Caboose

Last time I was in Abuja I used my phone to take some pictures of the aftermath of demolitions at Utako Ultra-Modern International Market. It seems that the two-storey buildings that had surrounded the market (and held up the sign with the impressive name) were illegal, so down they had to come.

I’m sure they’ll be replaced with some more of the shiny “plazas” that blight Abuja. That is shopping complexes that are mostly empty apart from clothes shops operated as a hobby by the wives and girlfriends of rich men and where only their friends shop.

The two groups of trade unions in Nigeria, the Nigerian Labour Congress and the Trade Union Congress, are planning a general strike in an attempt to force the government to back down on the recent increase in VAT and fuel prices.

If the strike goes ahead it could make life very difficult. The petroleum industry unions are already on strike, leading to a petrol shortage that has pushed prices up still further. People have been advised to stockpile food.

I was watching TV this morning to find out what the situation was and saw an interview with a Lagos PDP politician. As usual it was more a series of monologues than an interview but some of it was interesting. The PDP man at one point encouraged civil disobedience and non-payment of taxes and also made the interesting claim that according to political science as soon as a government is sworn in it is legitimate. So it doesn’t matter how much an election has been rigged, as soon as you’re sworn in everything’s OK.

I find the political parties here interesting. They seldom seem to have any policies or ideas but act more as groupings of people who want power. Politicians move freely between parties as it suits them. In this they remind me very much of New Labour in the UK, no morals, no ideals, just a craving for power.

As an aside, it seems very Nigerian to me that there are two groups of trade unions, one for ‘senior’ workers and one for their ‘juniors’.

It’s part of life in Nigeria that electricity is either absent, or not where it should be.

I discovered at the weekend that the spare circuit breaker in my house’s fusebox isn’t just spare and not connected. It serves the very useful purpose of electrifying the taps in my bathroom.

This is not the first part of my house that has given me electric shocks, but a bathroom is a particularly bad place given the combination of electricity and water. I’m just lucky that the floor is tiled and a fairly good insulator.

The training of electricians in Nigeria is pitiful. Most of them seem to have briefly attended primary school and then at some later point been given a pair of pliers and a screwdriver that lights up, that’s it. They have no understanding of electricity at all. For example, the electrician at the zonal office in Bauchi last week did a very neat job of wiring up lots of sockets but didn’t see any problem in connecting them all to a single plug (in fact two wires pushed into the socket, he’d run out of plugs).

The same lack of understanding means that almost no electrical equipment here is earthed, one of the fundamentals of electrical safety. Why bother with that fiddly third wire when two will do?