Rough.riders.

This is not what it sounds like. Here I will regale you with tales of brave men who according to national statistics (do we even have those) 86% of whom have balls carved out of pure steel.

All of us have encountered these guys, commercially or as friends, if you haven't, believe me you have missed much my friend.

I for one am adventurous. I like riding things if you know what I mean. No, that's not what I mean, you pervert. I like bikes or okada if u may. There's just this feeling that comes with having the wind in your eyes, sun on your face and terror on your mind. And, and they are cheap, almost reliable and they go where mortal wheels(taxi's) dread to tread.

Stuck in a mile long gridlock? No p. Just call an okada, bush path in the village? No probs. Call an okada, or do u need a get-away vehicle for when you eventually decide to rob a bank(a tempting idea given this economy) say it with me; call an okada.

Awesome, so now that I have sold you on okadas, here's why you should burn them. Keep your popcorn handy, this right here is worthy of an Oscar

#sucks teeth# alryty

It was a Thursday, or Friday, it could have been a Monday. I was writing my school leaving exams(ya WAEC, who writes NECO). I decided to use the very long interval between my papers to do something fun, learn to ride my friend's motorcycle.

The afternoon was hot and Samardina(let's call my friend that) lent me his bike, complimented my mental acuity and pointed out the needlessness to teach me how to actually ride the damned thing and given the praise, I could only smile like a hamster high on weed. So Sam showed me the brakes, the gears and the gas(throttle)...he practically just said a bunch of stuffs. I nodded quite coolly knowing I would look like a lil bitch if I asked him to ride with me, you know as my guide. This stupidity may or may not be due to the presence of some individuals of the opposite sex watching in sheer awe at my figuratively humongous balls.

Long story short, I set about mounting the bike which was a huge success, I kick-started it.
''Everything's cool, you got this" was my mantra. I wanted to go for "you not a lil bitch, you brave" but who was I kidding"

Alas! Motion!! I was actually moving! It was the most amazing feeling ever! I rode and rode admits chants of my awesomeness and for a split second I thought, pls don't laugh, I thought I was the night rider so I proceeded to perform a little stunt for the benefit of my spectators or my huge ego that is immaterial. I took my hand off the handle just for a few seconds.

Well, things went down hill from there, me, the bike. My fall made Jack and Jill's look like child's play. No pun intended.

There was silence, which I thought was a bad thing until a roar-like laughter ensued amongst my dear fellow students. Don't worry I wasn't seriously injured, except of course for a few bruises here and there, on my knee, ankle, ego.

Now this is something I want to clarify and I hope some of you guys there that day read this. I DID NOT CRY. See, what happened was, there was a lot of dust and some of it got in my eyes and their was no water around so nature decided to lend a helping hand, unlike you douches! And my eyes got a little wet just to wash away the dust and not as a response to any pain or embarrassment whatsoever!

My experience apart, according to national statistics; motorcycles cause 86% of road accidents and a few sea accidents I've seen. The other 14% is due to ignorance or goats or any combination thereof (I mean ignorant goats). They don't know traffic rules and signs mostly because unlike with cars, there are no riding schools (fore said goats).

So you can understand my transition to team four wheels. And I haven't been driving for long and these guys are beginning to get on my nerve endings. Not unlike MTN, they are everywhere you go! In other to beat traffic, these guys part the red sea everyday, Moses, in the words of Olamide, is a learner compared to them.

And you would think these things should at least have a weight limit on them. It always makes me nervous when I see a hungry-man sized person on a bike, too many things could go wrong!

Now in reference to the above story, do not draw to any hastily unfounded conclusions that I am a sissy. Personally I eat danger for breakfast, lunch and dinner. But the idea of losing a testicle to a bike accident seems hardly appealing.

Do you know what's even worse? As incredible as it sounds, I have had even worse experiences than my little accident at the hands of these commercial motorcyclists and I'm the amateur! I know right? Unbelievable! So since I obviously am not to blame, I won't blame the bikers either. That leaves only the bikes themselves to blame. Yes! The motorcycle did it!! Bad motorcycle, bad.

***
And the Oscar for best motion picture goes to......

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Road.Tripping.

 

I didn’t know how much longer I could hang on. I closed my eyes and then opened them and tried to focus, but all I could feel was the pain. Please God, help me make it out of this alive. I willed the words to come out of my mouth but instead, only silence. I looked at the clock in the front and wondered how many hours we were from Port Harcourt.                                                                             

I frantically tried to convince myself I was overreacting. What kind of loser died from a full bladder? Myself didn’t listen. I looked at the clock in the front again…

14:40.Please I need to ease myself          

The words we were trained to recite in primary school when we needed to take a piss. In this instance though, it would just piss off my captors, because we left a public restroom less than thirty minutes ago.                                                                   

Don’t overthink it, just say it.                                 

 JUST STOP!!!                                                           

 And the car just…stopped. My heart flew to my mouth.

I know I didn’t just say that out loud. There was no way, I briefly entertained the possibility that I had stopped the car with the power of my mind, or with my chi, or maybe I was the last in a long line of powerful warlocks and my folks at home didn’t tell me for my own protection.

The Beard turned around and looked me squarely in the eyes.                                                    

I looked right back, focusing all my mental energy on turning him into axe body spray.                          

 My warlock theory just didn’t hold water              

But I wasn’t ready to accept that just yet              

 “Let me buy ukwa”                                                      

 I thought “abeg do fast so I can get home faster”

So I said “okay”.   

The man got  down and I watch him weave his way through a sea of traders, sweaty, arms outstretched, calling,  grasping at whatever article of clothing they can lay their hands on, but mostly his jet black, magnificent beard, very much like zombies.          

“You sabi road?”

Zombie market.

“You’re the one I’m talking to”

If I knew the road then I, and not you, will be driving.

“Oh I been think say you still dey for phone”

“So you sabi pidgin sef? I think say you no go ever sabi am”

Cheesy was looking at me out of bloodshot eyes and the driver seat. One of my biggest fears was and still is that I’ll grow up and my eyes will become like that. Neither of my parents have bloodshot eyes, so my fears were completely unmerited. Nevertheless, I avoided the plant like alpha avoids beetle after an argument, on Sundays, in the mornings and on weekdays.

I looked out of the window, away from those eyes, at the beard haggling with a trader. Five minutes had passed. A very long time for one measly bottle of ukwa.

Beetle used to say pidgin was the first language I learnt, even before English. Beetle lies a lot. But I do know pidgin, yes. My pidgin skills have sharpened to a point by a colony of house helps. 18-ish girls that defied the laws of nature to speak English when my parents were around, but the universe was always restored to order once my parents travelled. 

 I picked up calabar pidgin from Gift, who followed us to church for bible study every Thursday and got pregnant while in our house. I know, it sounds like the kind of thing you watch on super story but I’m for real. When she left she called her boyfriend, a thug and they both stood outside the gate raining curses on my mom.

I picked up a little Akwa-Ibom from Uduak, and by "a little", I mean the word for “egg” in Akwa-Ibom.

Nsen unen.

That’s eight letters, four syllables and two words just for one egg. Confused? Don't worry, so is the egg.

 Then there was Ebere whose only crime was sleeping with a candle still lit. Nothing happened, but Beetle said she almost set the house on fire so she had to go.

 They seemed to have come to an agreement, the beard and zombie #7KA1. He handed her a crisp 1000 naira note from a wad of similarly crisp 1000 naira notes and smiled. She extended her dry, furrowed claw-hands and collected it, then smiled. The beard smiled again. I felt like throwing up. The beard was visibly impressed with his negotiation skills and cheesy did nothing to puncture his ego.

“Uncle how much did the bottle cost?"                                

I didn't want to hear his reply. Even if he somehow managed to supress his accent and patronizing tone, thereby hiding his American-ness from one sense, all the other senses immediately picked up on it. The beard looked, smelled, felt and probably tasted American (he even got one of those super strong, super ugly casings for his IPhone. Hello? In Nigeria we don’t hide or disfigure IPhones), when you add that to the fact that Nigerian women market women are psychic, sensing weakness, fear and of course money, (just like zombies, in a way) you got the feeling that he was Daniel, walking into the lions den. You know, if it had real National Geographic lions, and not those giant pussies (figurative and literal) the real Daniel encountered.

He would go back to the land of the free to tell the tale of this epic escapade in an African market, with emphasis on how he priced a six hundred naira bottle of ukwa from one thousand naira to nine hundred and seventy five naira. Equipped only with American allure, and a truly epic beard.  Amateur.

2:50.Still no silver lining to my dilemma. I have what my family doctor calls "urinary incontinence", to normal people that means my bladder and I are not on speaking terms.  I like to imagine he got that diagnosis after receiving a very strongly worded text message (from you know who). Anyhow sha, I've decided to stand up to it today. For if your faith be as a mustard seed...

2:55. “many of these drivers don’t care for the lives of people on the road”

A lorry had just passed us and cheesy was delivering a mini-lecture on how the behaviour of Nigerian drivers is a reflection of a failed government, while a woman on the radio was explaining why Nigerians who normally don’t give two shits become expert sociologists and political analysts when in the presence of Americans.

A few years ago an uncle returned from the states and a cousin, who was living with us then, when we went out was just giving him the 411 on all the problems in the country, ending each sentence with “so that’s how it is here ooh” As if she was giving him reasons to take her back with him. He left a week later. He did not take her with him.

Cheesy had moved on to police extortion at checkpoints, the woman on the radio called it “the duplicity of Nigerian folk”.

3:15. Cheesy kept his foot on the pedal of the car and the stories he told the beard.                            
It seemed the moral lesson of each one was “Nigeria is a corrupt place”. He told stories of police brutality, exam malpractice, oil bunkering, embezzlement and the like. Gradually, I became Interested. Because cheesy was telling exaggerated stories. He was describing Zimbabwe.                                                                     

 I was witnessing the birth of a new George R.R. Martin

“Do you want some?”

The beard was looking at me. I tried to read his face. Maybe he too didn’t believe cheesy and thought he should shut up.

“Thank you”

For a moment I was tempted to say no, so I could enjoy watching him misplace like four teeth in his beard trying to finish one thousand naira ukwa but himself. (If you’re not looking at the time stamps, which is something you should be doing, he bought that thirty five minutes ago) I gladly carried his burden.

3:30.We went past a police checkpoint without so much as being looked at twice. I felt like telling the beard something, but cheesy was still talking so I decided to let it be. I felt I should let him form his own impression and not anybody else’s. I tried the car stopping warlock/telepathy/chi trick with Cheesy but he didn’t budge.                                                             

 And so he kept on talking. Another police checkpoint loomed large in the distance, and I focused all my energies on shielding our car from the gaze of evil forces.

We went past it.

Then I saw George R.R. Martin peering at me curiously through the rear view mirror.

I made a mental note to ask him for his autograph the moment we got home, because it would be hard when he became a famous fiction author.

I cannot categorically say how these thoughts crossed my mind, my working theory is that some urine escaped from my bladder into my bloodstream and got me high.

3:55. “do you know the road here?”

 I did know the road, because I’ve only been on it a hundred times, but what Cheesy meant was “what way do I go?” and to that, I’ll be damned if I knew. Still though, I looked out of the window and pretend to study the landscape, and after what felt like an adequate time-lapse said…

“Go straight”

“Are you sure?”

I wasn't but I had already said "go straight" and I am a man of my word. A part of me wanted to say no, (the superior part actually) because not knowing the road is not something you should never be ashamed of, you can always ask for directions. That’s what God created those people selling gala and plantain chips for.

“Yes, go straight”

My bladder sent me a warning shot.

to be continued...

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Black.Sheep.

 

So this article is about  how the average Nigerian seems to be missing this crucial feature.You don't agree?. Take a look around you, poorly constructed roads, buildings, contracts outsourced to the hilariously under qualified, etc. It isn't pretty. And why should you care average Nigerian? This defect applies to only the top tiers of government right? I mean on a basic level the Nigerian takes as much pride in his work as the next guy right? At least we don.t have civil servants showing up hours late to work, and our road sweepers show up at six in the morning  way before there's any traffic, and our police force and paramilitary....

You're laughing so hard I can almost hear you, even while writing this. Because you know what every other citizen of this country knows. You know you have this defect, you are the typical Nigerian. See when a comedian makes a joke at the expense of his audience, they all laugh. They laugh because they think they are the exception. Each and everyone of them  is thinking  "oh he isn't talking about me, I don't do that. All these other 10,000 people do that though, but not me". This is only human nature. In the light of this, please know that this is directed at no one else but you. You the taxi driver, you the General manager, you the student and you the jobless person on the internet(if you're reading this you're not).

 Take this scenario, to illustrate.You own the M&M company. (Those small sugar coated chocolate balls they market as candy, you know them). And in the line of production, a batch (lets say 250,000) have the M's misprinted and they read M&N's instead of M%M's. Now there's no way to correct this error short of melting them and starting over, and the chocolate company owners reading this would know that that line of action would set production hours back and cut profits by a size-able amount.                                                                                                                        
Would you?
a) remelt them and start from scratch.

b) continue with production.

Chances are you went for the second option(this applies only to Nigerians). Common logic dictates it. M&M's for crying out loud. These are the things you shovel into your mouth by the handful without thinking. It's not like anyone would calm down and inspect them before eating. Seriously they're so tiny, plus 75% of their customer base cannot read.(this is what happens when you market a product exclusively to toddlers.) What kind of wasteful human beings will flush hours of hard work down the drain? The owners of M&M's that.s who. I bet you with your Nigerian sense would never do that.

I easily derail from the point I'm making . Please bear with me. Where were we at again?  You Sir are the embodiment of everything wrong with this country. And the cause. You're both the embodiment and the cause. We as a country have collectively blamed our leaders for too long, while sitting on our hands watching our boat slowly sink, like a junkie that knows he's being robbed but is too stoned to do anything about it. See if the leaders are bad, its because we are bad. You can't pick an apple out of a basket of rotten apples and say "oh how come is it that every time i pick an apple out of this basket it turns out to be rotten" and then drop it and pick another apple. Odds are the next apple will be rotten.You have to do something about the whole basket and stop dumbly picking apples. I'm not saying Nigeria is composed of entirely bad people. There's always black sheep in every organization(ironically the black sheep in this case would be the good sheep). So if my tirade has offended your ego please feel free to assume that you are one of the twenty or so good citizens of Nigeria. But remember that we can't all be the black sheep is what I'm saying.

We all are rulers, primarily of ourselves. If we can't make the next person adhere to a set of rules or behave in a certain way, at least we can to ourselves. Food for thought as we usher in a new era of leadership.

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