LAGOS IS BURSTING AS A VICTIM OF ITS OWN SUCCESS

Finally, Lagos is bursting as a victim of its own success. From Apapa to Surulere, Mile 2 to Orile, the city is overgrown with trucks. Truck queues that grow daily like wild legumes. Human traffic, vehicular traffic, refuse also growing daily. People are gathering fungus sitting hours in their cars. Sweating inside buses and scratching itchy hairs. Dying inside of trucks.

Wild, smoky trucks—they are headed to Apapa, “to load” goods and distribute across the vastness of Nigeria’s container economy. Toothpick containers, Toothpaste container, and  Electronics. Goods and frivolities produced by foreign wisdom, needed by populous nations that create little. The trucks wait in queue for weeks, sometimes months, delayed by ditches, logistics, and corruption. Lagosians, therefore, stew in their cars in faraway Ojuelegba, waiting for trucks to load in Apapa and move an inch. The truck drivers lay mats under their vehicles to lounge, wake up to piss by the roadside, and drink more gin to replace the discharged liquid.

Lords they are, these truck drivers, feared by the government and by all other motorists. Their trucks are parked atop weakening overhead bridges in defiance to regulations and Ambode’s serial ultimatums. They know he cannot tow away over 5,000 trucks, nor does he have a place to park them if he does. They know the government cannot do anything to them because the situation has moved from being a problem to becoming an impossible complication, just like Nigeria. So the trouble can only deepen rather than ameliorate.

But in the final analysis, truck drivers are not the problem. That politics of exclusion, that deliberate bottleneck inserted by politics to make Aba or Onitsha importers use the Lagos port instead of the ones close to them. It is now clear that the politics that resists the proposal of having working seaports outside of Lagos has failed. Those two-lane roads around Apapa built by colonial power and hardly ever expanded ever since, now bearing the tonnage of transportation for over 170 million people. With the current complication, fixing the roads is now such a task.

Lagos—center of excellence and fulcrum of the Nigerian dystopia. With poor state economies across the nation, Lagos became a major magnet for mindless urbanization, deepening wear and tear on its infrastructure. Huge budgets but, broken down per capita, Lagos spends around N8,000 per Lagosian in a year! It is a state in need of multiple, tolled overhead bridges to be built by public-private partnerships. Yet a State that, in less than a decade, will be completely overwhelmed by people, more trucks, more money but little real value. It will worsen because of the politics that resists ports deregulation.

It is time to leave. Stay and die under the impending rubble. This Lagos, e no go work.

You see why we wail? You see why we insist that this country either gets structurally overhauled or we split already? Yet, all some people could think about is to vote in the next set of gangsters that would gang rape not only the Treasury but hapless Nigerians!