Caboose

When I move to a new place I like to walk around to get my bearings and develop a feel for where I am. So on Saturday I decided to go for a stroll around Kaduna.

After a morning of washing clothes I took a car to Kawo junction and then a minibus to the French Café. I had lunch there as a little treat after last weeks illness. They have a lovely bakery and even real coffee. The prices for the bakery products are reasonable, NGN 120 for a cheese croissant and NGN 150 for a mini-pizza, but they charged NGN 200 for a Sprite (usually NGN 35 in Kaduna) and NGN 300 for an espresso. Nearby was this sign:

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On Tuesday I wasn’t feeling very well, it started with an entertaining case of the runs and then I just started feeling generally ill. I spent the afternoon sitting around my room at the conference centre, feeling achy and alternately hot and cold.

Yesterday morning things hadn’t improved, so I went to the NTI clinic. The doctor decided I probably had malaria, plus something else that had caused the diarrhoea. He gave me some tablets for the malaria, told me to increase my dosage of doxycycline to see if that killed off the gut bugs and sent me to the on-site lab for a blood test.

The blood test results came back this morning and it’s definitely malaria. It looks like it was caught early and the tablets seem to be working, I’m feeling much better today. I’m not sure if the taking my malaria prophylaxis every day has reduced the severity of the malaria or if it’s just luck, but I’ll certainly keep on taking my daily doxycycline.

I’m convinced the cause was the large number of mosquitoes in my room, due to the huge gap between the air-conditioner and the wall. I’ve been spraying bug spray around every night but as soon as it wears off more of them come in. I complained to the hotel and they did nothing. Instead I bought a newspaper and used it to fill in the gap, looks like it was too late though.

Getting malaria is probably some kind of VSO Nigeria rite of passage, like falling in a drainage ditch (which I haven’t, yet).

I’ve now been working for NTI for just under a week and am settling in. There was the usual tour and introductions to everyone, this time I took notes and pictures to help me remember who’s who. I have my own office (below left) in one of the lovely buildings at the NTI campus outside Kaduna. Each building is arranged around a courtyard, from the outside they look like something out of a 70’s sci-fi film.

I’m living at the NTI’s conference centre, also on site. At the moment I’m in one of their suites, waiting for my permanent apartment to be finished. The conference centre is basically an on-site hotel and seems to mostly be used by the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation for their training courses. Like many buildings in Nigeria it looks like it was very nice about twenty years ago but has since had little maintenance and basic services such as running water don’t work most of the time.

On the other hand my room is quite comfortable, has a/c and a TV. The permanent apartment is another one of these suites, they’re currently building a kitchen and will apparently be ready in about two weeks. You can see it at the right of the photo below.

At work I’m now thinking about my workplan for the first few months, working out what I need to know and who to ask. So far there seems to be plenty of work to be done and expectations are high.

I’ve been meaning to do some research into road accident fatalities in Nigeria and have finally got round to it. People keep going on about how dangerous it is to fly here but I suspected the roads are much more dangerous.

Of course, statistics are difficult to get hold of and usually unreliable. The Federal Road Safety Commission has a little bar graph with some statistics (below). If you zoom in you can just make out that the deaths figure for 2004 was 5524, 15 people per day.

Take Bellview crash in October last year, in which all 117 passengers and crew died. The road deaths (from 2004) are equivalent to 47 Bellview crashes, nearly one a week. Given that it’s not uncommon for pedestrians or motorcyclists killed on the roads to be left lying I’d say it’s safe to assume that the road deaths are under-reported.

As a comparison, in the UK in 2004 the number of people killed on the roads was 3321 (source: Road Casualties Great Britain 2004). Given populations at that time of 59,834,300 for the UK (source: Office for National Statistics) and 128,709,000 for Nigeria (source: Unicef) that means that in 2004 about 1 in 18000 of the UK population and 1 in 23300 of the Nigerian population died in car crashes.

I’ve tried (but failed) to find statistics so I can compare the number of vehicles on the roads in each country.

I organised a little picnic yesterday, to celebrate me leaving Abuja. The organisation was complicated slightly by the fact that MTN’s mobile network was barely functioning for most of the weekend. In the end Tim, Dave, Gina, Jasper, Ilse, Diseye, Marebec (behind the camera), Alex and Kate made it and everyone brought lots of food.

MTN‘s network seems to be getting less and less reliable, with long periods where it’s impossible to make calls or check credit and text messages sometimes getting held up for days. I’m starting to think about moving to a network that actually works, Glo are apparently good.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve noticed new phone kiosks popping up around Abuja, lots of them. No equipment has been installed yet, but they seem to have solar-powered lighting. From the name of the company I’d guess they’re going to be using a wireless network for their payphones.

The city is still littered with old Nitel payphones, none of which have worked for a few years. I’ll be interested to see how the new payphones (when they appear) compete with the many roadside “business centres” (GSM call vendors).

Russell the cat disappeared earlier this week. He spends most of the day outside, wandering around the compound and trying to catch geckos, a few days ago he didn’t come back in.

We checked around the house, looked all over our little compound and asked the security guards and other residents if they had seen him but nobody had.

Yesterday morning Joseph, one of our regular guards, said he had seen Russell during the night, with another cat. Later in the day I heard that a cat had been heard in the (unused) studio building. The studio building was built at the same time as the rest of Radio House, but there wasn’t enough money to complete the inside. These days it’s partly used for storage, piles of desks, dead equipment and stacks of papera litter the bare concrete passageways.

The guard let us into the building and straight away we could hear Russell wailing from the far end of the corridor. He had managed to fall into the empty liftshaft and wasn’t able to climb out. We couldn’t see him in the darkness, so I went back to the house for torches and came back to find Marebec helping the guard manouevre an old desk into the pit. There aren’t many ladders around Radio House, so I had to climb down the desk to retrieve a very dusty but uninjured Russell.

Today he’s at the vet being neutered, we’re hoping that will reduce his tendency to wander off far from home.

Some big news for you (although some people know already), I’m leaving Abuja! I’ll be staying in Nigeria, moving up to Kaduna, which is about two hours north of Abuja by car.

Although Radio Nigeria has been a nice place to work and they have treated me well there just hasn’t been enough work to keep me busy (or even close to busy). Projects are endlessly delayed due to internal bureacracy and funding problems and a few people within the hierarchy are happy to just sit at their desk and do nothing all day, having no interest in improving things at the radio station. As an example, a few months after I started we requested for six computers so that we could start training newsroom staff in how to use computers. Those computers have only just arrived, over six months later.
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Looking for information about the forthcoming scheduled bus services in Abuja I couldn’t find anything official, but instead stumbled across Chippla’s Weblog. It has well-written and knowledgeable commentary on expensive new taxis, what will happen to okada riders if they’re banned from Abuja and religion in Nigeria among other things.

After a series of cryptic text messages (the first was “After 12 then”) Alex came round to take us on another hiking trip in the hills around Abuja. This time it was to be near Dutse and Dave, Marebec, Kate, Eva and Erin were going along.

The Harmattan dust has been quite bad the past few days, as you can see in these pictures looking down on the town of Dutse Alhaji. We’ve also had a few cold nights because of it, which means my shower water is getting pretty chilly in the mornings.

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