Caboose

On our way to spend the weekend in Yankari National Park Marion, Kristel and I spent the night at Siv’s place in Gindiri, Plateau State. He’s working at the College of Education there.

It’s a lovely place and he has a nice little house there. The college staff club has the best suya I’ve had in Nigeria.

Last year’s census is still causing arguments here, with all sorts of wild claims flying around. One of the big problems has been the announcement that Kano state has a slightly larger population than Lagos state, when obviously there are more people in Lagos!

Chippla’s Weblog has a very sensible post on this subject, pointing out the difference in population density between the two states.

Quite apart from the organisational problems of the census, one of the major difficulties seems to have been the tendency for people to travel back to be counted in their hometowns. In some cases this was being organised and promoted by ethnic organisations, to ensure that their numbers would be high and to increase their share of Federal jobs and money. So cities with large non-indigenous populations emptied around census time and, as a result, will have been undercounted and will probably be under-resourced in future.

It’s good to see that the BBC has finally noticed the reality of Abuja rather than just following the official line about how shiny and modern the city is.

The contrast between the city centre and the “satellite towns” is amazing, from multi-lane expressways to dirt roads in a few hundred metres. Most people working in Abuja can’t afford to live in the city, having to commute in every day. Some of my former colleagues at Radio Nigeria travelled in from as far away as Keffi because that was the nearest place they could afford a decent home for their families. This isn’t easy or cheap given the lack of good public transport.

Although the FCDA claim to be enforcing the “master plan” they seem to be doing so in a way that ignores the idea of building neighbourhoods and providing housing for all levels of society. So long as your mansion is in a residential area and isn’t built on what should be a park it doesn’t matter that there should be tens of houses in the space you’re taking up for one.

On a technical note, the link to Google’s map of Keffi shows that their idea of where Abuja is is a bit wrong and some of the roads and place names are slightly suspect too.

Last night I joined Monique, Kristel and Marion at Gamji Gate Auditorium for a free concert organised by the British Council and the Centre for Hausa Cultural Studies. They’d brought over a Muslim hip-hop group from the UK, Mecca 2 Medina, who were collaborating with a group of young traditional Hausa musicians from Kano, Arewa. The whole thing was called “Cultural Rap Rapture” and also included several local musicians.
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I’m taking advantage of a brief period of NEPA to boil water, listen to music and write this.

As usual for the weekend I got up fairly late this morning, I was out last night with Monique and my friend (and tailor) Otinu.

After breakfast I went kite flying again, Suleiman is getting quite good and the others are improving. The wind was pretty strong today so I had to keep reminding them of safety precautions like not launching the kite when people are in the way! Some of the smaller boys were getting dragged around a bit by the wind. I was watching carefully and made sure they used the safety straps (“kite killers”), that way they can just let go of the handles and the kite will drop out of the sky.

I just had some soup for lunch, I made it on Thursday to use up all the vegetables in the fridge. I think it was carrot, tomato, green pepper, garlic and “american cucumber” (a roundish yellow thing that I think is some kind of squash). As usual, after a few days and a spin in the liquidiser it was even better than when I made it. I enjoy my small culinary successes.

In a little while I’ll have to head off to the market to stock up again, the fridge is looking pretty bare.

On the way to and from Ghana we passed through Lagos. I found it much less chaotic than its reputation had led me to expect. Maybe if it’s the first place you see in Nigeria it’s a bit overwhelming but to me it’s just like any Nigerian city but on a larger scale.

One odd experience was visiting the Palms shopping centre, which is packed full of very wealthy Nigerians. It has shops just like you’d see in Western Europe, including a supermarket. I thought it was interesting that a lot of the prices in the supermarket were actually lower than in ordinary Nigerian markets. Of course, the people who’d benefit most from these lower prices probably can’t afford transport to get to Palms and might not be allowed in even if they reached it.

Transport was easy, although Marebec and Dave had been there before and knew where to get buses to various parts of the city. We took one very scary okada in the night, weaving in and out of traffic at speed and hurtling over potholes. I wouldn’t mind if I had any confidence that the riders were in control of their bikes but they’re pretty poor, always either on full throttle or the brake, on sandy roads that means you keep sliding about.

The bridges are one of the distinctive features of Lagos, especially the Third Mainland Bridge. This is the one we took to the airport, it is (or was, not sure) the longest in Africa and is apparently deteriorating badly due to a total lack of maintenance. It’s quite strange to be in a bus, hurtling across a dual-carriageway concrete bridge and looking at stilt houses in the lagoon on one side.

I brought a Flexifoil Sting 1.2 kite back to Nigeria with me in November (that’s a fairly small power kite, 1.2 square metres). I’ve not had much of a chance to fly it due to lack of wind or other things to do.

Today I finally had the time and the wind was strong enough, so I wandered over to the NTI Staff Primary school football pitch and unpacked the kite.

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Just over a week ago I travelled to Ibadan with my colleague Niyi. We were doing some work at NTI’s South-West zonal office, installing some software we had written.

On the left is one of the major junctions and public transport hubs in Ibadan, I was staying in a guesthouse nearby. In the middle is the “Oyo State Luxurious Bus Terminal”, very grand but barely used, the buses just sit in the car park beside it. The picture on the right is of the sign at the front of my ABC Transport bus up to Abuja.

I’m beginning to think that somebody is spreading caltrops on the expressway in Ibadan, the ABC bus arrived with a fist-sized hole in one of its tyres. This is not the first time my bus has had a puncture in Ibadan.

I occasionally read naijablog, the blog of an English expat living in Abuja. Sometimes it reminds me how two people can live in the same place but see it in a different way.

For example Jeremy is quite fond of saying that the Hilton is Abuja’s city centre, maybe this is true if you’re an expat or an ultra-rich Nigerian. As I saw Abuja it had several smaller centres, spread across the different districts.

For example, for the part of town close to Radio House the centre was the square outside the Garki Area 7 Shopping Centre (UTC). During the day this was mostly a car park for the surrounding shopping complex, with a few small stalls selling videos and phone accessories on the road side. In the evening there were suya stalls and young people playing basketball, pool and table tennis. Sadly, last time I was in Abuja it was fenced off and something was being constructed on it, a loss of a useful public space.

Other districts have their own centres, although the demolitions in Abuja have damaged or destroyed many of them. Wuse Zone 4 had it’s collection of shops, restaurants and bars demolished last year but people still congregate in the area in the evening. Garki Area 2 has a small market and shops around its Shopping Complex.

It seems these centres were designed-in as part of Abuja’s master plan, each district having a “corner shop” or “shopping centre”. The current interpretation of the plan is that these should be (yet more) ugly shopping plazas rather than open, public spaces.

I don’t know the more upmarket parts of town (Wuse II, Maitama, Asokoro) very well but they too probably have some kind of “centre”, you just have to look around you and maybe sometimes walk rather than driving from place to place in air-conditioned isolation.

1. Taxis are all clearly marked (by orange wings) in Ghana. While this theoretically applies in Nigeria most taxis in (for example) Abuja are unmarked.
2. There seems to be some enforcement of car roadworthiness checks in Ghana, you don’t see the kind of old wrecks on the road that you do in Nigeria. Maybe the vehicle inspectors are less easily bribed in Ghana?
3. Electricity. In Ghana you get a schedule telling you when there are going to be outages (due to insufficient supply), in Nigeria NEPA/PHCN like to keep it a surprise (probably even to themselves). The Ghanaians complain about how the suffer due to poor electricity supply anyway, I struggled not to laugh at them.
4. Ghana still has an agricultural sector, the economy hasn’t been completely dominated by one product.
5. Newspapers in Ghana actually contain some news, rather than stories the journalists have been bribed to insert.
6. Ghanaians aren’t as keen on greetings, in fact often asking “how is your family?” or “how was the night?” will result in blank faces or funny looks.
7. Ghana smells. The drains at the side of the road seem to commonly be used as sewers, in Nigeria they’re normally just storm drains. This gives the country a special aroma.
8. The roads in Ghana are mostly in reasonable condition. I often travel on the Abuja-Kaduna expressway, Nigeria’s best road (because the generals used to use it to travel between the capital and their homes in Kaduna). A typical major road in Ghana is at least as good. Even dirt roads to villages in Ghana showed some signs of maintenance.
9. There’s a greater variety of food in Ghana. Even in smaller towns you can often get some “continental” or even Chinese food. Ghanaians seem to be more adventurous when it comes to food.
10. You get singled out for begging in Ghana. In Nigeria the beggars go round everyone, in Ghana they immediately target the rich “obruni” tourists. In fact in Nigeria you don’t feel as singled-out just for being white.

Of course this is based on the parts of Ghana I saw, it’s possible that things are different in the north. In general I’d say that things work better in Ghana but I found the people slightly less friendly.