To Lagos and back (1)
I made an unexpected dash to Lagos last weekend. The last time I travelled to Lagos was in July, 2011, that is about four and half years ago.
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Before then I used to visit Nigeria regularly, sometimes three times in a year. This must be expected since I lived and worked there for about 13 years.
However since July, 2011, I have not been to Nigeria for the simple reason that there has not been any compelling reason for me to do so.
It has even reached such a stage that most of my friends over there have stopped calling me and we are gradually losing touch.
But last Friday, I was forced to go to Lagos because one of my children, Faisal, had met a lady he would like to spend the rest of his life with and it was necessary that me and his mother had to be in Lagos to meet the parents of the lady to reassure them that their daughter would be safe in Ghana.
Working in Nigeria
Faisal is probably the most Lagosian of all my children. When I relocated to Nigeria in 1983, I first settled in Ilorin, the Kwara state capital before I came down to Lagos in 1986 after obtaining a good job as the Head of Information at National Youth Service Corps (NYSC). Later I moved up to Ilorin again after being appointed as the editor of Kwara State government owned Herald.
I took all my children with me to Nigeria. Somehow, it was Faisal who lived with me in Lagos where he had his education up to secondary level. Side by side he studied the Koran like the other children. But after completing secondary school I enrolled him at the prestigious Maracas Arabic College at Agege in Lagos.
He remained in Lagos to complete his Arabic education after I had returned to Ghana in 1996. When he finally came back to Ghana in 1997 I wanted him to continue with his Arabic and Islamic Studies at the Islamic University College, so that he would continue in the path of my father, his grandfather, who was a great Islamic scholar.
Faisal kicked against the idea. He told me in the face he would not like to be a “Mallam”. He rather would like to study Information Technology (IT) and be a modern man. There was nothing I could do but to allow him to have his way.
I have been pleasantly surprised by the remarkable progress he has made as a businessman. Business often takes him to Lagos and Abuja and it was during one of such business trips that he met this lady, for which reason his mother and I had to go to Lagos last weekend to meet the parents of his future wife, whom he had already brought to Ghana to be introduced to the family in Kumasi.
Some observations
The meeting at the residence of the father of my future daughter-in-law at Egbeda, a Lagos suburb, was a very pleasant one. After seeing us, the other side did not have any objection to their daughter relocating. They were happy that it would also give them the opportunity to visit Ghana in future.
This my latest trip to Lagos came with some observations which I would like to share with my readers. In the past I always enjoyed going by road to Lagos because of so many interesting things one would see on the way from Ghana to Nigeria.
So I did not hesitate to go to Efex, the transport company, opposite Paloma on the Ring Road, three days before the trip to buy a ticket; I was in the first bus and there were 17 of us. Only two of us carried Ghanaian passports. The rest were young Nigerians, most of them students, studying in private universities in Ghana.
In the course of the journey, I asked the young man sitting by me what he came to do in Ghana. He told me he came for the graduation ceremony at the Accra Institute of Technology (AIT). He was on his way to Abuja and he told me he wished he could remain and work in Ghana.
I also realised that those who were waiting for the second bus were all Nigerians. Their ages showed that majority of them were students, and maybe two or three young adventurous traders, one sees in Accra and Kumasi doing business.
Tables turned?
This is a far cry from the past, some five to 10 years ago, when Lagos bound cars or buses carried mostly Ghanaian economic refugees going to try their luck in Nigeria. Now it is Nigerians who are travelling to and from Ghana.
I must say I was impressed by the excellent state of the road from Accra to Aflao. It was simply excellent. On my last trip to Lagos four and half years ago the road was in a very deplorable state, even though a lot of construction work was going on. As a result there were many diversions.
At the time no vehicle would like to go through Akatsi to Agbozome and then to Aflao. One would have to branch off at Akatsi to Dodze before going down to Denu to link up with Aflao.
Now there is not a single pothole on the new asphalted road. Even in the past, on getting to Aflao one would have to use some town roads as diversion before getting to the border.
I am sure it is a great relief to all travellers to Lagos. I found Aflao to be so neat, instead of the dusty and muddy town it used be four years ago.
Good roads and multiple checks
It was the same story in Togo and Benin. The highways have been reconstructed in these two ECOWAS countries. In Benin especially, getting to Cotonou, the road has been widened and dualised. As a result, there is a free flow of traffic in Cotonou which used to be crowded, with cars and motorbikes fighting for space.
However it is a different story when one gets to Seme, the border town between Benin and Nigeria. The two mighty buildings used by Nigerian and Beninois immigration and customs officers have been abandoned. There are rather makeshift checkpoints and I couldn’t help wondering what was going on.
It took us another five hours to get to Lagos from Seme, a distance of about 80 kilometres, with so many checkpoints, after every 100 metres, with officials performing the same duties. In Ghana,Togo and Benin, checkpoints had reduced considerably allowing free flow of traffic but not in Nigeria.
Death during voting
I don’t think I can conclude this episode without mentioning the story that broke out some few days before I left for Lagos. It had to do with the death of a governorship candidate of All Progressives Congress (APC) for Kogi State, Prince Abubakar Audu, which occurred while votes were being counted after the elections.
I was wondering what might have happened to the man to have died at that material moment. The story was carried by both the Daily Graphic and Ghanaian Times but not much was said about the cause of the death.
When I got to Nigeria I had to look for back copies of some newspapers, which I got through Isaac David Aboderin, my childhood friend from Kumasi long resident in Lagos. I got to know that Audu was not very well just before the elections and had a heart attack.
The election itself was not conclusive and a new person, Yahaya Bello, has been selected to replace Audu. The APC chose Bello because he came second in the primaries and not the running mate to Audu. More anon.
May his soul rest in peace.