Caboose

I’m organising a workshop on library services with NTI and VSO. It’s challenging to get the NTI side of things organised when everything has to be approved, passed up through directors to the chief executive and then back down. Most of the directors spend most of their time in Abuja, in meetings with the Ministry of Education.

Just to make things even more fun because of Ramadan working hours are 8am to 3pm, or 1.30pm on Fridays. And Monday is a public holiday (for Independence Day, which is actually the first), although this wasn’t announced until a couple of days ago.

I just got back from a trip to visit Aine in Minna. Tammie is now on her farewell tour, so I thought I’d catch up with her there in case I don’t manage to see her elsewhere.

Minna is in Niger state (that’s Niger state, Nigeria, not the Niger Republic, they’re pronounced differently), one of the shari’a states and coincidentally also fairly backward. In fact Minna is also home to former dictator Ibrahim Badamasi “I organised the fairest election Nigeria’s ever had but didn’t like the result, so I cancelled it” Babangida, who is probably going to stand for president next year. He can certainly afford to buy his way into the presidency with all the money he stole while in power.

On the way back today I went to the motor park in Minna and joined a bush taxi there. One seat remained to be filled. The first sign of trouble was when the car had to be moved to the other side of the motor park so that the last passenger could order people to load his luggage for him.
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Apart from yoghurt there’s not a lot of dairy produce around in Nigeria. Milk comes as powder or condensed/evaporated in a tin, butter is only found in expensive supermarkets and cheese is something that comes in little triangular foil packages.

Blue Band margarine is very popular, but I don’t entirely trust a food product that doesn’t go off when kept in a warm cupboard for a year. My suspicion is that Blue Band is actually a form of spreadable plastic.

This post was triggered by me treating myself to a bottle of milk today. Two hundred and eighty Naira for one litre, so a bottle of milk costs more than a bottle of beer! I also passed by Baker’s Delight supermarket to get some imported Kerrygold butter. Nigerians really don’t understand the European fondness for dairy products (neither do Filipinos).

At first this seemed a bit odd to me, after all the country is full of cows. However the Fulani’s cows don’t produce much milk, certainly not up to the standard of European cows raised on special hormones and produced by centuries of selective breeding.

There is a cooperative dairy just up the road from NTI. On the right day they might even have something to sell. Last time I went there I bought butter, but they only sell kilogram tubs (400 Naira, much cheaper than the Kerrygold). After weeks of cooking with butter instead of oil, having bread, butter and jam for breakfast and even making shortbread I still had some left to throw away today.

I’m looking forward to cheese when I’m back home on holiday next month…

I was just struck by the thought that I haven’t heard a fire alarm in a long time.

Some Nigerian buildings have fire alarms (NTI does) but I’ve seldom seen one that showed any signs of actually working.

In fact about the only time you hear sirens or hooters here is when some big man is passing by on the road and his police escort want you to get out of the way. It’s quite noticeable that the Nigerian police don’t waste their sirens on trivial things like getting to the scenes of crimes quickly.