Looking for Transwonderland (19 page)

Nigeria's cycle of corruption and eroded trust locks the country in a tailspin. Nigerians have become pessimistic about their chances
of succeeding through normal channels, yet wealth remains a culturally important goal. This coupling of ambition with non-opportunity seems to have fuelled corruption even further. Politics becomes the only route to enrichment, and once the ministers have clubbed, kicked and clawed their way to power, they plunge elbow-deep into our government tills with breathtaking abandon.

Former dictator Sani Abacha helped himself to an estimated $6 billion. The EFCC uncovered a catalogue of financial skulduggery. Joshua Dariye, a governor of Plateau State, reportedly stole nearly $35 million, which he kept in twenty-five different bank accounts in London. Bayelsa State governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha was arrested in London where he was allegedly found to have properties worth £10 million, plus £1 million of cash stashed in one of his bedrooms. Another £2 million lay in a British bank account, it was reported. This was in addition to bank accounts traced to Cyprus, Denmark, USA and the Bahamas.

Some researchers say that dishonest politicians use this money to maintain patronage and influence in Nigeria; much of the rest is stashed overseas rather than invested in Nigeria's economy. In some Asian countries such as South Korea, investing ill-gotten money abroad is considered to be virtually an act of treason – South Koreans keep their money within their borders and use it to maintain the world's fourth largest economy.

My father never bought into the Nigerian system of corruption. I was blind to the virtue behind our modest home and few holidays, and I resented his frugality and non-materialism. I craved a luxurious lifestyle. But he held an intense disdain for such things. Once, when I was eleven years old, I told him the names of all the Nigerian girls at my school. One girl's name stuck out.

‘Her father is a very bad man,' my father murmured between puffs of his pipe. I asked him why. Silently, he stared ahead, refusing to elaborate on it. ‘I will tell you when you're older,' he said. He was killed before he had the chance to fill me in, though his
murder was an answer of sorts. Seeing the crude lengths to which politicians were prepared to go to protect their wealth dented my idealism rather abruptly. Up until age nineteen, I thought the world was a more malleable place, that the difference between poverty and prosperity was ‘change', which simply required willing and tenacious agents. Life hadn't yet taught me how sociopathic greed can be. But after my father's murder, I realised that corruption was a monster that could vanquish even the toughest moral warriors.

 

 

I stepped out onto the expressway to flag down a taxi. The pale tarred road was broad and clean and quiet, except for the occasional zoom of a passing car. The government had also introduced zero-tolerance planning laws, which it exercised ruthlessly, demolishing any buildings that fell foul of the Land Use Act. This, coupled with the okada ban, bestowed Abuja's uncluttered streets with an eerie and thoroughly un-Nigerian serenity. Pleasant as the effect was, it seemed a shame that the city could only achieve its orderliness by stripping itself of everyday Nigerian life.

My taxi driver dropped me off at the Wonderland Amusement Park on the edge of town. Like most places in Abuja, this amusement park was gleaming and modern, a sparklingly redemptive jewel that obscured all memory of Ibadan's Transwonderland. Beyond the fairy-tale castle entrance and water fountain, a few families ate ice cream and strolled through the largely empty park. A diaspora teenager, perhaps the child of a diplomat or businessman, chatted on her cell phone in a strong Californian accent as she strolled with her brunette friend. Despite the 37°C heat, a man dressed head to toe in a Spiderman outfit (including a completely covered face) sold balloons and paced about the place with the speed and zeal of a street hawker, squeaking and hissing for customers' attention.

‘Aren't you hot in that outfit?' I asked him. He stalked off without answering, annoyed that I wasn't buying a balloon.

I lined up for the roller coaster. It consisted of one carriage with space for a lone individual. I watched it zip along the track, soaring and diving in all directions. Curiously, the boy passenger was burying his head between his knees throughout the ride. At the end, he disembarked, looking shaken.

I soon discovered why. My carriage started along the uphill track with a jolt so forceful it instantly wiped the smile off my face. The ‘protective' metal crossbar lay nearly a metre in front of me, meaning I had to lean forward in order to grasp it. And though the aircraft-style safety belt kept my thighs securely in place, it left my shoulders and back completely exposed. Each time the carriage turned a violent corner, I had to clutch the crossbar with all my strength to stop my torso being flung over the side. The ride turned out to be a white-knuckle battle to avoid injury, typically and amusingly Nigerian in its disregard for comfort and safety.

Nursing a slightly sore back, I took a cab to the Garki district, once an indigenous village but now swallowed up by Abuja. The residents weren't wealthy. Here, Abuja gave up on its pretensions to be a modern city with good infrastructure for all. One street, the aptly named Lagos Crescent, was a tatty confection of potholes, giant rainwater puddles and cheap shop stalls, a surprise oasis of the real Nigeria. Abuja came alive here.

On a leafy street corner, I encountered a group of youngish men engaged in a loud, animated conversation.

‘I want to live in Russia!' one of them shouted. ‘Because there is plenty of vodka there. Vodka, I
like
. . . there is no
vodka
in my life!' The man launched into a theory about Russia becoming the world's superpower this century. His friends and I disagreed.

‘What makes you think so?' I asked, inviting myself into what I thought was a refreshingly intellectual conversation.

‘Russia is an ally of the Arabs, so it will become a superpower soon,' he replied. ‘It says so in the Bible.'

I walked on.

 

My bus rolled north out of Abuja and circulated endlessly through the spaghetti junction, still sparse and new-looking after all these years. The road uncoiled into the highway towards Zaria, cutting through sandy, scrubby plains that continued for miles, providing ample space for Abuja's urban expansion. We passed Abuja Model City, a gated community of brand-new houses organised in tidy, toy-like rows in the midst of this semi-desert, like pioneers in a brave new world of orderliness. I wondered how long Model City would last before sinking into the quicksand of Nigerian urban decline.

I was on my way to Zuma Rock, a large, dome-shaped volcanic inselberg, known as the ‘Ayers Rock of Nigeria', an iconic symbol of the central region. Zuma Rock was one of the few places from 1988 that I remembered clearly. My father, brother, sister and I had climbed out of the car and stood on the empty highway to observe the giant monolith. My father said you could see a man's face on the rock, a quirk of natural erosion. Everyone except me seemed able to spot it.

‘Can't you see the eye?' my brother Tedum asked incredulously. ‘It's there . . .
there
!' I thought they were all hallucinating.

Perhaps I would see it this time around. For the last portion of my journey from Abuja, I switched to an okada. After going a week without these bikes, I realised how much I loved them. Though fraught with danger and often ridden by reckless drunks in a hurry, okadas were exciting, liberating and cheap, and they appealed to a downwardly mobile side to my character I hadn't known existed. I would use this form of transport even if I were a billionaire.

Minutes later, as we crested a hill, Zuma Rock rose suddenly and
magnificently out of the otherwise featureless, yellowy landscape. Its dark, striated dome stood several hundred metres high and held dominion over the scenery for miles around. After days in Abuja's flatness, my eyes needed to adjust to this topographical excitement. Back in 1988, the surrounding landscape was a flat and barely populated expanse of trees and sandy soil. Now, traffic in the area around the rock droned more densely, and the previously deserted plateau shone with corrugated rooftops.

This time, my eyes could decipher the outline of a cone-headed alien with a dark round eye. I wanted to phone Tedum and tell him I could finally see the ‘man' on the rock. But there was nobody to call: five years after first visiting here, he died suddenly from heart failure, two years before our father was killed. My sister is now the only living link with that day. Revisiting Zuma Rock by myself felt like a physical expression of the family's loss, and all morning I had been worried that coming here might disrupt whatever amnesia may have protected me from my pain these past dozen years. Fortunately, my melancholy was swept aside by some unusual activity in the area.

As my okada approached the stone dome, I could see that dozens of parked motorcycles and two, maybe three, hundred people were clustered on the side of the highway. Everyone stared and pointed fixedly at the dome, which loomed 300 metres away. The focus of all this fuss? Two Europeans in sports gear and helmets slowly abseiling down the rock.

The roadside spectators chattered excitedly on their mobile phones as they urged their friends in the nearby town to come and watch. Most of the crowd were dark-skinned, sharp-featured Muslim men wearing flowing white boubous and
kufi
hats. I and a handful of peanut-selling girls were the only females there.

Police patrolled the roadside, directing traffic and shepherding everyone away from the highway. One helmeted officer with massive aviator sunglasses rode the fanciest patrol motorcycle I'd seen in
Nigeria, a shiny, high-spec machine fitted with a windshield, siren lights and loud speakers. He knew he looked like a Californian patrolman, and he was loving it.

‘Kommot for de side of the road!' he boomed down the speaker at a driver who had stopped his car to observe the spectacle. ‘Look me well, o.' But the driver was too busy staring at Zuma Rock to acknowledge the officer's command.

Why all this attention for such a simple leisure activity? Were the abseilers famous? A very tall and irritable second policeman with tribal markings radiating from his nose gruffly ordered me to keep away from the road. I hoped he might know something about these foreigners.

‘Who are they?' I asked him.

‘They are human beings like you, and they are white,' he sneered, brushing past me as if I were a lowly she-goat. Rudeness aside, I admired his ability to keep things in perspective. Everyone else ogled the scene as if aliens had just landed.

One of the abseilers, a girl, was stranded midway down the steep rock face. Her partner was several metres away and slowly struggled to scale across and reach her. No-one had witnessed abseiling before, or even heard of it. But, this being Nigeria, there was an expert at hand to expound on the subject.

‘I can climb Zuma Rock,' a man boasted, his arms folded across his chest. ‘I don't need all these things.' He cast a belittling eye on the abseilers' harnesses and belay devices.

A superstitious man standing next to me proclaimed he wouldn't touch Zuma Rock, ‘not even for a million naira'.

‘Why?' I asked.

‘I fear it,' he said. I later found out that in the old days, young girls were sacrificed near the rock to appease its evil spirits. He mistrusted those abseilers too. ‘They use other things,' he said. ‘It's not just rope.'

I asked him what ‘things'. He didn't know exactly.

‘Do you mean voodoo?'

He shrugged his shoulders without expanding on the matter. ‘It's not safe,' he said, grimacing with fearful disapproval.

‘They have equipment to stop them from falling,' I assured him.

‘Are you with them?' he asked.

‘No.'

‘Are you a Nigerian?'

‘Yes.'

‘But you don't talk like a Nigerian.'

‘That's because I live in London.'
Was my Nigerian accent that bad?

He smiled suspiciously. ‘I think you are with them.'

‘I'm not!'

‘Why did you come here to Zuma Rock like this?'

‘I just came to see it. I didn't know all this was happening.' It was indeed odd that I managed to catch this event. The coincidence was bizarre, but I was glad of it. Nobody had ever abseiled down Zuma Rock before.

The male abseiler finally reached his friend and rescued her from her predicament. Both of them were descending the rock more rapidly now. As they approached the bottom, the spectators fizzed with excitement. One middle-aged man abruptly launched himself into the scrubby bush and strode authoritatively towards the rock as if he were personally connected to the adventurists. A second guy copied him, and soon a trickle of people began wading through the foliage. The trickle graduated into a steady current, which within a minute exploded into a mad rush. Nearly everybody was now racing towards the base of the rock. Stick-legged boys with ringwormed scalps and ragged clothes giggled and bounced through the scrub; little girls, still carrying trays of groundnuts on their heads, gathered their dresses with their free hands and sprinted in aim of God knows what; the men's long djellaba garments billowed like sails as they hot-footed it with everyone else.

A part of me almost joined in the madness, but the thought of running in that heat dissuaded me. I stood with the handful of people still left on the highway.

‘Nigeriaah . . .' one man chortled ruefully.

‘You cannot see such a thing outside of Nigeria,' the rock-fearer said to me.