I remember my past commutes to Ojota, which literally means where bullets collide (literarily it means, if you’re brave enough, enter the fray).
I remember the blind man I helped across the old pedestrian bridge at Ojota, it’s probably the most memorable event from when I commuted to work by bus. And I think it was the last time I used the footbridge.
He was dark, tall, with round cheeks and dressed in a pale cream Senegalese-styled buba and sokoto. The edge of his flowing buba was stained with mud, a thin film of dust hid the sheen of his black pointed shoes. I was on a queue inching its way up the bridge when he eased himself ahead of me, feeling his way through the air with measured steps. I dislike this. A woman I once snubbed snapped back, you never know where we’ll meet again in life. Another ripped me with her stare, who even asked you for space?
The blind, pregnant and elderly were exceptions. Could he cope on his own? Would it be callous to overtake him, as I did slowcoaches, once on the bridge? There was time, it wasn’t nine. And so I said good morning and held his elbow; an unspoken offer to be his guide.
When we reached the top, his right hand reached instinctively for the handrail and he walked on like it was a rehearsal. Matching his pace behind him, I felt like a waka-pass as we crossed over Ikorodu Road. When we got to the end of the bridge, the grating sensation of sand against the worn rust-brown concrete staircase accompanied our slow descent.
Under the shade of the bridge, wares were on offer for small change: recharge cards, sweets and kola nuts, handkerchiefs, chintzy designer sunshades, bananas, self-help books on how to be a consultant and write love letters or, for about a week, blaring from a loudspeaker, the disembodied voice of a salesman marketing in fluent pidgin a DIY booklet for mobile phones for a promo price of ₦100. The blind man stopped here to buy airtime from a vendor. She always has a yellow tarp with the logos and rates of the mobile networks on her laps, and her young son is never a tug too far away.
He wanted to load his mobile phones with airtime; one was a purple flip phone another was bound with rubber band, all four had scratched screens. He knew the promos each mobile network offered and insisted we confirm if, in addition to airtime, he was credited with bonus bandwidth. I, the vendor and a scruffy man with dirty nails, strained our eyes to read the balance. This took time. He got grouchy and threatened not to pay. Abi uncle didn’t I tell her what I wanted? When he turned his bulgy restless eyes on me for the first time, they stung. I felt awkward.
Maybe I was more than a movie extra. Why compliment me with uncle, when sir or brother would do? Were the vendor and man with the dirty nails in cahoots with him? I felt like the target of a routine scam and rued the moment I offered to help. When the hassle ended, I’d lost track of the total amount due. He knew. I don’t know if naira notes come with Braille but he extracted them like he could tell their value with the slightest touch. I walked him to Kudirat Abiola Street, just across the Ojota bus park, where he planned to get an okada to a bank.
Ojota stinks.
The entire area is marked with a stubborn acrid stain that only fades the farther away from it. In the bus park, sand, spittle and plastic sachets are all over the uneven rubble-strewn surface. A fetid cocktail of human waste and marijuana suffocates the air. The gutter by the bus park is a urinal. Every discarded black poly bag, banana peel mashed into brown mush, and islands of wet patches looked suspicious. In the park, I moved like a sapper through a minefield. Most pedestrians cover their noses when they pass by. Occasionally, when the smell slips into our nose or we can’t hold our breath for much longer, we spit into the gutter. And navigate our way to queue for a bus to cart us away from the stench.
The new pedestrian bridge at Ojota was still under construction when I saw it (actually it was pointed out to me). I didn’t realise it was there until I told a friend about the foot traffic that thronged across the old bridge. He insisted I look beyond the usual perimeter I had set my eyes, to look where my eyes hardly ventured whenever I was in Ojota.
Once I took notice of the bridge I knew it was a wannabe. It’s a copycat of the Lekki-Ikoyi Link Bridge (Nigeria’s first cable stayed bridge) which in four years, has become the most recognisable landmark of Lagos. Pre-wedding albums are incomplete without a photo shoot on the bridge. I’ve seen prenuptial pictures of smitten newlyweds on it—the bride’s arm around the groom with her fingers clasped possessively upon his shoulder. Its strobe-lit pylon forms the backdrop of Mr Eazi’s “Accra to Lagos” album. And there’s the selfie Mark Zuckerberg took while jogging on it.
Beyond night shots of the pedestrian bridge to celebrate its opening, I doubt if Ojota’s new landmark will be considered a choice location for photo shoots and selfies (though I saw someone take a selfie on it). Still, its distinctiveness and function justify its swagger. No other footbridge in Lagos has aimed beyond the humdrum ambition to safely connect pedestrians from one end to another. Besides, most of the footbridges along the Ikorodu Road (and the Lekki-Epe Expressway) are cookie-cutter chunks of concrete.
Fresh, big, wide and coated garishly in silver paint, the new pedestrian bridge at Ojota is showier than the aged, small, narrow and sooted concrete bridge a short walk away. Its two pairs of ramps and staircases are roomier, and admit walkers and cyclists and wheelchairs and pushcarts and wheelbarrows.
For years, pedestrians preferred to course across the expressway, negotiating the capricious current of cars along Ikorodu Road. My heart skips several beats whenever I see them rush across the expressway.. The impulse with which they do so still jars me. I’ve seen a woman with a bandaged leg limp across the expressway to the Orthopaedic Hospital, oblivious of a pedestrian bridge a few metres away, as if the bridge was one more obstacle course to outmanoeuvre. When green fences were erected along the median of Ikorodu Road it compelled pedestrians to use the footbridges. That of Ojota was unable to support the surge.
Around April 2016, newspapers echoed the complaints and groans of Lagosians. Crossing the expressway had never been so difficult; pictures of pedestrians queuing to get on the bridge appeared on social media. In September, the governor said a new bridge would be up in weeks. Bridge engineers: math mavens with magical and mantic powers, factored load capacity, weather, weight of footfalls, wear, tear and damage into their designs and threw metal and concrete at the problem. As one of several events to mark the 50th anniversary of Lagos, the governor unveiled a plaque to commission the new bridge in May 2017. I began to commute to Ojota seven months earlier.
Most mornings I rode on the cavalcade of BRT buses that shuttle thousands every day on a dedicated lane between Lagos Island and Ikorodu. The ride from Barracks bus stop to Ojota is a rhythmical, almost predictable, trip—a calm interlude to pray, read or sit walled within my thoughts like other passengers. I buy my ticket without hassle, get my change with minimum wrangles and enter the waiting air-conditioned bus without a tussle. There is no conductor, and so, no yelling of sporadic stops; instead passengers push a red button minutes before a designated bus stop, and the pilot eases the bus to a halt.
Once it sets off, it leaves in its wake numerous buildings in Fadeyi and Obanikoro, which, I assume, are done in Afro-Brazilian design. The quick transition from one stop to the other blurs their order in my mind. From the Orthopaedic Hospital at Igbobi to Palmgrove Estate, Onipanu, then past St Agnes, Maryland I often omit Anthony and the bus stop before Maryland Shopping Mall. By then we are at Ojota where once I descend, as if from an airlock, I hear the pneumatic doors hiss shut.
After frequent commutes to Ojota I got accustomed to the stench but the first time I was smothered with an undesired embrace. Intermingled in the din, bustle and stench of Ojota, the queue of pedestrians extends from the foot of the bridge past conductors who bark their route and hustle passengers into revving beat-up canary yellow danfos. Often, the tail of the queue snakes past the Efex Motors garage into the street that leads to Ogudu GRA. I’ve seen BRT co-commuters jump the queue; riding on the BRT has no calming effect on their nerves. Or is it the mentality that in Lagos fortune favours the sharp? Lagos chews and spews the gentle. It could be that tranquil bus trips can’t defuse the stress accumulated from hot, short nights spent in mosquito-infested windowless rooms. Still, most of us respect ourselves.
So many people use the Ojota footbridge. The view from below as they flow across is of bodiless heads bobbing along the bridge. Metal rails split the staircases in two to corral the mass of pedestrians up and down the bridge. Several shunt their way through descending pedestrians. Often at the foot of the bridge, a blind woman in a brown blouse and orange print wrapper sings while her daughter begs, uncle, aunty, help my mother, God bless you. At the same spot, a bald lanky dolt asks for money and addresses every passing woman as his wife; sometimes he’s either cajoling pedestrians to go against the flow of traffic or muttering abuses at those who do. On a couple of days, a trio—a child with a pitiful disorder and two adults with the green bags, the kind passed during offertory in church—beg for money.
As we ascend, my eyes are fixed on the heels of the person ahead of me. I take care not to step on them. And as we creep along, our hands clasped to our valuables, I’m mindful not to kick the shin of the person behind. As we trickle across the bridge and down, most of us spill into Kudirat Abiola, which cuts through Oregun up to Mobolaji Anthony Way.
I took my friend’s advice and began a routine reconnaissance while crossing the old bridge to monitor the progress of the new one. I saw the source of the now familiar smell the first time I used the new bridge. Plumes of acrid smoke smoulder as trucks that look like toys sit atop a mountain range of waste. It’s extent, I realised, was visible from either of the pedestrian bridges. Lagos generates garbage faster than the trucks dismount; mounds of litter line street corners, gutters and bus stops. Plans to handover the city’s waste collection to a private company was resisted stiffly.
The view from the new pedestrian bridge, however, is an impeded close-up of Olushosun, Africa’s largest dumpsite. This 100-acre landfill was once on the outskirts of the city but houses and businesses have sprawled around it as Lagos caught up with the waste that was formerly out of sight. It reportedly receives 2,400 metric tons of thrash every day.
Waste shrinks as it rots yet Olushosun, a tumuli of garbage, swells with rubbish. I imagine what information can be excavated from this most unsanitary landfill of mainly rotting vegetables, emitting the most pungent of smells. An honest account of our behaviour, the true population of Lagos including age, income, dietary habits etc? (An art exhibition of discarded stoves by Ndidi Dike reminded me of the use and beauty of junk though her message was, trash is vast but power is scarce).
Olushosun is a sore indication of Lagos’ rapid growth, a funerary monument to our unwanted, unused, rejected materials from which metal, plastic, paper and much else are scoured, rummaged, salvaged, sold and re-used by thousands who call it home. Welcome to Lagos where resilience and resourcefulness go hand in hand.
I’ve sat huddled in clunky Suzuki minibuses stewing in the soporific early morning sun waiting for the bus to fill up while hawkers dangle perfumes and handkerchiefs before passengers. As I hurry to catch the BRT back home, I ramble past traders of second-hand clothes peddling polo shirts for two, two hundred naira every evening. I’ve overheard conversations, complaints, comments and brawls in yellow motorized tricycles and danfos.
One evening while held up in the traffic that almost always occurs at the intersection of Opebi Link Road, I heard a man moan, dis government no change anything, na carryover we dey. On posters celebrating the 50th anniversary of the state, Lagos’ finest and brightest and several nameless others praise the city of their dreams.
Tayo Fagbule
