Help, Police!

The police in Nigeria are brutal.  They are jumped up, drunken and corrupt.  I don’t believe there is one decent police officer in Lagos.  The government take decisions without a thought for the ways in which they might affect people’s lives and then send their ignorant force of gargoyles out to enforce the new rules in whichever way they see fit.

I’ve got used to the random checkpoints and invasion of privacy when a police officer stops me and don’t feel scared anymore when a drunken man with a gun asks us to pull over.  I’ve also gotten braver and now tell them to go away or pretend I am sleeping.  I have even been out driving myself a couple of times (but only on a Sunday ha).  I also have the peace of mind that if anything were to happen on the road I could buy my way out of the situation and/or get my employer to help me out. 

What I can’t stand is the injustice shovelled onto everyday Nigerian people.  It is blatantly displayed for everyone to see.  The latest ridiculous decision taken by the Lagos state government is to ban ‘Okadas’.  These are small motorbikes or mopeds which are normally seen all over Lagos whizzing in and out of the standstill Lagos traffic.  People use them to travel short distances in and around Lagos to avoid long, boring trips in cars.  The Okada drivers are dodgy and don’t exactly drive safely but in a city where roads are falling apart, have huge potholes and are not large enough to support the huge amount of vehicles which use them every day then they actually serve a very useful purpose.

For whatever reason, the local government has decided to ban them from the streets.  They have provided the police with a very tidy opportunity to extort money from already extremely poor people, to take a bike from its owner on the street and burn it and to do this with any force they see fit.

Today I witnessed a man being stopped by an officer without a uniform.  The officer slapped him a few times, shouted in his face, intimidated him and then drove off on the man’s motorbike.  I watched the man as he stood, bemused, staring after his only source of income as it disappeared into the distance.  I thought he would have shouted and screamed in the normal Nigerian fashion but instead he just stood there with a truly mournful look on his face.  It was like he was watching himself go hungry, his wife and kids crying, his family being thrown out of their house.  I think he was seeing this in his mind’s eye. 

This scenario must be playing out all over Lagos.  The number of bikes on the roads has shrunk from thousands to the odd one or two.  Where are all the drivers?  How are they eating?  How many of them will turn to crime in the months running up to Christmas?

The other impact is on the traffic.  Hundreds of people who used to travel to and from work on the back of the bikes now have to take cars, taxis and buses.  The traffic has gone from bad to unbearable.  We are all doomed to spend hours of our lives in a car every day.