PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

After picking up the last passenger, we set off for Ikeja, where the party was being held. Being exhausted and somewhat hung-over from the previous night, I didn’t really want to go, and traveling to the mainland after dark, without an armed police escort, was strictly forbidden according to company policy. Still, the guys managed to convince me to come, saying it’d be “an adventure”. It was some American bloke’s birthday, and he lived way out near the airport because that’s where he worked and ran his business. I’d apparently met him at a party the previous week, though I was too drunk to distinctly remember him, and he’d insisted to the other guys that I come.



We traveled in a three-vehicle convoy, and coming up to the first mainland bridge we encountered our first “adventure” for the evening. There was a broken down truck ahead, slowing the peak traffic down to a trickle, so armed gangs of robbers were quick on the scene. They went from car to car, using Okada boys on the opposite side of the road as getaways. At first I didn’t register what was going on, when I saw two guys leaning in on either side of the front windows of the car next to us, yelling at both the driver and passenger. There’s always a lot of minor accidents here in Lagos, where people get out of their cars and yell at each other for ten minutes, before hopping back in to their cars and taking off. I thought this was such an incident… until the passenger handed over his mobile phone, some cash, and the robber pulled his arm out with a handgun in it! The robber then ran across the road and quickly jumped on his accomplice’s Okada and sped off. The two victims yelled “Thieves! Thieves!” to no avail, pretty much accepting what had just happened instantaneously as an everyday occurrence. This is Lagos after all. The guys in one of the other cars behind us witness pretty much an identical incident, but with different robbers, so we all concluded it was a gang on the prowl.



Around the corner we saw the broken down truck… complete with a couple of cops standing around doing nothing, especially not chasing robbers! The cops here are notorious for avoiding clashes with armed robbers. They consistently arrive ten minutes late on any crime scene, so as to not have to risk their lives for somebody else’s riches. After all, would you risk your life on a two to three hundred US dollar monthly salary?



As we came on to the mainland bridge, near downtown Lagos, my idiot driver decided to take one of his “shortcuts”, as the traffic here was also jammed. But when my driver decides to take a shortcut it usually doubles the travel time, and this was no exception. For some unknown reason he veered off at the ramp leading into downtown Lagos – the most cluttered, chaotic and impenetrable part of Lagos island! In a whole year of living in Lagos I’ve never attempted to drive through this part, choosing to just view it from a safe distance on the bridge. Everybody who had ventured through it told me I wasn’t missing anything, and they were right. Weaving through impossibly narrow roads and alleyways, dodging vast amounts of erratic pedestrians and Okadas, it took us almost an hour to get to the third mainland bridge; my driver’s chosen path which he thought would save us time. We finally get there, only to find it banked up with traffic more than half the length of the bridge – and this is a motherfucker of a bridge, spanning almost ten kilometers from Lagos Island to Abule-Okuta on the mainland! “Well done!” I told him, as we proceeded to sit through another hour of snail-paced traffic.



The other two drivers weren’t as stupid and had arrived at the party an hour before us. It was there one of the guys told me he’d seen a dead body by the side of the road on the way. Adventure number two I thought.



If we hadn’t come there wouldn’t have been much of a party. The only people there were the host and his girlfriend, a quiet couple who sat on the couch all night, and three weird guys who never moved from the kitchen table. We’d come in three cars, consisting of four guys, five girls and three drivers! And we were the only ones dancing or mingling… I wanted to go home after an hour.



Being a weeknight and considering I had to be at an important meeting at 10:00am the following day (as did one of the colleagues I was with), we all said our goodbyes and left around 12:30am. This time I told my driver “no fucking shortcuts, ok?” He simply nodded as he always does “yes boss!” Are you going to be there to pick me up at 8:30am tomorrow? “Yes boss!” You’re not going to be late then? “Yes boss!” Do you understand what I’m saying? “Yes boss!” Where have you been? I’ve been waiting for an hour!! “Yes boss!”  Moron.



Traffic was no problem on the way home, as only lunatics and armed robbers tend to take to the mainland streets after midnight. We sailed on through, this time all choosing the third mainland bridge, as we knew it’d be deserted at this time of the night except for a few police check points. There’s nothing strange about that, as there are hundreds, if not thousands, of police check points scattered around Lagos. It’s the same drill every time; the police motion you to stop and pull over, your driver has to turn on the interior light and wind down his window, the cops come over and greet you, they see “Oiybo’s” (white people or foreigners) sitting in the back or passenger seat and do their usual “happy weekend” routine: “Aah, Oyibo! Happy weekend! (shakes hands) You got something for me?” Meaning they want you to hand them a small sum of cash for ‘protecting’ you; something I have never done, opting instead to offer them kisses, the middle finger, heated discussions about the failing and corrupt political system governing Nigeria or the role of the police. I tell you what buddy… go back to your station or outpost, take a photocopy of your job description; highlight the section that says “stop Oyibo’s and attempt to bribe them of money” and I’ll give you every fucking Naira in my wallet! They tend to respect a certain level of playful arrogance in Oyibo’s, laughing at their defiance and waving them through with a smile. It’s the scaredycats that get taken to the cleaners… A couple of years ago a team of Spaniards came to work here, leaving after just one week saying they’d been “robbed at gunpoint” and vowed never to return (a stance strongly supported by their management). After some investigation by local company officials, it turned out they’d just been routinely harassed by some “happy weekend” cops, had shat their pants and handed over all their money and valuables!



So there we were, cruising along the third mainland bridge, when, at the Lagos Island entrance, we get motioned to pull over by one of these checkpoints. My senseless driver slows down, turns on the interior light, winds down the window yelling to the cops “please-o, we are following that car!” pointing to the car ahead of us. This much was true, we we’re following the car ahead of us, but it’s not like we didn’t know where we were, or where we were going, and the cop didn’t buy it. “Stop at once!” he yelled, but my driver kept going, still pointing to the car ahead going “I beg-o, let me pass”. Bad mistake. Once it was clear to the cop we weren’t going to pull over he let off a round of bullets from his machine gun, blowing out one of the rear tires. I instantly ducked down in my seat yelling, “Go, go, go!” We were in a brand new Pajero so I knew the rim would endure some distance before we’d have to change the wheel. Once at a safe distance we pulled over to change the tire. It was now about 1am and we were still on the bridge, in pitch-black darkness and no other traffic around.



Now, I’ve never been shot at before, in my entire life, and I have to say that that kind of experience tends to inject you with an enormous boost of adrenaline. The only other time I’d felt anything remotely similar, was when I leaped off a sixty-meter cliff wall, down over the Taupo River on the north island of New Zealand, with nothing stopping my fall other than a long elastic rope attached to my ankles. The whole evening after that jump I was high on adrenaline, and after this shooting incident my levels jumped up to an identical high. I guess it’s a first time thing, as the second bungee jump did nothing for me. From what I hear – from both journalists and soldiers – you get used to being shot at pretty quickly. Not that I really want to find out for myself…



We phoned the car that had got ahead of us, telling the driver to drop his passengers and quickly return to pick up the rest of us. One car drove by, slowing down to a crawl to examine us… then another. My colleague was getting a bit worried, thinking we were easy pickings for any robber driving by. We had nowhere to run, stuck on a bridge with no walkways to escape or a functioning vehicle. But I felt no fear. I was riding the high of a life-threatening experience! I was buzzing around erratically, trying to fathom what had just happened. I was laughing and going “Wow! I’ve never been shot at before! Cool, now I can tick that off my ‘to do’ list!”



Suddenly two more cops turn up on the scene, but having walked from the next checkpoint down they had no knowledge of what had happened (police force here is too poor to supply two-way radios to all officers, only equipping high-ranked police and some vehicles).



“Err… umm… our tire hit something and we had a blow out.”



“Really? Well let us help you.”



By all means… but the irony couldn’t have been more comical. One police checkpoint shoots you, the next helps to patch up the damage! My colleague thought it was a moneymaking scam, as we handed the two cops a five hundred Naira note each.



“They’re probably working in conjunction with each other,” he whispered. “They know the ‘happy weekend’ routine only gets them small change, if anything, and doing this they know we’d feel obliged to give them something more substantial.”



“Yeah, you’re probably right,” I whispered back, as I watched the two cops happily jack the car up and pull the damaged tire off.



It was at this point when we discovered why my moron driver had defied the first checkpoint cops. Underneath the spare tire he’d scattered his entire week’s allowance I’d given him for an upcoming trip. My colleague, who quickly scraped up the stash and slipped it into his pocket before the cops saw it, said it looked like something out of a Hollywood drug/gangster movie – there were five-hundred Naira notes lying around everywhere, as if to display an abundance of wealth. This is most likely what my usually poor driver had done; he’d taken the allowance money, scattered it around the back of the car and then driven all around Lagos to show off to his mates. It was only thirty-four thousand Naira, but to him that was more than a whole month’s wages, and I’m betting he’d never had that much cash in his hand before (it was initially fifty thousand, but we’d already completed two days travel, and his daily allowance for accommodation and food was seven thousand). Still, he risked our lives for less than three hundred US dollars, and I am still pretty pissed about that!



The other car returned, and we all got in, leaving my driver with the cops to finish changing the tire. We didn’t think he was in any danger. The cops were there, whom both had been dashed handsomely, and he was a local so there was less chance of robbers attacking. Besides, he didn’t have any money left to steal, a fact he was yet aware of. ;o)



After all that had just happened I couldn’t go home to sleep, I was just too high on adrenaline, and decided to go out for a few more drinks and pool games at “Ynot’s”. There I met the police captain of the very cops who’d shot us, and I bitched to him about it, telling him “your boys shot my jeep man!”



“Really? Let’s go now! Let’s sort them out!”



“Nah, don’t worry mate… I’m here now… just give ‘em a smack for me when you see ‘em, ok?”



“I will talk to them and investigate this tomorrow.”



(The Dolphin Outpost police captain and I go back a long way.)



Needless to say, their version (as I found out the following night) was:

We motioned them to stop, but they sped straight through, hitting the police barrier… We thought they were criminals on the run.



Yeah right… two Oyibo’s in a brand new Pajero – criminals on the run? Ha!



The next morning I woke up to find forty-nine missed calls on my phone, all from my driver! I called him and he said that something had ‘happened last night’. No shit! We were shot at! But I quickly got dressed and met him downstairs where he was waiting.



“Please-o boss… I don’t know… I mean… something happened…”



“What? Spell it out man!”



“My money… err… the money you gave me… I think the police took it.” He was looking more perturbed than I’d ever seen him, sweating and shaking. “I left it in the back of the car.”



“Why the fuck would you do such a stupid thing?!” I yelled at him.



“Please-o… I’m sorry boss… I… I…”



By now he looked like he was going to burst out into tears, so I said “Ok, how much was it?”



“About… err… thirty-four thousand.”

“Thirty-four thousand huh? Wait here.” And I left him there, jogging back to my apartment. I returned a few minutes later, handing him exactly thirty-four thousand Naira, and said “don’t lose it ok.”



Never in my life had I witnessed such a display of gratitude. I could feel the enormous relief released from his body, as he praised the lord to bless me, bobbing his upper torso back and forth with cusped hands. “Thank you boss! Thank you boss!”



I could have returned the cash to him the previous night, but hey, he risked my life for it so I thought he could suffer a bit to get it back! :op