Today, I witness the proof of Apapa's successful secession from Lagos. The word is actually cessation but, let us yet read it in italics, since I suspect that the diction might have been suggested by my excusable cynicism in our affairs. I'm visiting Apapa because a very important profit insists on my presence in that location, otherwise....
Popular counsel warns that I go by public transportation. It's 8am at Cele bus stop. I'm seated at the front seat of the bus, neighbour to one fellow beside the driver. His surrounding fumes with the strength, or rather the stench, of a noisy, black-market perfume. Kinetic breeze soon abates his pollution....I condemn the driver for taking 'one-way'.
A wise disobedience, it turns out: the normal lane, the one we have abandoned, is overgrown with stationary petrol trucks, from Mile-Two all the way to Coconut Bus-Stop. Apapa bus-stops bear the strangest names - there is one named 'Cement'. So when a bus gets to Coconut, or Cement, the conductor asks, 'Coconut dey here?' A human being will claim the identity and alight. At Coconut, the conductor asks all 'Coconuts' to 'go down' and we all obey. Seeing the complete lock-down of traffic at the forgone lane, the driver looks at me silently, in a manner that validates his lawlessness. I can see it - every 'normal' motorist is taking 'one-way' because obedience is apparently foolish in the circumstance. Apapa buses now turn back at Coconut, just about half the journey, that spot being the boundary between Lagos and the newly seceded entity called Apapa, host of Nigeria's premier port.
There is a bridge, even a canal, separating the two states, at Coconut. After that bridge, articulated trucks take over from petrol tankers, in the task of successful traffic nuisance. Their drivers loiter around, or even go far away, confident that their abortion of motion is so total that they will not be required to move their vehicles anytime soon. I'm told that they sleep in their vehicles, on this main road. That familiar smell of faeces hangs in the air. Away with the word 'faeces' - it elevates the mire to an academic status. Mounds of shit sit under some stationary trucks. Washed clothes spread at the backs of trucks, buckets, and other such little proofs, confirm the story of traffic habitation.
Storyteller is the okada man taking me from Coconut to Creek Road. He and his colleagues milling all over the road are persistent in their blare of horns. We encounter the new evidence of secession after the bridge: one, two, three, four massive ditches...ditches that look like they were intentionally dug by man. They are so deep, so wide they cover the whole lane, from the median to the absent sidewalk. No car, or bus, even without the presence of trucks, can dare cross them. They are boundaries deliberately dug by human neglect. Trucks pass them cautiously with limited success, such that not a few have tumbled over, I'm told. I can see a truck, its mouth stuck in the ditch as if it is sucking the mud, looking like a strange, thirsty animal. Another is unhinged at its truck-bed, so that it is now sitting akimbo. The water looks like condemned oil. It is stinky, either from the deposit of filth, or of shit. The ear-splitting blast of truck and okada horns, the rev of truck engines, and the general flamboyance of dirt establish Apapa as a new Hobbesian state, complete with stick-wielding touts and some uniformed, toll-collecting illegalities.
We pass the ditches, the bike sputtering precariously between recumbent trucks, to Liverpool towards Creek Road. The new state is dusty around here, desolate, leaving my face sticky with a new layer of fake skin. Huge padlocks guarding official premises, cobwebs, and other expressions of desolation hold sway. Many companies have closed shop. Apapa, originally the pride of Lagos, has become the venue of rot, a septic space holding the defecation of bad governance. It has become a fatal victim of its own success, punitive to its inhabitants and workers. A dead city - finally, a secession - a cessation.
immanuel James.