The Future Nigeria

My legs shook a bit as I stood on the polished-wood podium. My mother used to tell me that every time I had to face a crowd, the best way to overcome the butterflies in my tummy was to look above the heads of my audience. It had worked tremendously during recitals and other such school activity. But this was different. I spotted mum in the distance doing her thing with her television crew; filming the event as she did every year. But dad was nowhere to be found. The one person who would make this easier for me to bear…
‘Njoku Nk’iru.!’
It was the voice of the Special Guest of Honour; Professor Grace Alele Williams, snapping me out of my musings. I walked towards her and stretched out my tiny hands. She placed the package in my hands and made a little speech which I would have memorised if I hadn’t been too busy wondering where my dad was. I received my prize and in a practised swirl, turned towards the flashing bulbs for my first taste of celebrity. A few missing teeth rendered the photographs naff, but it was a moment of glory for me…
The next name was announced and I had to leave the stage. My mind was occupied with trying not to slip on the recent wax-job so I was looking down the whole time that I descended the steps. And then I raised my head and caught a glimpse of him. I nearly knocked off one of the camera crew who was standing in my way, as I flew into the arms of my dad. I rubbed my face in his, enjoying the familiar tickle of his hairy jaw. He kissed me and then turned me towards a photographer. The flash went off a few times, capturing my tears of joy as father and child luxuriated in the aftermath of what was a great academic achievement…
It was my fourth year in primary school and I was sick of the pattern of my end of term results. I wasn’t the best thing that happened to my teachers but I was a smart pupil. It wasn’t unusual for me to be the top of my class at the first and second terms, but third term? No. I always came fourth or fifth or something like that. I couldn’t complain too much lest I be beaten up by the class bullies who constantly grazed at the bottom of the list, but I wasn’t very happy with myself. More so because third term was the prize-giving term; the one were you made your family proud and justified your parents’ hard work. It wasn’t that the first two terms didn’t matter, but third term was the icing on the cake and for three years of my life I’d watched people pick up prizes that I believed should have been mine! So I vowed that it would never happen again!
It later turned out that two other classmates had made the same dogged resolution. Seun and Titi were as ticked off as I was. So like three musketeers, we banded together, telling ourselves and one another that we would work so hard in the last term that we would each come first! It was a laugh because no one wanted second or third, even though they were prize-worthy. All three of us wanted to be the top of the class…
‘Working hard’ seemed very gallant when I made the resolve but in actual terms I realised it wasn’t anything more than paying more attention to detail. Not rushing off my essays before checking that every single tense was correct, being a bit more patient with my sums and making sure decimal points didn’t miss their places. It was also about paying less attention to other people’s errors and making sure my home economics projects were impeccable and my ‘current affairs’, current.
The three musketeers didn’t fail to check in with one another as the term wore on, and for each of us it was almost worrying to find that the others were doing as well as you in every subject. By the time prize giving season arrived, we were assuring one another that ‘everything would be alright’ even though we each were in a secret frenzy. Who would top the class? Who would come second and third? God bless Mrs. D, our class teacher, for putting us out of our misery.
A day before the end of year ceremony, she called us for a little tete-a-tete. We had all done brilliantly that term and our results were impressive. However, if she hadn’t been following our progress she would have found it weird that all three of us had scored the exact same percentage after the grades for individual subjects were collated. In other words, the three musketeers had all come first! There was no second or third! It was unbelievable!
My parents would have been proud of me as usual, whether I received a prize or not. But that day, balanced in my father’s arms, and smiling into his face, now oblivious of the crowd, it felt like a special kind of victory when he said to me, ‘Adanne…you said you would do it, and you did it! You can do anything..!.’
I still believe him.
The End.
Nk’iru. Njoku

As a child, I hated being embarrassed. I could never bear to be disgraced especially in the presence of people who knew me. So until I grew up and started having real issues, the event you are about to read, ranked as the most shameful thing that happened to the little me…

It was a balmy evening with no electricity. My siblings were already asleep and I was hanging out with dad in the living room even though mum had warned me to go to bed thirty minutes before.  She was tinkering around in the kitchen and all I could think was why wouldn’t she stop all that noise? I was playing with my daddy and she was disturbing us…

Then she strolled into the living room, sweat glistening on her forehead, and wiping her wet hands on her jeans.

‘It’s hot o..’ She announced.

‘Have you finished?’ my dad asked in response.

I saw her shake her head as she walked into their room whilst packing her hair into a bun.

A few minutes later she emerged from her room now wearing shorts. The heat was that bad and she was probably antsy. Knowing that I could get a nice yelling if she saw that I was still awake, I squeezed myself into my father’s side, struggling to stay out of sight. But the hawk-eyed woman caught me.

‘You what are you doing there? Won’t you go and sleep?’

I looked into my daddy’s eyes as if the answer to her question was there. He smiled and asked her to leave me. ‘When she is tired she will go, there’s no school tomorrow’.

Ha! I was the victor. I sat there chuckling as she walked back into the kitchen.

‘Be spoiling her o! Anyway why don’t you go outside for some fresh eggs…’

Okay. ..fresh eggs, huh?  So that was why she wanted me to go and sleep? So she and dad could sit on the balcony and eat fresh eggs all by themselves? Busted!

Dad got up and I followed, of course. We went outside and he sat on the bench while I resumed one of my regular positions at his feet. I clapped my tiny hands as we recited the folk songs he had taught me over the months. I jumped on his pot-belly and remained there ‘pinching’ the heat rashes on his chest. By the light of a lantern we solved a few puzzles from his news-paper crossword. I eventually became drowsy but the thought of the fresh eggs kept me going…

Several minutes after, mum sauntered unto the balcony, still griping about the heat and worried about mosquitoes as dad had forgotten to shut the front door.  I looked at her hands and didn’t see any saucer or bowl. What was wrong with this woman?  Who was she trying to fool? Wasn’t it obvious that I wasn’t going to leave without tasting this mid-night snack of boiled eggs?

So I blurted, ‘Mummy…where are the eggs?!’

My mother stopped in what I presumed to be mock shock. ‘What eggs?’

‘The eggs you were supposed to bring for daddy, you think I didn’t hear?’ my eyebrows shot up. I was like a cynical detective interrogating an obviously guilty criminal.

‘Adanne, what are you talking about?’ Dad patted my forehead with the back of his palm…checking for a fever, maybe.

‘I heard when she said you should go outside for fresh eggs! Me too, I want!’ I finished petulantly.

Then my parents looked at each other for a few seconds after which Dad laughed under his breath as mum hissed at me, ‘I didn’t say fresh eggs, I said ‘fresh-air’! My friend, will you carry your long-throat inside the house and go and sleep like your mates!’

Oh my goodness I was so embarrassed, I could have wet my pants! I ran into the house with a stomach full of shame and it was a very long time before I could sleep. I had been disgraced in front of my dad and tomorrow, everyone else would hear my shameful story…

The next day, I expected to wake up to mocking laughter from my big brother and sniggering from my younger sister. But it wasn’t happening.  Nobody looked at me funny or passed silly comments my way…my respect was still in tact. What was going on?

It turned out that dad had made mum promise to not tell anyone my story. He had told her that I would die of shame if it got out. Mum was willing to be lip-sealed, but there was however a catch. From that day onwards, I was to let them spend their evenings together without my meddling, daddy’s best friend behaviour!  It was hard, but in view of the situation, it was a small price to pay…

However, for a long time after, every time my mum said certain words, I would diligently check to be sure that I wasn’t hearing things. I’m not sure I could have lived it down a second time if I one day heard ‘rice and stew’ instead of ‘give me my shoes’!

The end.

Nk’iru. Njoku

‘She left us when we were children and I will never stop hating her’. My blood curled.
‘But that’s your mum. It’s got nothing to do with my mum…’
‘It does! They are all women!’
Okay, this was getting too deep for me to handle. I mean, there he was prematurely planning a marriage even though I had not yet said ‘yes’, and he had the effrontery to hate my mother even before meeting her. My father had left us too but I didn’t hate all men on account of that!
‘So if you hate women so much, what do you want with me?’
He threw his head back in a burst of ironic laughter. ‘Nk’iru., you are not yet a woman, you’re still a girl on her way to womanhood and I want to catch you before you get there…’
That was when I began to taste the bile on my tongue.
Who was this fool to sit there and tell me I was just a girl? Yes I was nineteen, but I’d just gotten to my final year at university, I was running my mother’s salon, mentoring my three younger siblings and generally manning the home-front because mum had to be away for an extended period and this self-pitying zombie had the guts to say I was just a child? Worse still he was attracted to me because I was still a girl? I couldn’t believe the nonsense I was hearing!
And so I bade him a passive goodnight and prayed that I would never see him again. There was no use attempting to plough through the psychotic morass of his words. He was a nutcase and I wasn’t cracking!
Several days passed and I didn’t see or hear from him.
Then I started to miss him. Everytime my alarm clock went off, I remembered him. Everytime I smelled fresh bread, I remembered the smell of his car and therefore, him. It was warped. How could I miss this insane character? What was wrong with me? It got so bad that I started hanging out on the balcony with the hope that I would catch a glimpse of him if he ever drove past my house. And then, every single black car reminded me of him! It didn’t matter what brand it was or if it was squeaky new or rickety old. If it was black, Chinedu came to mind!
Then early one morning I was rudely awakened by the jangling of our housephone. I thought it was my mum who was calling from abroad so I hurriedly took it and breathed a languid ‘hello’ into the receiver. Then I heard his voice and everything stopped.
I couldn’t believe it. I lay there thanking fate and making the appropriate conversational sounds as he spoke even though I hardly could hear anything he said; what with the loud rush of blood to my head. We made a date for later that evening and the rest of the day was a blur. At school I hardly paid attention to my lecturers. My gang kept wondering why I was acting so spaced out. My judo sparring-partner beat me silly and my Sabomin got me to do a hundred push-ups before I left dojo that day. When he drove me home from school my boyfriend noticed my absent-mindedness and became really irritated. But who cared?
Later on that day when Chinedu parked his car in front of my block, it was an elated me that ran down to greet him. He leaned to the side and unlocked the door and I promptly slid in. Regardless of the sitting positions, we hugged as best we could, and then started blabbing at the same time! But my voice somehow managed to drown his…
‘I’ve missed you, you this man! Oh and I’ve missed your car so much!’
‘You’ve missed my car so much?’ his smile was fading quickly…
I nodded rapidly, waiting for him to make the connection. He knew I liked the ‘comforting’ smell of his car, so why was he staring at me like that?
And that was when the yelling began. We were all the same, women! We were materialistic and it didn’t matter how long we pretended; our true selves always came out!
Like a bucket of water on a lit match-stick, his words drenched my excitement and broke my spirit, bringing with it the painful realisation that this suitor had very serious issues indeed. First he hated women. Now this girl he was about to salvage had all of a sudden become a gold-digger because she happened to miss the smell of his cheap, eighties-model, Volkswagen Santana! What a laugh! My plan was to unhinge the door of his car when I slammed it and walked off!
As for the smell of fresh-baked bread, well it’s been ten years but it still nauseates me!
The End.
Nk’iru. Njoku.

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‘I didn’t know you were so materialistic!’ He all but shrieked, nearly shoving me out of his car. ‘I thought you were a decent babe. You haven’t seen me in two weeks, and now that I’m here all you can say is this nonsense!’

‘You know what? It is getting quite late; my brother will wonder what’s keeping me. See you some other time’ I said calmly and slammed the door of his car, not caring if the vibration would crack its windscreen. Damn him and his marriage proposal. I’d rather marry my father’s wicked brother!

It started on a dry Harmattan evening. I’d been invited for a party by an older friend and it was New Year’s Day so it didn’t seem like a bad way to start the calendar.

A few hours into the evening, she had to rush off to chat with her old school mates, leaving me all by myself; well not quite, as I was in the company of my plate of fried rice and chicken curry. And so, there I sat, wondering what everyone found fascinating about chicken boiled in a greenish gruel with the occasional pea or carrot-cube floating by. I always thought plain old jollof rice made more sense at parties, really.

‘But this one tastes nice, come on….’ I looked up and shot off several curious blinks at this light-skinned stranger…

‘I heard you saying you preferred jollof rice, but I think this is really nice’.  I laughed nervously at having been caught talking to myself and I can’t remember what I said in response but I do know that before long we had progressed to a debate about the effectiveness of a certain anti-inflammatory in treating allergies. Neither of us was a doctor; in fact the closest we both came to it was being members of the Red Cross whilst we were in primary school! Along the line we found ot that we did have a few more things in common and so it wasn’t surprising that by the end of the evening a friendship had formed and phone numbers were swapped.

A few days later, I turned nineteen and of all the gifts I received, his was the perfect one; an alarm clock! Don’t laugh, its true…I really was blown away. The night that we met, I had mentioned in passing that I was often late for classes because I never could manage to wake up early. It wasn’t even a topic we dwelled on; it was just an off-shoot of one of our many debates.  And he remembered! That singular act solidified our friendship and opened the door for many more evenings of easy conversation and friendly arguments.

One day, we were seated in his car as we talked about everything from his master’s degree which he’d acquired after three years in Europe, to the fact that he came back to Nigeria because he was desperately in search of a wife, to the odds of a nineteen year old getting married to a thirty-two year old…I know, dude was probably a pervert, but don’t blame him much; I was in my final year in university and I did manage to carry around a convincing air of wisdom; those were the days before the dredlocs and anti-establishment leather wrist-band…

Anyhow, I loved the smell of Chinedu’s car. It was an old Volkswagen Santana….something from the eighties and there was nothing fancy about it, but it smelled very…comforting; like the smells from an old bakery…it was really curious. And as I watched and laughed at the speech he planned to recite to my father, I had a flash-bulb moment. It dawned on me that Chinedu had never tried to grope me in the darkness of his car. My respect for him shot to astronomic heights and I remember just staring at him as he continued to lay out his plans for our future.

‘Will your mother come to your wedding?’ he asked, suddenly. I giggled in response and when he raised a questioning brow I responded, ‘ah-ah? Are you joking? In fact, we would have to beg her to sit down on that day so she doesn’t break a leg!’ but realised that I alone was laughing at my attempt at a joke.

‘My mother will not come anywhere near my wedding’, he dropped the words very casually; as though he’d mouthed them countless times before.  I wondered about that but before I could finish my question, he leaned back in his seat and hissed, ‘If I allow your mother come to our wedding, you have to promise that she will never visit our home afterwards’.

Screeeeeeeeech! Halt!  Poof! And I had another flash-bulb moment! This guy was tall, handsome, and remembered the little things, but he was also stark, raving mad!

To be continued….

Nk’iru. Njoku

WHO THE CAP FITS…

When at the beginning of the year, the Lagos state government laid down a law requiring okada (commercial motorcycle) riders and their passengers to always wear helmets or face a penalty, I knew I was not going to enjoy it.

Seriously, its not that I’m an award winning okada patron, in fact I could easily be friends with over a hundred taxi drivers (having several customers in each zone) in Lagos, but there are times when I have no choice but to ride those killers-on-two-wheels and the last thing I’d want to worry about is swapping dandruff with an anonymous group of people. Then enter the perfectly-timed tales of people getting jazzed by the helmets. Wear the wrong helmet and you would disappear into thin air, or become hypnotized or something equally as interesting. Call me superstitious, but by and large, sharing helmets with half the population of Lagos was a rather unsavoury thought.

So as is usual with all things that make me anxious, I assured myself that I was going to avoid Okadas totally no matter the cost. I would take the bus, or walk to my destination if it was a short distance and attempt to lose some weight in the process. Don’t laugh at me, because it actually worked for a while.

Until one warm February morning, when I played a fast one on myself!

If you don’t live in Lagos, you may not understand the geography I’m about to describe, but hey…just ask a friend. Anyway, I needed to make a quick visit to an Ikoyi address and wasn’t quite looking forward to all the money I was bound to spend commuting back and forth by taxi. So when my friend told me she would be doing some shopping that morning at the popular ‘Lagos Island’ market in Apongbon, I knew it was divinely ordained. I’d ride with her up to a certain point and then take a taxi from there. It was perfect.

And so, after about an hour of chatting about all sorts; from inflation, to men and their errant ways, we pulled up at ‘under bridge’ and then made an appointment to meet at the same spot in an hour or less. So off I went, to find my taxi.

After walking for a few seconds, I saw a few languid-looking men stretched out on tired benches underneath the bridge in what looked like a perfectly mapped out sitting area. In a neat formation beside them were several taxis.

So I proceeded in that general direction but was accosted by a group of three men who in the usual ‘Lagos’ way, began to ask me where I was going and wanted to each take me there. I identified the least hard-faced of them and told him I was going to Ikoyi.

‘Ah, that one na three hundred naira’, he said.

It was a very good price for a taxi that was supposed to take me all the way from Lagos-Island to Ikoyi. So I really should have just taken it, but no. The business woman in me just could not resist it. ‘God forbid! Take two hundred!’

He and his friends looked at one another and laughed while I stood there acting as if I didn’t know that I had just made a ridiculous offer.

 ‘Are you sure you know where Ikoyi is?’ I asked the man, attempting to convince him that he was asking for too much.

‘Yes na. Oya, pay two-fifty’, he was adamant. And then he went on to tell me that I would be his first customer for the day and that was why he was charging so low.

Its not that I believed him, but something told me I wouldn’t get a taxi anywhere at that price, let alone cheaper, therefore if I didn’t seize the opportunity, I was a goat.

Then I pulled a long face, conjured up my best victim shrug, and sighed ‘okay, let’s go’.

And he led me straight to an okada!

Whilst I’d been silently tickled at the thought of my wonderful taxi-ride bargain, the man had been talking about an okada journey all along! The shame!

But you see, I’m quick on my feet so I didn’t argue, I just boarded the thing like I knew that had been the plan from the get-go, and he handed me a helmet which I deftly slipped it on, like it was the most ordinary thing.

I however could not stop laughing at myself throughout the journey.

Lesson: If Mohammed does not go to the helmet, the helmet will come to Mohammed.

The end.

Nk’iru. Njoku.

‘Listen, I will never do this again!’, I screamed. ‘Rather than ride on that bus, I’ll walk all the way and back!’ I finished with a flourish, and stalked off.

That was the year two thousand and seven. My friends thought it would be fun to do the BRT ride from Ikeja to the Island. However, by the time we were done, my nerves were all over the place and I was making more than a mental note never to be associated with the BRT or anything that high-up off the ground again.

Therefore when a few days ago, my sisters suggested we do the BRT from Festac to the Island, I rebelled. My eyes popped, all the blood rushed to my head, my dredlocs stood at attention…okay, I exaggerate, but you get the picture, yes?

Anyway sha, they succeeded, the silly girls. I found myself at the bus-stop paying for three BRT tickets and voila we were on the bus. When the door closed, I got that ‘who send me’ feeling I get every time I’m in an aircraft. I started thinking about the bad things I’d done and all the good things I’d left undone. In fact, I was going to call my sister to say ‘I love you’ but then I remembered that she was right there beside me.

So was my state of mind when the journey began and it didn’t get any better as we rode through the bumpy roads of my neighbourhood. For every ditch, I thought the bus would fall over, and no matter how much my sister tried to convince me-she even held my hand-I knew I wasn’t going to enjoy the hour-long ride.

I quickly proceeded to distract myself with my Blackberry but even the joys of the internet couldn’t stop me from feeling the undulations of the bus deep in the pit of my stomach. I had to crouch low in my seat to reduce the effect, or count to a hundred until we’d gone past the worst sections of the road.

By the time we got to Orile I was in the middle of a chat with a friend who was trying to convince me to sign up for anxiety management. In his opinion, my fear for big vehicles like the BRT is quite unnatural. In his words, ‘you need to ask yourself what chances there are of something really catastrophic happening’.

I was about to shoot off a response when I heard commotion in the bus and as soon as I realised what was going on, I broke into bucketfuls of sweat…

Behold, our dear BRT was stuck in the middle of two petrol-carrying tankers!

We’d just been negotiating our way through an extremely bad patch of road when one of them apparently decided to overtake us from the right. As soon as our driver noticed what was happening, he too decided to be a bully and so three monster-size vehicles got stuck struggling through a narrow road that was fraught with consistent gullies.

I died.

My sister morphed into motivational-speaker mode but I saw a tic in her neck and knew that if she could be nervous, then we were finished.

The tanker on the left leaned into our bus with a loud thud and I went into undiluted panic, expecting to hear a loud explosion. But we were fortunate as after a few minutes of struggling, we were able to snake our way out of danger zone. Phew.

Twenty minutes and a few more less-dangerous potholes after, we pulled into our stop. It was a very grateful me that stood up to exit the bus.

My sisters had knowing smiles on their faces, but just for the drama of it, I said ‘you know what? All that could have happened in a smaller vehicle, there’s nothing wrong with the BRT’.

As they tried to get over that, I went on to tell them that we would ride the bus home!

There you had it. The brand new me! I’d just braved the BRT for the second time in two years and I’d suddenly overcome all my fears.

Then wham!

Another BRT bus ran into us from behind, and shattered the rear windscreen of the bus. Luckily, the passengers on the last seat had just risen so there was no casualty. Except the ‘brand new me’  scurried out of the bus like a mouse.

For the homeward journey, we rode a red cab.

The End.

Nk’iru. Njoku

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