End of queues in sight?

VIEW FROM THE GALLERY BY MAHMUD JEGA

Short of the capture of top terrorist and bandit kingpins and putting an end to their reign of carnage, there cannot be a more pleasing story in Nigeria than the one attributed last Friday to Aliko Dangote, Chairman of the Dangote Group, reputed to be Africa’s richest man. According to one screaming newspaper headline, he said at the State House, Abuja after a meeting with the President that fuel queues are gone from our stations forever. Dangote said we have been having on-and-off fuel queues in Nigeria since 1972 but that his refinery, which he said now has the capacity to supply 50 million litres of petrol to Nigeria every day, will bring that sorry era to an end.

Disappearance of fuel queues in Nigeria almost sounds like the disappearance of bandits from our bushes. In 1973-74, during the Gowon era, this country experienced a devastating fuel shortage with motorists spending days, if not weeks, in petrol stations. In early 1974, New Nigerian newspaper had a screaming story, quoting the Permanent Secretary in the Federal Ministry of Mines and Power as saying that fuel queues would end in May. There was a huge cartoon in, I think, Daily Times, of the Perm Sec holding a megaphone and announcing to motorists in a miles-long queue, to come back in May to get fuel. Come and see sadness all over Nigeria that day.

In October 1981, I accompanied my elder brothers to the fuel station and we were there from 6am to sunset. We were in that queue when we heard that Egyptian President Anwar Sadat had been assassinated. Our immediate fear was that Sadat’s killing could lead to turmoil in the Middle East and lengthen our fuel queues. Luckily it didn’t. I also recall a period of acute fuel scarcity in 1991 when I spent a whole day at a Kaduna station. There was chaos all over the place; the queue was moving at a snail’s pace, and an elderly Kombi bus driver and his child conductor, pushing their bus all the way because it had run out of fuel, finally arrived at the pump. As the attendant began dispensing fuel to him, we saw that his tank was leaking and the fuel was gushing out. The conductor ran to the back of the bus and brought out two jerry cans, but the attendant said he was not allowed to dispense fuel in jerry cans. The elderly driver burst into tears; he said he had been in the queue for two whole days! Desperate though we all were, we intervened and pleaded with the station manager to make an exception of that case, and he reluctantly did.

In the 1980s, we read stories in the newspapers nearly every day about “kerosene explosion” in one town or another. Kerosene queues at petrol stations were as long as petrol queues. While adult males dominated fuel queues, women and children dominated kerosene queues, which they turned around and hawked at street corners. Petrol was cheaper than kerosene, so unscrupulous hawkers mixed petrol with kerosene, which then exploded in stoves and lamps. A lot of lives were lost in many parts of the country.

In the days when Nigeria Airways was the only domestic airline operating in Nigeria, boarding a plane was a nightmare in Nigeria. One day in 1979, I was sitting at Lagos airport, waiting for my flight to Sokoto, when the Lagos to Port Harcourt flight was called. Come and see chaos; passengers jumped over seats, dragging huge bags, rushing through the gates, pushing and shoving up the plane’s ladder. I heard that before the Obasanjo military regime brought KLM in the late 1970s to manage Nigeria Airways, there was nothing like seat number on boarding pass, hence the stampede to get into a plane.

Or, for that matter, to get onboard a train. Nigeria Railways was very busy up until the early 1990s, with its trains crisscrossing the country at all hours. Getting into its Third Class coaches was however a nightmare. Beggars and physically challenged persons had free rides, which enabled them to move up and down the country. Even the First Class coaches were something else; in 1985 I bought a Zaria to Nsukka First Class coach for N20 but in the middle of the journey, six hefty NRC staffers left their Third Class coach and smuggled themselves into my coach.

In the early 1980s, we queued up to buy newspapers. Vendors were very imperious in those days; they knew which newspapers were much sought after, so they hoarded them and forced a customer to buy two or three other less desirable newspapers before he could get the one that he wanted most.

The longest queues in the 1980s were at the Nigeria National Supply Company [NNSC] depots. “Essenco” [i.e. essential commodities such as rice, sugar, milk and detergents] were so precious that people spent days on end in queues in order to get them. At the tail end of the Second Republic, essenco virtually disappeared from the shops. They were being horded; when the Buhari/Idiagbon regime arrived on the scene in December 1983, soldiers entered markets, forced open shops and stalls, people formed long queues in front of shops and soldiers sold essenco to them.

Entering a football stadium was a nightmare in the 1970s and 1980s. Before Nigerian youths migrated with the coming of satellite tv to becoming fans of foreign football clubs, there was a crush in local stadiums whenever popular Nigerian football teams such as Enugu Rangers, Mighty Jets of Jos, IICC Shooting Stars of Ibadan, Bendel Insurance of Benin, Kaduna Bees, Stationery Stores and P&T Vasco da Gama of Lagos were playing, not to mention the national football team, Green Eagles. One day in 1979, there was a crush to enter a stadium in Lagos, the wall collapsed and dozens of people died. Daily Times featured a photo of a mountain of shoes left behind by fans.

Even worse than entering a stadium, was entering a cinema theatre. Before many states established television stations in Nigeria, cinema theatres were the best place for entertainment, with their staple of Indian, American and Chinese films.  Some of my secondary school classmates watched so many Indian films that they spoke a smattering of Hindi. Our cinema houses had three compartments: cushion, chair and bench. There was no rush to enter the first two because they were expensive but there was a crush, jumping, pushing, shoving and fighting to enter the bench side, which was the cheapest. Once inside, there was a lot of shouting, curses, profane words and a huge cloud of cigarette smoke. Seventy-four years ago in Kano, El Duniya cinema mysteriously caught fire and hundreds of people died in the stampede. Some clerics said it was God’s punishment for the immorality of cinema houses.

Young folks will be surprised to hear this, but in Kaduna in 2002, buying a GSM SIM card was a nightmare. Mobile phone service had just debuted, and during that year’s Kaduna Trade Fair, MTN and Econet [the only service providers then] opened stalls and were selling a SIM card for N16,000. Only the city’s toughest thugs could get one; the rest of us stood at a safe distance and bought it from them at a premium. Young folks will however remember the days of Post-UME screening by universities. I witnessed one, where tens of thousands of aspiring students jostled to get “screened” for admission into a university.

Crossing the Jebba bridge was a nightmare in the late 1960s. As a small boy I sat in my father’s car when we set out from Ilorin at dawn. It took seven hours to cross the Jebba bridge; it was single lane, trucks and trailers blocked the road; and it was with great effort that small cars were allowed to crawl through. There was no Dangote in those days to assure us of an end to the queue, and there was no Dave Umahi to build a ten lane highway by the Niger riverside.

Some of the most depressing queues of the olden days were seen at Area Courts. Before many of their youths took to banditry, elderly pastoralists were the most patient people in Nigeria. On our way to and from primary school, we saw pastoral elders sitting patiently in front of Alkali courts for days on end, because a farmer reported them for destroying his crops.  Each elder had a mat, a blanket and a water gourd to ease himself and to pray. No surprise perhaps that their less patient descendants have resorted to self-help.

The mother of all Nigerian queues occurred during the currency change exercise of 1984. At dusk one evening, Major General Tunde Idiagbon suddenly appeared on NTA, closed all land, air and sea borders and announced a change of naira’s colours. For the next one month, miles-long queues formed in front of every bank branch in the country as citizens struggled to exchange old money for new ones. When banks closed in the evening, no one dared to leave the queue, until they reopened the following morning. It was such a tough task that in every city ward, money was pooled together and given to a tough guy to go and enter the queue. Food was brought to him in the queue. Because thugs handled the money, court cases arising from that exercise went on for many years. There was no Dangote in those days to promise an end to the queues.