Eko-Lagos III
LAGOS, in the immediate post-independence period was still a good place to live in. Migrants were flowing in from all over the place and were being absorbed as had always been the case for more than a hundred years. No sooner did they arrive than they took the trouble to become Lagosians who were soon, for all practical purposes indistinguishable from others in the city on any account. It was soon apparent that Eko/Lagos was a metropolis that could be put side by side with other cities in other parts of the world and the Town Council was soon upgraded to the status of a City Council with considerably more municipal responsibility than ever before. Lagos took her new enhanced status in her stride and went along on its accustomed merry ways. It was at this time however that the city began to expand furiously into the suburbs of Somolu, Bariga, Ajegunle and other such places which had up till then been growing practically unnoticed in the arm pit of the city which had been visible to all. Rent was relatively cheap in those areas and therefore attracted those who did not have the wherewithal to pay the increased and indeed, increasing sums of money demanded by landlords in those areas where the Town/City Council held sway. As expected, the level of municipal responsibility in those areas dropped by more than a fraction. To live in the nether regions of Somolu, Bariga and those other such areas was to be on your own in terms of municipal services which were taken for granted in the more prosperous areas of the city.
Perhaps the most visible effect of the lack of municipal reach in those places was in the field of transport. The narrow streets in those suburbs were not designed to accommodate those big, beautiful buses that served the more established areas of Lagos. There was a large number of people who still required transport to other parts of Lagos and since nature could not abide a vacuum, mini-buses, most of them made by Volkswagen began to operate between those suburbs and the rest of the city as indeed they had been doing for some time in Mushin, Idi-Oro, Agege and those parts which were solidly in the Western Region and were therefore beyond the reach of the cherished authority of the Federal Capital Territory. Then, the operative Federal authority did not go beyond Fadeyi as was claimed by the situation of a large notice board which announced in bold red letters that you were entering Federal territory as soon as you crossed that boundary in Fadeyi. Most bona fide Lagosians of the time did not live beyond the shadow of that intrusive notice board and although municipal bus services were terminated well down the road at the gates of Palm-groove Estate, this was because there was space for a bus station at that point down the road. All other roads were served by the mini buses, danfos as they were colloquially named to signify their independent status from the all powerful Town Council. In strict terms they operated under their own rough and ready code and were soon joined by the real kings of the road, the almighty molue. These were large contraptions which were bus like wooden structures which had been built on the chassis of Bedford lorries which before then had carried the weight of the ubiquitous bolekajas of that period. These contraptions ruled the roads with the proverbial iron fist and other vehicles as well as the municipal authorities gave them a wide berth as they appeared to be answerable only to the authority of their own self appointed union leaders as is still the case. The fear of the molue was certainly a considerable part of street wisdom. The slummification of Lagos had begun and has become intensified over the years until now that many parts of what people insist on calling Lagos extends far into Ogun State and people who live in the other lagoon town of Badagry, many kilometres down the swampy road are, to all intents and purposes, new vintage Lagosians!
All throughout the sixties, Lagos was growing furiously but the growth was not under the control of any recognisable authority. Villages which for a century or more had managed their own little affairs quite harmoniously were suddenly invaded by space hungry strangers in need of a small plot of land on which to put up a modest building which turned them overnight into landlords with all the arbitrariness of that status in a space where roads, drainages and those other signs of municipal authority were only conspicuous by their absence. It is to the credit of the new Lagosians that after a few years, something like a livable urban space is established and the rents begin to climb up to the roof forcing newer Lagosians to strike out into new territories to repeat the process of building other so called urban centres attracting migrants to Lagos. I have very scant knowledge of these newly contrived urban centres and have no choice but to leave them to their own devices.
I left Lagos in 1969 to become a pharmacy student the Ibadan campus of the University of Ife. I left with all the accoutrements of a certified Lagos city boy of that period stuffed into a large blue suitcase of Japanese manufacture. Today, the country of origin of my suitcase would have been China but that story is for another time. When I made that journey out of Lagos, it was with the intention of returning to Lagos at the end of a three year exile but fate had other plans for me which is why more than fifty years later, I have not returned. The furthest point of Lagos of my memory is therefore Ilupeju Estate from where I left for Ibadan all those many years ago. Lagos State was created only a couple of years before I checked out of Lagos and that has changed the complexion of the city on the lagoon. I really have not been able to wrap my head around this contraption that is Lagos State but it has not allowed Lagos to claim its place as a distinct entity, different from those other towns which have taken on the mantle of Lagos without being part of Lagos. And of course there is the added complication of vast areas which have been reclaimed from the sea and which have attracted tons of those new immigrants who have no knowledge of the history or even the geography of a space to which they now have ownership claims. Unlike the waves of migrants who settled in Lagos immediately before and after the Civil war, these migrants owe no allegiance to Lagos regardless of where they came from. They are responsible for the provision of their own municipal facilities and have not developed any serious attachment to any authority but the remote State government to which they pay their taxes and from whom they expect little more than periodic harassment from agents of that remote government apparatus. This is contrary to what obtained in the old Lagos of the sixties and seventies.
The sixties were kind to Lagos because at least for those who were sheltering under the umbrella of the Lagos City Council there were facilities galore which the Lagosian tapped into. I spent seven years in a Lagos secondary school and throughout that period, there was uninterrupted supply of electricity outside the few days period of the general strike led by Michael Imodu, the powerful labour leader of those days. This was no miracle as the ECN power station at Ijora was fully operational at the time and Lagos could boast of a steady supply of electricity as it had done for close to one hundred years at the time. This was one of the features which impressed new Lagosians who were coming into the city from the darkness of their places of origin. Returning to the humble places of their birth was simply unimaginable and they sank their roots into the welcoming, if swampy soil of Lagos. Life was good and Lagos enjoyed it to the full.
Then came a rather strange period in the sweet life of Eko which by now, was more Lagos than Eko. Following all the turmoil of the first and second coups in Nigeria there was an exodus of Ibos of Lagos from their adopted city. One minute they were there, large as life and then in a few short weeks, they had packed bag and baggage and crossed the Niger into the apparent safety of the Eastern Region where they were overtaken by the disaster of the Nigerian civil war. They came back to Lagos as swiftly as they left after the war but they returned, not to Lagos as they knew it but to Lagos State to which they had to seek accommodation afresh as the old Lagos had all but disappeared in their absence. Migrants were pouring into Lagos from all directions of the compass and the gentle but rapid assimilation of the pre-war years had gone, to be replaced by a space within which had become occupied by rats racing down avenues of their own individual designs. Lagos began to expand like a rash into all those unplanned and insanitary suburbs. There was an almighty population explosion which was aided and abetted by the so called oil boom which made mindless money available to Lagosians who suddenly lived by the price rather than the value of the commodities which they sold, bought and consumed in ever increasing quantities. Informal commerce had become the business of Lagos as all manner of items became available for sale on the traffic congested streets of Lagos and her new suburbs.
By the time Lagos ceased to be the capital of Nigeria, it was thought that the congestion which had seized the city by the throat was going to be eased considerably but by that time, Lagos like a malignancy had acquired a life of its own and was no longer dependent on her status as the designated Federal territory. Lagos no longer needed that status which now appears to have become an impediment to the expansion of Lagos. To those of us who can only stand by and see Lagos through a telescope, the changes that have occurred in Lagos in the last fifty years are as inexplicable as they are humongous creating a raunchy environment in which just about anything is possible. To this explosive mix, we must now add a dose of political grand standing which has neatly divided Lagos between the indigenes who are daily becoming more difficult to identify with any degree of certainty and those who identify with Lagos only in terms of the vast business opportunities which characterises Lagos and separates her from all other parts of Nigeria. Lagos throbs with a vitality which is impossible to deny. That conurbation on the lagoon has amply demonstrated the capacity to reinvent itself with the passage of time. It reserves a niche for everyone including the thief and the incurably slothful who have the will to insert themselves into the mix which the new Lagos has created for anyone bold enough to come and win a portion of it for themselves.
The Nation Newspapers