell you something: writing a book is quite often like a charged phenomenon that failed to go off, leaving you wondering if it was an explosive in the first place. The computer school job? I took it up teaching Typing and Shorthand. But the school has since folded up because there were too few students enrolling. To think of the enormous amount the MD was paying for the premises and to run the place. Just the sort of encouragement people need to go into business!
So my cousin has been proved right. Having left my job, I am left with nothing. I have failed in my efforts to start something of my own or to secure another job so far. But I am not regretting. The stability and order of a hospice hardly renders it more desirable than a rowdy post office. It is bad enough leaving your home by 6.30am and returning to it at 9, 10 or 11pm every weekday, putting in your best and being paid a starvation salary at the end of the month. It is unbearable knowing that what fraction of that salary you are going to get will depend on the venal whims of a capitalist. Therefore it is one relief to be out of that place. A situation of skipping meals to save money for applications and walking the streets to make something elusive happen is not an absolute evil.
It is not so much worse than the stability of a dead end job as Comfort Zone advocates like my cousin would suggest. For anyone who has got all the empowerment he needs in life – that is who was fortunate enough, like me, to have gone to school and is able to read and write – it all could be regarded as a challenge. You soon adjust to it as long as it does not become a vicious cycle and you take care to guide against falling into a whirlpool of despair or self pity. It is, you see, one of the greatest marvels of living that you always survive this kind of episode and once it is over it retires to the deepest recesses of your memory, unlikely to come out unless, and until, another similar challenging episode comes along. And it is worth all this effort; for when you try as much as this you get jobs many others with the same levels of qualification and connections can only dream of. I get them. Not spectacular, not the best, but better than many.
Anyway, back to the present.
I study the page with the plethora of ads. These days I can pick that kind of job agency out of a myriad ads, for on another occasion I had answered an “urgent” ad for “secretaries” and “apply in person with CV” at Bariga. Something warned me about this. Bariga is not located in the middle of Central Business District. Some would describe much of the place as a slum. There are no such jobs as advertised there. But in this job of job seeking, you grasp at straws. So I went to Bariga. The single-room affair, when I got there, was also packed like feeding time in a Dickensian workhouse. This time I did not pay. I told the gentleman who attended to me that I would come back; that I did not know it was an agency and so had not come with any money.
These days I simply avoid them - small space, tiny prints, too many disparate posts advertised, urgent, apply in person, and so on. I turn the page and get to a page with a wonderful ad for teachers in Secretarial Studies in a computer school somewhere at Alagbado which is in the suburbs of Lagos. It states that you must be able to teach Typing, Shorthand, Office Practice, Secretarial Duties and Business Communication. It is just my thing. But I have to decide whether I will go or not. Alagbado is quite far from where I live. The cost of transportation these days is in the sky. And since the price of petrol now goes up every other week, the pay would have to get prime consideration when accepting a job at a place that far. But why not check it out and see how it pays? After all a poorly paying job is better than none, at least that is the conventional wisdom. Besides, Alagbado is much closer than America where credible rumours have it that teachers’ reward is now hibernating.
While still trying to make up my mind, I go to meet Sunny, my neighbour whose knowledge of everything would, comparatively speaking, make Hermes the messenger look miserably uninformed. This man can give you the inside story of anyone in the neighbourhood and can tip you off on state secrets the vice president is unaware of. He has probably been living in Lagos since King Dosunmu signed the cession declaration with Queen Victoria’s consuls. I ask him how you get to Alagbado. “You want to go?” He invariably starts answering you with a question of his own. Yes, I want to go. Why not take the train, he suggests. Train! I have never entered a train in spite of having lived near the Railway Corporation these past two years. Why, everyone knows trains do not work around here, the corporation having derailed many years ago. They do, he tells me. There is a train that goes to Alagbado at about 9am. Whereas it will cost me over a hundred just to get there by bus, it will cost me one hundred and twenty to and fro by train. I thank him for the information.
*
I must digress at this point. And I think I should mention it because I am not a professional writer.
My application letters hardly get replied because (i) the advertisers get too many applications and the person reading them may read the first twenty out of the four thousand or so he has and make his selection, (iii) few are keen on a secretary who does not put on skirt and mascara, (iii) many companies advertise to keep the books straight, having already made their pick through patronage and backscratching. It is not that my own back is hairy. It is perhaps more to do with the length of my fingers.
But I never stop praying and hoping for the occasional one who will read my CV and desire a male secretary and not mind my not having a higher degree. I never stop praying and hoping that I might find such if God led me to the right place at the right time – not unlike the thief impaled beside Christ at Golgotha who got invited to paradise at the dying minute. What would you have me do? Stay away from the ads? Too many have done that. And many are the things they do.
They quickly adopt their own final solution, Nazi style. They find places in the twilight economy, where you will quickly find lucrative employment as long as you receive Satan into your heart and get used, soon enough, to the fact that mankind – Hegel’s “visible or apparent maker of history” – is not the most superior of the animals. They adopt as their pen, the gun, and as their prime currency of exchange, violence. Laying siege to buses and homes and pumping hot lead into people’s heads for sport after taking their money are minor operational routines to these sonofaguns. And thanks to them, what many left-leaners like to call “the middleclass’ fear of crime” has become an equal opportunity matter.
Others are cleverer and more polished, taking to the kaleidoscopic world of paper, numerical, and cyber games. The money count is incredibly high here. So, increasingly, is the body count, for many a victim has committed suicide, and quite a few perpetrators have got the vigilante slug. Fantastic wordsmiths, these grandkids of Azazel compose murderous missives that scud and shatter with speed, accuracy and crudeness unknown in cruise missiles. They kill dreams born forth with pains long before they were sired. And they blanche not in the least that they besmear their climes with disgust, their decent neighbours often treated like a lot to be put down. Consequently the compatriots have a hard fight on their hands against a reputation so battered by “some of us”. Poor in the morning, rich by noon, their suits are made in London and Milan, for they are members of the landed aristocracy. But the list of victims has got so long that the Rock dwellers have noticed and sent a czar. That one is spitting fire. Sacred cows are now in the circus. “Alleged” evildoers now hibernate behind bars, each one charged with something with a name. They are awaiting their day in the arena, while silk clad barristers scurry around, weaving ways and means to prove that since it all neither looks convincingly dark red nor noticeably thicker than water it is not blood; to explain away a billion naira as petty cash, to cloak a hundred million dollars in judicatory flimflammery; to reduce it all, as well as every corpse and teardrop to an arcane vernacular; every argument put forth to saw asunder; every contending contention to render down to a pulp of non sequiturs.
Yet others, particularly in the lower Niger, have from time to time taken to a brand of unliterary monologue that spurns conflicts, action and spectacle and gives a new name to nihilism – pressman and politician call this “youth restiveness”. Still others in the upper Niger, now and again gyrate, calling God and prophet. This brand is called “religious intolerance”. They devote to the sword – or more accurately, the machete, once described by an impetuous reporter as “the weapon of Africa’s poor” – every man, woman or child they see, these being “unbelievers”. Many, though, being believers who, just by happenstance, get it when the matureness of the jungle no longer permit the junkies to distinguish the colours, signs or symbols. There is zero social security remember?
Add zero social security to an owambe culture and you are probably nearer to visualising a system that shows zero regards for the feelings – and resentments – of the deprived. I am not sure even Ronnie Reagan of the “trickling down” school would not spurn these people. Why, everyday big men and big women host owambe , loud parties where “spraying” of devaluated naira notes is being replaced by blessed green dollar notes; where limousines dispel vociferated exhortations on and claims to modesty; parties which generate high returns, in terms of colourful covers and ink material for pulp magazines, superlative entertainment for the power cleavage denizens, royal practitioners, and other janissaries – brokers, preachers, drivers – vouchsafed with an invitation; and feast for the eye for the rabble of hungry, less equal animals, many of who seem to derive nearly enough pleasure from ogling clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels. A tiny minority of who, however, take it further. Some lend themselves as on hand utensils to the entrepreneurs of conflicts. Others join the twilight economy that they too may “arrive”. Did not Deng Zao Ping say “to be rich is glorious”?
But that is not all, for it is in fact a tiny minority of the tribe that adopts such fiendish measures. There are those that simply give up on the system, hearken to chants of “See Morocco! See Spain!” and make the desperate dash across the Sahara. The ones who lose only their money to phoney agents are sometimes the fortunate ones. For several quickly find out it is no 100m dash and end up as snacks for various forms of desert and marine lives. Some get thrown into jail, where one or two will have their necks wrung by Nazi-type cops. But then, fraudulent Nigerian agents, xenophobic Libyan youths and Nazi-type Moroccan cops aside, several do get to the West. And some of them find fame and fortune.
There is also a sub-tribe of the unemployed who would do nothing but beg. Certainly, begging, like most of these other phenomena, endure in every clime. I have heard of beggars in Los Angeles who go on the street just to get means to sustain a drug habit. And, more shockingly, of begging syndicates in Bangalore who rent kids from poor families, break their limbs and put them to work on the streets. But the remarkable thing about Lagos is the sheer number of beggars, which a Jamaican visitor once put at far above the population of his country.
And there are also the many who, tired of their own inability to break even, have bought into the extraterrestrial sub-culture. Anything that goes wrong in one’s life, it is the witches, wizards and jujuists that fly at night and swim by day in the family, neighbourhood, workplace and everywhere who are at the bottom of it. Deaths and other bad things, including those manifestly caused by horrible acts of omission, are blamed on witches or, shockingly, attributed to God. I met someone who prays regularly in churches and mosques and is not unfamiliar with the interior of a babalawo’s shrine. And another who professes Christianity but is adept at Hindu recitations and meditations. Your own efforts, innate abilities and attitude, and the interplay of time and chance are no factors at all. Just be “strong” from home, bath in the river at midnight and nothing can come near you. Or go take a splash in holy water and you can go to sleep, employers will write you applications. Scriptures are selectively read and hyped. It is all encouraged by supposed spiritual guides whose tool of trade is fear mongering. This anti-cultural orientation, though, may have created an economy and generated some employment for makers and sellers of fetishes and of course the spiritualist entrepreneurs themselves who hold the majority of shares in this sub-sector and reap huge pecuniary gains from it all.
*
So the following morning - the day in Nigeria the financial crimes czar spoke to the press about his biggest “419” fraud burst - I rush to the post office to post the applications for the other likely ads I picked up, about six of them.
I then rush to Ebute Metta Junction train station and make enquiries about where to buy tickets as Sunny told me. Tickets are sold outside, on the platform, the ticket clerk informs me. I go to wait on the platform. While waiting, it occurs to me to leave the platform, go to the buka across the road, use the fares to eat a hearty meal, sing “happy happy day”, then go home, get under the covers and indulge in a little more slumber till the next cockcrow. I am more frequently skipping the loo for whole days, even two, and the pins and needles are getting more and more frequent simultaneously on two limbs, in spite of having dipped into the money put together, with help from my cousin and his friend, for house rent.
After I wait for about three-quarters of an hour, an attendant comes to the platform and begins selling the tickets. But I cannot buy because he has no change for my two hundred naira note. When I rummage in my pockets and manage to excavate sixty naira in two 20’s and two 10’s, he does not accept the lot because he considers one of the 20’s too damaged for him to accept. Sunny has told me that it is unsafe to get inside the train without a ticket, as anyone who does, if smoked out of his hole, is heavily fined. And there is a document pasted near the platform reminding anyone that cares to read that being caught inside the train without a ticket is an offence.
Perhaps a literalist in these matters, it is not a favourite pastime of mine to commit offences; neither do I crave any row with a cantankerous clerk inside the train. Besides, I have no problems with my moral and social duty to pay my fair. So when the train begins to horn for take-off and someone is raising a flag, I rush inside to negotiate with another clerk about a ticket. He tells me he has none, that I should hurry as the train is moving, that I can buy one inside. I run to an open door of the moving train as they do in Hollywood movies and climb aboard.
The first things I notice are the seats. The cushions are all in place and not a single one is torn. The train is so much unlike the molue, those commodious relic buses which form part of the landmark of Lagos; or the molue’s cousin, the danfo, which, I get from reliable sources, are decommissioned mortuary vans in Europe where some buccaneers rescue them from scrap yards and retool them with more seats for Lagos business. But most of the seats are empty and wear a thick coat of dust. I dust one that looks like it was last patted when Michael Jackson was still a black man and sit down. There is only one other person in this coach.
I keep looking out the window to ascertain where we are. When I see Mushin I am surprised that this big apparently slow-moving thing has covered that distance in so short a time. This is not your fast train with electric engines and all. This is the earlier generation type. The Ministry of Transport says it is arranging to modernise the system. Of course the egregious gridlock which is the famed Lagos traffic jam does not have any jurisdiction over the area of locomotives. Which should have made this method of transportation much preferred in Lagos were it readily available.
When we get past Mushin I decide I might make some effort to find the clerk to pay to. The money, including the disagreeable note, in hand, I get up and begin to walk towards the rear of the long commodious hunk of metal. I am rocking as the train moves but I get on without much difficulty. The seats seem to go on and on. The sheer size of the train has a sobering effect on me, as I am reminded of how minuscule I am.
Why, if this train were rational it would probably require a microscope to see me in all my glory! You know the kind of feeling you get when you see those horrible pictures of kids driven out of their homes by bombs delivered from the air and dying of starvation in southern Sudan, or a woman in Peru with eyes full of tales of failure and abuse, her jaws sagging and her nose eaten off by leishmaniasis. You tell yourself you have absolutely no right to whine about not having a job, or to gripe that your job is not good enough, or to growl about not going to university. Or if you are rich and/or serve in government and have a rich conscience you feel guilty about having so many big cars in your garage and living in such a big house with so much empty space. But in no time, of course, you go back to whining, griping and growling. You accept that you are a speck, but as long as you breath, as long as the Grim Reaper has not brought his scythe to your steps, your own cosmos revolves around you, and you alone. You accept everything, including human suffering, as they are. It saddens you when it does, but you accept that the world – in which we all have to participate if we must live – is governed by a ruthless principle, a principle that operates in terms of winners and losers, the winner getting everything, the loser, nothing. You accept that good things do not belong to everyone. They belong to those who can grab them, and those who had them grabbed for them.
Some coaches are entirely empty. Some have few occupants. It is the coaches nearer to the front that have more occupants. I do not come across any clerk. I sit down in an empty coach and wait, money in hand. At the next station, a woman joins me, taking a seat a little further from me.
I catch sight of a wooden board through the window and try to read what is written on it, but I saw it too late. The other Saturday afternoon I was with my friend Hank, also a job seeker in the same sphere as me. Suddenly, I tapped him on the shoulder and pointed. “There, see that ad for secretary.” He asked me how I saw a board so far away. I told him I could see them three streets away on a very misty day. Did he have his CV here? He was surprised at the question. He was more surprised when I unzipped the bag I was carrying and pulled out a copy of mine. I opened the bag and showed him more copies of the CV, writing papers, envelopes and a bottle of gum. The bag also contained a lightweight umbrella. Later he told me he saw an obnoxious ad. What he found appalling about the ad was that it said “Ability to work under pressure.” What pressure did they want to put you under? he wondered. I smiled, pulled out a copy of my CV and, again with the airs of an all-knowing genius showed him a line on the second page that reads, “Ability to work under pressure with little or no supervision.” Christ! So I had it on my CV. Once he asked me how come I invariably got jobs that paid twice as much as his “computer operator” jobs. Now Hank is very good at his job. But he has not been job-hunting as long as I have. And he lives with his big sister, so bills do not pile up for him. I daresay he will learn when he starts real job-hunting, for he is going back to the university this year. But then I hope he does not. I know several folks who just walked out of school and into a job.
Before we get to Oshodi, two attendants come up silently from behind me and ask for my “ticket, sir”. I mutter that I want to buy, and let them see the money in my hand. One of them promptly shoots out his hand and collects the cash, checks that it is complete and they move on. As he does not produce a ticket or some kind of receipt, I feel a qualm knowing the money will not go to the transportation ministry, owners of the train, but into the spacious pockets of these two. Aware that I have just got away with an “offence” at my end, I have to live down my qualm.
The next station is at Agege. I feel sure Agege is before Alagbado. When the train stops again, I peep out the window and see I am at Iju-Agege. I stay put, since I am not going to Iju, and Agege is definitely before Alagbado. When the train stops again, I look out the window and see we are right in the middle of a market. I begin to crane my neck to see a signboard. By the time I see one that tells me where we are, the train is already moving.
Agbado, Ogun State!
That means I am already outside Lagos. When I find the attendant and ask him he confirms my fears. Do I disembark at the next station and find my way back? No, I should wait till they are coming back and then come down at the appropriate place. I soon see why it would be unwise to get off. All the remaining stations are set inside a wilderness – or so it looks to me. There are about three or four of them before we get to the final stop.
*
People disembarked and many others began to come aboard through all the doors. This return trip was clearly going to be much fuller. The first person to enter into my coach was a middle-aged man who dusted a seat, flopped into it and was sleeping within seconds. An elderly woman then entered, soon followed by two twentyish girls. One of them was slim and fair in complexion. How I remember her? She would not stop looking at me. I knew she was not some silken girl bringing me sherbet, but rather she seemed to consider gum chewing a fraternity, as we were both chewing the stuff. The coach was soon full of people and there was a babel of chatter in Yoruba. By now I had changed position so that I would face forward when the train moved again. Two young men, obviously brothers, entered and took seats opposite mine. One of them inadvertently hit me with his sack and apologised in Yoruba, which I do not speak a word of. There were no written signs to tell me where I was so I asked one of them in pidgin what they call the village. Ijoko, I was told.
I will put the time we spent at Ijoko at a little over an hour - I did not bring my wristwatch out of my pocket. The strap had snapped some weeks before and considering that the cost of replacing it could buy a few postage stamps, I am content to carry it in my pocket.
During the wait at Ijoko I learnt something. When I was a kid someone had told me that trains had heads at both ends, since they could not reverse. But since growing up and seeing photographs for myself, and then living near the Railway Corporation and seeing trains at close range, I have realised this is not the case. I had always wondered, then, how a train commenced journey in the opposite direction at the termination of one journey. So as soon as we stopped I had kept my eyes open for this. It was not long before I saw the head of the train, which contains the engine that pulls the coaches, speed past us in a nearby track. I worked it out for myself instantly. The head moves in either direction. It had been detached and, by means of purposely intersected tracks, was going to get in the other side!
An acquaintance who is a goalkeeper at soccer once told of how he saw the ball coming for this particular goal. He set himself for it, dived on time and “covered” the goal, but the next thing he saw was the round leather inside the net. When the train started the reverse journey, I kept my eyes open. We got past the bush stations and the train soon stopped at a market. I asked the two folks sitting across from me if this was Alagbado. They said yes, it was Agbado. I asked if that was the same thing as Alagbado. They said it was. I was out of the train in a flash. But I soon found I was at Agbado, Ogun State!
I decided to return to the train and get off at the next station. As I approached the train, I saw it start to move. I ran towards it but there was this heap of yams between me and the nearest open door. I decided to jump over the yams, but stopped myself in time - not only would that be patently impolite, it was likely to net me a stomachful of maledictions delivered in the Yoruba tongue and by a hundred mouths. You know that sort of thing. Everyone is talking and flapping their hands at you, and you have no idea what they are saying. When you find someone to translate for you he tells you they are asking something to strike you with pestilence down to the third generation. Or it might be worse even than that. Although still rich in the old traditional values which include hospitality to strangers, these clanspeople have a lot of taboos, broken at one’s peril. And jumping over a heap of yams being offered for sale could be one of the severer ones. I could be grabbed by the balls, dragged to a chief’s palace and stared down upon by some bearded ancient tradocrats till I paid a fine to appease whatever spirit I may have disturbed his lunch.
Having missed the train, I took stock of the situation. This place was Agbado, Ogun State. Those two had told me Agbado was the same as Alagbado. That must mean that Agbado clan lies in Lagos and Ogun States. That must mean I was not far from the vicinage of where I was going in Lagos.
I made enquiries as to how to get to Adura in Alagbado and was told to take an okada to Ijaiye and then connect with a bus going to Sango, and then come down at Adura bus stop. I had been to Ijaiye Road at Ogba several times and that was well inside Lagos. I found the motorcycle park after a search, but I had to wait a bit for the okadaman to find a second passenger.
As we were going I began to chew the situation over. I had to fault myself for not having asked Sunny, knowing how geographically challenged I am, about the specific station to get down. And now, all this trouble for what? What if this man did not even interview me? Or had the ad not specified some higher qualification I did not possess? You must wonder what qualification I have to be applying for this teaching job or any other job. I admit my diploma does not amount to much. I told you so myself, already. But most of those who have seen my CV remark I have piled up considerable amount of experience and know-how. I type at top speed. I write Pitman Shorthand at a good speed. I have good experience as a computer and secretarial instructor…
“Abeg, stop!”
Here, along Agbado Road, on the way to Ijaiye, I had caught sight of the signboard of the computer school I had come to this part of the city to seek. I felt sure this was a link road to the street the school is located. I have been in Lagos less than three years and have often taken roundabout ways only to find out the destination was a few metres from where I started my journey. A good thing, therefore, that I had seen this on time. I disembarked from the okada, paid off the cyclist and made my way to the signboard.
It took me a few minutes to persuade myself that the computer school was nowhere around there. The board was just an ad, which is quite unusual. I had been fooled because signs are usually placed in the vicinity of the place or the road leading to it.
I walked to a nearby shop and asked the teenage boy there how to locate Adura bus stop. He had a problem communicating in English, but he managed to tell me to walk along the road I was, take the first turning by the right and walk straight on. But his directions hardly sounded straight to me. I thanked him, walked along to a phone kiosk with “MTN” splashed all over it, and asked the girl sitting there. She advised me to take an okada or a tricycle to Ijaiye, get on the bus for Sango and disembark at Adura bus stop. She used almost the same words as the danfo driver I asked at Agbado, Ogun State.
As soon as I got back to the road I saw a tricycle approaching. I am not neophobic or that sort of thing, but I am hardly enamoured of these tricycles. They look so fragile and I cannot help comparing them to their better known cousins, the speed demons called okadamen. They are quite a new portent in town. Like all the others in its present generation, this one was painted with the green-white-green national colours and had KEKE NAPEP written on it. Keke is a local word for bicycles - and tricycles - and NAPEP means National Poverty Eradication Programme. If, as one reporter put it, “poverty has disappeared from the national debate in Washington”, the opposite is the case here. Before the set of politicians currently running things at the Rock and the provincial state houses came into power they promised a total war on poverty. As soon as they were sworn in, they had launched PAP, or Poverty Alleviation Programme. But recently the programme was renamed NAPEP. A possible explanation for this shuffling of letters is that poverty has now been alleviated for the most part and these motorised rickshaws are by way of the final onslaught to eradicate the monster from our land. Indeed apart from concern expressed by some – and denied by government officials – about ruling party supporters walking to the front of the queue, most observers have praised the programme to high heavens for “lifting” hundreds out of poverty. And following this some government officials have predicted that poverty will get a decent burial by next year.
I did not stop the keke as it already had three passengers in the passenger compartment. But seeing I was staring at them one of the passengers asked if I was going to Ijaiye, and the tricycle stopped. The fellow who spoke to me stood up and joined the cyclist in the front and I joined the remaining two at the back.
At Ijaiye, the first bus to come along was for Sango. As usual in a danfo, I squeezed myself into a space that would scarcely permit a tortoise to hang itself and the bus took off. The street was right at Adura bus stop. When I entered the computer school premises, two youths sat watching television. I confirmed that was the place I sought and asked to see the person in charge. When they learnt I was for the “vacancy”, they asked me to wait.
Wait. That is something you quickly learn to do in this business. You are always asked to wait. Once I went to see this chap who runs a computer school not too far from my place. He asked me several questions once I told him my mission. Then he asked me to wait. Perhaps to be given a practical test. So I waited. It happened I needed to get to Sabo that morning to collect five hundred naira from a guy who had promised to lend me. As the time approached I became restless since I was down to my last ten naira and this guy is a stickler for time. I got up and informed the director of studies that I needed to get to Sabo and come back. He looked at me as if I just asked to have two kids by his wife. Obviously he had never heard - or read in a book - of someone waiting to be interviewed for a job asking permission to go out. So he said, “And you want a job!”
I went for my five hundred naira since I had a stomach to minister to that day and the job did look like, to use an Americanism, it was going to suck. When I came back, he was out of sight inside the premises and nobody even bothered to ask me to wait. I never got the job.
So I waited for the Alagbado director of studies. While waiting I wondered how the interview would go. Interviewers can be out of this world. They will ask you the normal questions relating to your qualification. Some will then go further to ask all sorts of questions - from the knotty to the incredibly fatuous, from the mysterious to the patently discomfiting. If it is what is called “oral aptitude test” better be prepared because they could ask you to explain one of the great mysteries, such as “The Babes in the Wood”, or “The Mary Celeste”, or “Boy Adam”! Applicants for an accounting job have been known to be asked to recite poetry. There was one many years ago who asked me “how old are you?” I said 20. “20 what?” he said, his voice larded with lofty admonishment. Could it have been aeons? Or perhaps I looked 20 months old and he just needed to be sure? I said years. And one once asked me “what do you want a job for?” What? To have something to dole out to the Coalition Against Gender-based Violence! I said, “To enable me keep myself,” and then added severely, “and to contribute my quota to national development.” That seemed to surprise him, which surprised me. “National development?” he asked. I said, “Oh yes. It is businesses, whether small or medium or large that make for economic growth. When those who work play their parts well therein the nation is better for it.” His next question had been “How old are you?” I told him. Was I married? No, I was not married. When did I plan to get married? Marry? I blinked and said, “I am not thinking about marriage now.” He pursed his lips to ask another question. At the rate he was going, I anticipated what this one would be - how many kids? In this age of disposable relationships and contract kids it would be a perfectly normal question. And I thought of a possible answer, “Sir, you know we do not live in Australia where, I hear, they are planning to start paying people salary to bear kids.” But he seemed to change his mind, as he said nothing.
This one would want to know what teaching experience I had. They do not joke with experience. Once there was a fast food outlet opening near my place. I had thought I could get a job as a waiter. Did I have any experience with an international fast food outlet? No, sir, but I am willing to learn on the job. I learn quick. Okay, go. You will hear from us. That, with rote regularity. Tell me why he should bother with a complete tyro like me when there were a thousand cognoscenti beating his doors down.
Someone entered the reception. The person with the man I was waiting to see got out and to my mild dismay, the new entrant was ushered in, and I was smiled at and asked to wait – “please”.
That is the kind of treatment I sometimes get. You see, age is highly respected around here. I am close to 30 but it seems I look not a day older than 18 - someone said 17. So people usually ask me, the kid, to wait. I am not pintsize or something like that. At about normal average height and weight I am not diminutive. It is just the face that “looks baby”. The other day I went for an interview and the oga asked his daughter, obviously in her mid-twenties, to interview me. Transmitting pressurised Britishness, she commenced with me the way she might with an ambulance driver who wandered into the venue of a neurosurgeons conference. As I am not a Battle of the Sexes enthusiast, and a battle of wits is hardly one of my favourite mid-afternoon sports, I went along with her. But when the interview was over, she was smiling, agreeing with anything I suggested, and generally carrying on like a wannabe movietown suburbanite showing off her curves to an ace director. And there was this secretary I met at another lawyer’s office. I later found this one was a girl Friday actually. That means a kind of office chiropractor. She curiously prefixed her name with “Ms” when she wrote it, looked around 23 and had minimal proportions. She kept answering me with grunts, nods and monosyllables. A columnist once asked if these front desk girls take a crash course in sauciness once they get a job. But after collecting my CV and seeing my age, and perhaps seeing I was much senior to her in the office racket, she began to talk to me as if she just learnt I am the next Ashiwaju of Lagos. I have begun to take the problem serious lately. I have considered drugs that can age your facial muscles, even surgery. I hear there are doctors in Spain who can do any such thing with both eyes closed. My enquiries even reveal there is one in the Far East who can increase your height if you can stand the pain!
By the time I was called in about 30 minutes later, I was a little sorry to get up, having been absorbed in a home video running on the telly. The heroine was at that moment trying to persuade the hero to commit the crime of murder to ease him out of his financial hellfire. He was considering it when I left, priming myself they way Hercules must have done to fight the hydra.
The office was lined with books on various subjects and the furnishing was of average quality. Its sixtyish occupant obviously liked his food and kept himself well. He did not ask any bizarre questions. The glacial stare of your typical interviewer was here replaced with an inquiring, almost friendly look. In place of the usual snap was the sweet tone of diplomatic speak. He collected my CV and my certificates, read them quickly, and gave me the school’s prospectus opened to a particular page. He asked me to mark the subjects I was capable of handling. He said he asked that “in case the need sould arise for you to handle courses oder dan secretarials.” I ticked Windows 2000, MS Word, MS Excel, MS Dos, Computer Appreciation, Typing, Pitman Shorthand, Office Practice, Secretarial Duties and Business Communications.
He asked a few questions about my work experience and proceeded to lay out the working conditions. “De good ting about dis job,” he began with his strong intonation, “is dat it goes wit accommondayson.”
If you have never lived in Lagos, do not try to imagine what the accommodation problem - crisis actually - is like, because you have never seen anything like it. Do not get me wrong. If you earn big bucks, you can always get a flat or duplex. But if you are in the one-room stratum and you want to start looking for an apartment, scream, walk up a wall, climb Eko Bridge and dive into the lagoon - do anything, it is better than trying to find a house. Comparing the trouble it will take you to get a job to what it will take you to get a house would be like comparing what it takes to get to Alagbado to that which it takes to get to America. But if by any chance you get one, ever heard of that old economic theory, “higher the demand, higher the price”? It is the abiding principle here. And be prepared for just about anything your landlord might do. If his daughter is getting married, better deliver a carton of Guinness stout, and if you have a car, make it available to convey people to the reception venue so that he will remember you well. And if you have just paid him in advance for two years and he is broke, be prepared to find him some money for about six months. You too are broke? Go rob a bank! You want to live in a house, not so? I know of several people, including one junior lawyer, who sleep on their office tables - or underneath it, depending on preference. And they are the “lucky” ones, if you consider that the number of those who sleep outdoors, on verandas and under the bridges, in Lagos would probably equal the entire population of Libya.
So that opening line was meant to make me swoon with joy and fall on my knees and thank the good Lord for leading me to pastures green to make me lie down. “De reason for dat is because we do not want you to be hafing problems getting home after closing. We teach from 9am till 4pm, and den from 5pm till 9pm. By 10 eferyone is gone. De second seson is mainly for workers who come in here hafter work. On Saturdays we hopen from morning till 2pm. Dere is not much work dat day. Wit de accommondayson we profide, closing late is not a problem because you do not hafe to come from afar. As for de salaray, we will not boast. For anyone of your lefel, for a start, we hoffer four.” I asked if he meant four. “Yes. You don’t pay house rent or transportayson. De good ting about de job is de accommondayson we profide.”
I have a one-room apartment of my own - which is really bad in this city if you do not earn good money because you spend almost all you earn paying for it. But I have held on to it through good and bad times because it affords me the privacy to listen to the radio, and do a bit of paper work. And because of the setting of the place, it is some residential quarters with the houses set so refreshingly far away from the chaos that defines city centres, I like it. So, as you would guess, it would take something to get me out of my island Valley of Avalon, and this offer to bring me out to Alagbado was far from something. The monthly salary was a joke.
I kept my face impassive, but he must have read disinclination in me. He said I could either tell him my mind now or get back to him. I said I would do that. He said I should do it quickly so that the space does not get taken up. He pointed to the mobile phone number on my CV and asked if I could be reached through that. The phone belongs to my cousin. The last time a job prospect called me on it he had forgotten to inform me. I have changed the number in newer copies of my CV. I told the director of studies I could be reached on it. What did it matter? I again told him I would get back to him and got up to leave. “You say you will get back to hus but you hafe not collected hour numbers.” I apologised and took his phone numbers, and was out of there.
*
I cannot contemplate trying to find the train station because I am too tired and have no idea what time the train comes. I realise my mouth is bitter and has been so for some time. But I am too tired to begin searching for sachet water to buy to rinse my mouth. I make enquiries from a passer-by as to how to get home from here. “You get to Oshodi, then take another bus.”
I cross the road and stand at the other side. While waiting it occurs to me to download my experiences of this day unto paper. People might want to read about a young man who is poorly certificated looking for a white-collar job in an urban jungle and seriously believing he will get one. I will title it, “A Journey of the Magi”; and commence it, “A tough going I had of it”. But I quickly dislike this title because (i) there is only one traveller or magus, and (ii) who wants to be associated with sorcery? How about, “Sisyphus’ Diary”? or “The Auditioning of Brother Sisyphus”?
I wait for nearly half an hour before a molue creaks to a stop. Fortunately, the bus is not full, so I get a seat. The late Nigerian song genius and nonconformist Fela Anikulapo-Kuti was talking about the molue when he sang 49 Sitting 99 Standing in an album titled Shuffering and Shmiling. In Kenya, where they have a similar spectacle called the matatu, I hear they are something of a tourist attraction. If you think the tourism authorities here are less creative, that problem starts with the molue themselves. While a matatu is garishly turned out, often looking like a bride prepared for her husband, a molue typically looks as if Attila the Hun had borrowed it to take his men into some oriental jungle.
Inside the molue, I bring my wristwatch out of my pocket and see it is about 1:30. I have been hoping to be home by 2 so as to see the soccer match between Nigeria and Benin in the ongoing African Cup of Nations, the only thing everyone is talking about anywhere you go these days. Even MTN, the big mobile phone company known, perhaps more than anything else, for its penchant to overdo things is too busy eating up the African mundial with a spoon to have any space left on its plate for Valentine, the other big thing of the season.
It is the dry season and although Oshodi still lives up to giving the impression of an imminent apocalypse, it is not muddy. I board another molue, also getting a seat. When all the seats are taken I am surprised the driver does not wait to pick “99 standing”. It would appear the government has been getting tough on that sort of thing lately. I wonder if there has been a major incident, since it was shortly after the death of over a thousand people in an overloaded boat in Senegal sometime ago, followed by outcry from the press, that the state government moved in to stop the boats that cross from Apapa to Lagos Island from overloading. I wonder too how many weeks it will take the molue operators to slip back to their old ways once they think the authorities are no longer looking.
The cost of returning home by molue is almost the same as that of going by train. Just the kind of advice Sunny would give. But it has been a good experience, my first train ride. I have had a view of the city you do not get from buses. Like standing at Mizpah, overlooking the Plains of Syria.
Between Oshodi and my destination my mind dwells on the interview I just attended. Four thousand naira! A joke. Does that elderly capitalist really mean to work someone from 9am till 10pm and pay them four thousand naira? I remember the advertisement, “Teachers’ Reward Now in America.” But the Bush country, where money grows on trees, is so far away! Getting on an aeroplane without a ticket is another matter from getting on a train that way.
Is the teacher’s reward still in heaven then? You probably know how these barroom conservations go. “Ol boy, buy me beer naa.” “I not fit buy you beer todayo. You know say area dry like dryer.” “That one mean say you not fit buy me jus one bottle of beer? Why you dey behave like say you be tisha? Na o’ly tisha wey dey menzure yam wit rula before him cook am. Na God go helep tisha. Barman!”
My mind goes to the story I am planning to write. I discard the earlier opening line as too severe. As I am almost feeling like I just met two of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I will have to make conscious effort to stop it dripping with the black bile. And “The Auditioning of Brother Sisyphus”, as a title, would be accorded some distinction only when they make Olympic event of pessimism or hopelessness; for the human race have something about the metaphor of propulsion.
As I get down from the bus, as if to remind me of something I would rather forget, I steady myself with some effort as I struggle with vertigo and a dull thud in my head. As I approach my place, pretty listless, the blazing ball is burning overhead, unmoved by the manifold personal experiences of this man of clay and therefore not altering course or temperature to acknowledge them.
When I enter my pad there is no power, no thanks to NEPA, the nation’s electricity grand monopoly. Now, when NEPA strikes, which may be 24 times a day, you do not hold your breath because it rarely lasts one minute, sometimes lasts one hour, often lasts one day and not too rarely lasts one month. Although the sun is shinning and the breeze blowing outside, my home is dark and hot. I unlatch the glass window and push, and the light and breeze I crave are mine.
I discard my clothes and stretch myself on the bed, wondering what I will do tomorrow. But I know. I will go out searching for a job. And get a job I will when I find the latch. For in the extant system of things whenever the window is closed, the darkness remains until you find the latch and pull it. Or you can latch on to hope. That supernal phenomenon which resurrects the carcass of a bear after the Arctic winter hibernation. When you had such a tough journey – without comic reliefs, without silken girls bearing you sherbet, without jobs – and you realise you will do it all over again tomorrow, hope it is that stops you catching a Sisyphean complex. And of course if you are a man of higher faith hope helps you to retain joy in expectation of old things passing away and all things being made new. Did our elders not say the phallus that does not die young will eat bearded meat? Would a man who swarm at Okun, in a state of surrender, not drown in a puddle of urine? I am unsinkable. I am a swimmer. I will find this latch and this window too will open.
Tomorrow I put my documents together and go out. No, I put those papers together this evening!