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A Holiday Story:
A Christmas Holiday in Nigeria
By Obi. O. Akwani
MGV Editor
December is a festive month in Nigeria. It is month in which many communities
across the country hold their different traditional
celebrations and festivals. In 2006 it was a particularly frantic month for
Nigerians. In this bi-religious country in which half the population is Christian and the other, Muslim, the Christians celebrated Christmas to mark the birth of Jesus Christ, on 25th December as usual, while the Muslim high Ramadan happened to fall within the same period on Saturday 30th December. The two holidays falling at the same time has made for the longest holiday period. Even though the 27th and 28th were working days few people remained in their offices for those two days. Monday was New Year's Day and because the Muslim holiday fell on a non-working day, both Tuesday and Wednesday were added to the holidays. People use the holiday to gather for the renewal of family bonds and friendship ties. Traders, civil servants and other workers who had followed the call of their trade and careers into far-flung places use that opportunity to return home to their ancestral villages or to journey to other family centers to be with family and loved ones.
Toward the middle of the month signs of Christmas preparations abounded. In Abuja, the fastest growing city in Nigeria today, the markets were unusually full. Goods and commodity prices were creeping up. The inexplicable long lines at the gas stations that began well before Christmas added to the frenetic atmosphere.
I had made my plans to leave early for my ancestral village, Umuachama Amamba Uzuakoli, but by the 20th I was still in Abuja working to secure some unexpected developments in my business affairs. I planned to spend this Christmas among my clans people, renewing bonds of friendship and getting reacquainted with the life of community. This is the first Christmas holiday season I would be fully spending in Uzuakoli since my father's death in 2004. I wanted to make the most of it.
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Commerce, Niger River
Bridgehead |
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Not nearly half the people that desired to travel during the holidays were able to do so in 2006. Times are hard in Nigeria today, and they have been for a while. Perennial government inefficiencies are taking their toll. Most of the governments (federal and state) operate at less than 30 percent efficiency. What this means is that the resources available to government are wasted. They are not applied to the right things. Social services and infrastructures are starved of funds; the average worker is under-paid; pensioners often do not receive their monthly pensions; some workers often go without pay for periods of time. All of this adds up to a poor performing economy, and the situation has left most Nigerians rather tentative. The holidays are expensive propositions. Nigerians expect it to be so. Christmas is a time of uncommon generosity in Nigeria. But in today’s economy, most people are not willing or able to commit to lavish holiday spending. Apart from the actual cost of the trip, there are other considerations -- family responsibilities and obligations -- all of which cost money. These costs can be kept down, but that is out of the question for some people -- those who have created such a reputation for generosity that they see anything less as amounting to a loss of face. Such people set the pace for event hosting and entertainment.
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Traffic Tie-up
45 Minutes From Lokoja
Travelers are Detouring Right (Foreground) |
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I traveled with two young ladies (my wife's younger sisters) in a van loaded with holiday purchases. Fresh produce like onions and tomatoes are much cheaper in the Abuja area and in the north generally than in the south. I bought two baskets of them. We also had gifts for individual members of our large extended family in the vehicle. We set out on the 22nd of December and discovered that a lot of other people had the same idea as we did. Traffic was thick but moved at a fast clip along Airport Road. The traffic crawl began as we neared the first T-junction after the airport. It took me more than two hours to clear the 50 or so kilometers between Abuja and Gwagwalada -- a satellite town where the main campus of the Abuja University is located. Half-way to Lokoja, the van began to overheat. I had to pull over to check it out. That was when I fell victim of the roadside 'mechanics'. These are people living along the route who look out for holiday travelers with car problems. Most of them are not qualified mechanics, but their object is not to fix your car anyway. Before I knew it, they were dismantling both front wheels of the van. The ball rings were faulty, they assured me. 'Lucky' they caught it when they did, otherwise we stood the danger of having our wheels fly off while speeding down the highway. The bearings would cost me N15,000 each. I looked on with incredulity as I realized that I was in the grip of con men. What I really wanted was to find out why the van was overheating and to be on my way. But time was passing. The van was leaking water and the temperature indicator on the dashboard was faulty. That much the mechanics were able to verify. But fixing the leak proved abortive. They wanted about N20,000 for the gaskets to seal the water leak. I made a few phone calls and found out everything should not cost me more than N3,000, including their
labor. They were still expecting me to fork over N50,000 when they coupled the vehicle back together. Unfortunately for them the van would not start. They had messed up the timing and were stuck.
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Our Conveyance |
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By this time, it was about 5 pm. I had long decided to take my family back to Abuja and try again the next day. It gave me no end of worry that I had to leave the fully laden van in that place over night. The mechanics had assured me the van would be safe, still I made more enquiries and was reasonably assured that it would be safe. The place was a residential area and there were other vehicles parked there. The 'mechanics' though not natives, were long-time residents of nearby houses. My van was packed in their 'workshop' and they admitted that they were responsible for vehicles packed there. They were still expecting to be paid handsomely, so I felt reasonably certain that my van would be safe overnight. I locked up the van and with only our hand luggage, I returned to Abuja with my family. The next day I returned to the van with a qualified mechanic who got it started and running reasonably well within an hour. I accompanied him as he drove the van back to his workshop. Along the way we stopped at the bus station where I put most of the stuff in the van on a way bill for delivery to Umuahia.
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Traffic Holdup Near Ninth Mile Corner, Enugu State |
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The following morning, very early, we boarded a Port Harcourt bound bus. The fare had gone up by 36 percent. The Christmas holiday period seems to bring out the worst and the best in most people in Nigeria. At the grass-roots level all kinds of hucksters, like vultures over a field of gory carnage, tend to appear as from nowhere to prey upon the unwary. From government workers and service providers to robbers and common pickpockets, everyone is looking for a way to gain that extra cash to fund their holiday extravaganza. My 'mechanics' of two days before are good examples. This is also a period when the activities of armed robbers peak. Rate collectors are another set whose ruthless demands on tenants and landlords increase markedly as December approaches. They may not bother for much of the year, but come December they appear, demanding payment on arbitrarily determined and exorbitant bills. They eagerly cut off service just so they can demand reconnection fee -- all cash deals without benefit of invoice or receipt.
It is hard to curb such tendencies because even higher authorities are not immune to it. It so happens that the end of 2006 coincides with a major election in Nigeria. That is probably the reason why certain categories of public employees in some parts of the country have been denied their December pay package. The common speculation is that the unpaid salaries have gone into party campaign war chest. For lack of any worthy explanation forthcoming this reason must suffice. Someone has suggested that Nigerians need to renew emphasis on basic civic lessons, not the classrooms of school children but in the halls and corridors of power.
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Crossing the River Niger |
When we arrived in the east, we discovered that fuel prices had jumped by nearly 100 percent. As one NNPC representative told the press in Abuja, Nigeria had enough fuel reserves for the holidays. The country had over a 36-day stockpile of fuel for the holiday period. But the marketers seem to have a different game plan. In Abuja for instance, fuel line-ups at gas stations had begun two weeks before Christmas. The black-marketers were doing brisk business, but the price of fuel at the pumps remained at N65 per liter of petrol. The rumor was that the apparent scarcity was happening only in Abuja, but this was not true. In the east, the situation was worse. All of the primary marketers like Oando and Texaco had stopped serving fuel. Reseller stations were open and selling between N120 and N200 per liter. This remained the situation throughout the holidays.
The good thing that happened during this period was the way the police and members of the
Federal Road Safety Corps responded to arising situations. There were a record number of these public officials deployed on Nigerian roads. Without them, the inevitable traffic jams could have
paralyzed movement for whole days. Instead the FRSC had officers at every potential point of trouble, untangling traffic and sending motorists on their way. The police too, did a terrific job holding down crime. While the 'mechanics' were working on my van, a police highway patrol team stopped by their workshop. I watched as one of the police officers called them over.
"Oh, you know the police well?" I chided one of them.
"We fix their cars too," he replied, but I could see that he was tense throughout the two or three minutes the police dallied questioning his comrades. I believe that the registered presence of the police contributed to the safety of my van and its contents over-night in that place.
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