Welcome to Lagos: An Eko O Ni Baje Story
Eko, aka Lagos, is big yet small. It is the smallest state in Nigeria by land mass — a fact likely to remain true into the foreseeable future as Lagos’ coastline gets slowly eaten away by the Atlantic — a phenomenon for which rising sea levels are partly responsible. And what’s causing the increase in ocean water volume that threatens to upend life as you know it in Eko? Global warming.
Historically, neither Nigeria nor Africa could be liable for the climate-fueled disaster sinking Lagos. No. The problem is foreign-made. In fact, Africa accounts for about just 4 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. Richer countries like the United States, which had an early start in industrialisation, burned for centuries and still burn carbon-rich fossil fuels like coal and oil to satisfy their ravenous energy needs.
If you think I’m suggesting that the US, UK, France, Germany, and the Western world should pay climate reparations to fund efforts by developing countries like Nigeria to adapt cities like Lagos to rising sea levels and other climate-related disasters, damn right.
Fun fact: Though worlds apart, Jakarta is to Indonesia what Lagos is to Nigeria. Both cities are the major economic arteries of their respective countries. However, both cities are coastal cities that, inch by inch, are becoming Atlantis — they are going into the ocean. And, just like Lagos was replaced by Abuja as Nigeria’s capital city in 1991, Nusantara is expected to replace Jakarta as Indonesia’s capital sometime this year.
Nevertheless, I digress. This story isn’t a rant on global climate inequity; it’s about my return to Lagos and its haywire idiosyncrasies. They say when you are in Rome, you should act like a Roman, but no matter how many times I come to Lagos, I don’t think I can ever act like a Lagosian in the true sense. I have started jumping off moving buses — an experience that is exhilarating but one that I would never accept as normal.
Lagos is off the rails, and so are the people living there. Many strange happenings have been normalised as a way of life here. On my second day back to the city, I was in a Danfo when the conductor — an agbero pulled out a kitchen knife from a crevice in the carcass of the bus, barely missing the supple cheeks of the young lady sitting next to me. While hitting the bus violently and hurling curses in Yoruba, he thrust the kitchen knife in the air toward the direction of another agbero on the road who apparently offended him. “Ahhh!” I exclaimed to myself as everyone but myself and the young lady whose face was almost defaced — literally, was stoic.
The agbero issue in Lagos worries me as you cannot live in Lagos as a poor or middle-class person without interacting with this menacing set of individuals. Don’t get me wrong; there are menacing agberos out there who are sweethearts. Being menacing is just part of the trade. That said, there’s no way the producers of Mad Max were not somehow inspired by Lagos’ rough agbero lifestyle. The agbero, ranging from as young as 13 years old to older egbons that look like they have 10 kids depending on them, are at every bus stop, street corner, and market around the city. That’s, of course, except where the bourgeoisie stays in Lagos. It would be a wonder to find an agbero in the crème de la crème streets of Banana Island.
In short, the agbero culture in Lagos has been institutionalised. The agberos are an integral cog in the ever-complex machine that is Lagos. They load the busses — the city’s most common means of transport. They also assist the Lagos government in collecting certain taxes, like those levied on commercial vehicles in the city.
Earlier, in 2021, I had an unfortunate encounter in Lagos where a policeman and an agbero tag teamed to extort me. On my way back to Gbagada from a wedding in Amuwo Odofin, my bolt was stopped by a police officer who, well within his rights, searched me and asked for identification. Things nevertheless started taking a twist when I didn’t have any valid means of identification. The police officer, now thinking to himself, “I don catch fish”, then asked me to produce my phone to be searched. Compliant, I handed over my phone to him, and he handed over the phone to one raggedy agbero that he referred to as their IT specialist. I watched in dismay as the said IT specialist, who was clearly a street urchin, scrolled aimlessly through my phone.
About 30 minutes after the farce ensued, unable to find anything to implicate me, the police officer came forward to ask for money, a request I reluctantly responded to by clapping one thousand naira note into his rough hands. At that moment, all I wanted was for the fever dream I was living to end so I could go back home. Ultimately, I was glad that the bolt driver who witnessed the entire incident scolded me for being complicit. He radicalised me. He counselled me that as long as I did nothing wrong and it’s still daytime in Lagos, I should not gree for the police and their gimmicks.
Nevertheless, aside from the agberos that seem to be embedded deep in the Lagos DNA, traffic also defines the city. To say that the traffic in Lagos is terrible is an understatement. Clearly, the transport infrastructure, among many other infrastructures like waste disposal, is bursting at the seams in the city of about 15 million.
In just the first week of my fourth time coming to Lagos, I was again reminded of the hate in my love-hate relationship with the city. Lagosians may see it as normal, but spending an hour and forty minutes travelling 26 kilometres is not normal. That’s an hour more than I would have spent on the road in Abuja. What’s worse? People like yours truly who are under capitalism’s stranglehold have to bend their sleep schedules to account for traffic and make it on time for work.
Have I mentioned the stench? Don’t even get me started. Everything in Lagos reeks. Maybe that’s a little exaggeration, but the lagoons, the gutters, the people in Danfo, even people at the offices — all produce a bad odour that nauseates. Unsurprisingly, the Lagos stench doesn’t seem to bother Lagosians.
Alas, the popular saying, “Eko o ni baje,” which means “Lagos will not spoil,” seems to me to be ironic as Lagos is indeed spoiling. Lagos is sinking — literally, and saying that the city will not spoil without acting on it won’t save it. I have long been an advocate for Operation Decongest Lagos: ODL. Decongesting Lagos should have been a national agenda before the turn of the 21st century, but unfortunately, the Nigerian factor has been at play and still is.
In my ideal world, industries would be moved out of Lagos in a manner that is already unfolding with the migration of industries from Lagos to its neighbour, Ogun state, more specifically, Ota. The logic is that the trend of people flocking to Lagos because of the mouthwatering economic opportunities can be stemmed and even reversed by the Nigerian government at all levels coordinating to provide infrastructure like roads, ports, and electricity in other cities like Onitsha, Warri, Kano, Calabar, Port Harcourt, and countless others to woo the industries that employ people.
