4 lanes are better than 3 in Lagos

Spending time in Lagos is a little like spending time in Disney Land; you know it’s not real on the surface, but when you dig a little, the deeper you go the more real it seems.  Come on, you agree – you’re telling me that you’ve never sauntered down Main Street in Orlando or LA and been only mildly shocked at strangers dressed in all manner of “cartoon” get-ups prancing around and crossing your path?  Remind you of a high street near you?@!

And so it is, to a certain degree with Lagos – however it’s not as kitsch or dare I say glam as the Magic Kingdom.

I had the “good fortune” to be staying a long way from the office on this trip and this afforded me an opportunity to see more of the “city of lagoons” – which is how the Portuguese named this city when they first landed here several hundred years ago, to the consternation and bemusement of the indigenous population.  And boy, did I see some sights.   

There were bakers transporting their loaves mile upon mile on a palette about 1m x 1.5m jammed full of newly baked bread perched precariously on the back of a rickety moped and speeding through traffic like a cockroach on wheels.  There were sellers of all kinds peddling their wares, dangerously close to the highway.  And winding side-streets took us on “short-cuts”, which felt disproportionately long, but we zipped past barbers, bars, shacks and hardware a myriad of merchants of all types.

But I think the thing that struck me the most and pushed me to doing this blog entry, was the 3 lane highway that drivers didn’t think wide enough.  Wide enough, you repeat?  What do I mean? 

Well, you see on most highways there is a hard-shoulder (or emergency lane) to allow access to ambulances, police vehicles and the like – and Lagos is (with a smile, perhaps surprisingly) no different.  Yet, the locals, perhaps peacocking or perhaps thinking the further away from the verge you are, the quicker you go, insisted on using the hard shoulder.  

Now, if the highway were clogged and not moving – then one may forgive motorists' selfish disregard for safety and other citizens in their driven desire to get home after a long day’s slog at the office.  But, no!  The highway was flowing like milk from a happy goat’s teat. (Sorry about this image – but it seems consistent with West Africa, where the goat is eaten with ferocity and gusto.)  There were no jams, and no slow-gos.  This traffic was speeding at over 80kmh quite merrily.  I was a little agog.

Sometimes what you have is not enough; sometimes the potential is not realized; sometimes the whole is not shared with the many – but rather hogged by the few.  For me, the highway linking the mainland of Lagos to Victoria islands and others was a metaphor for this disappointing situation in Nigeria.  The Big Men (Oga) need to show they’re bigger than the others – they drive on the hard shoulder; the aspiring disregard rules to get ahead of the pack – they drive on the hard shoulder; and the disenfranchised slip over from the inside lane to lane 2 or even 3, to feel “bigger” and squander the prospect of a highway that could move even faster, if everyone stuck to the rules.

However, no matter how fast the Ogas sped down the emergency lanes, no matter how well they thought they’d got one over on authority – or worse, their fellow Nigerians – it all came to a grinding halt at the toll booth.  Here the e-tag system was only partially working and all the traffic crammed and spilled over to a set of tellers taking money with only half of a half-smile and ample lethargy to give any sloth a crawl for its money. 

You sigh, you smirk– and you scratch your head thinking: what was all that bravado for?