At Ijegun-Egba jetty, it’s fun all the way

CHUKS OLUIGBO

You do not consider it particularly worth your while at first, especially because you got there about 3pm, a little too early in the day, you will later discover, for the fun to really begin. But you don’t give up. Your friend has told you this place is fun, and you are bent on finding out if all he said was true.

 

So, you look around for a place to sit, then you notice the beautifully arranged concrete platforms on the pavilion facing the seemingly endless water body. You also notice the plastic seats and tables arranged a little farther off, also facing the waterfront, but you opt for the former where you can have a clearer view of the sea. And as you relax, you begin to have a rethink as you feel for the first time the refreshingly cool breeze emanating from the unfathomable, impregnable bowels of the sea. Then, as time lapses, the place begins to fill up, the fun begins in earnest, and you see reason to thank your friend for introducing you to this place.

This is Ijegun-Egba jetty, a place of unending fun, sights and sounds. Facing the high sea which stretches from Badagry to as far as CMS on the Lagos Island, connecting to the Atlantic Ocean on both ends, but which many operators and regular visitors to the place know simply as river, Ijegun-Egba jetty offers more than just fresh sea breeze and relaxation. From the long stretch of the sea to the beautiful greenery comprising coconut and other trees lining the entire length of the shore on the opposite side of the jetty, the array of boats of different colours resting on the walls of the jetty awaiting passengers, boats arriving and taking off from the jetty, or occasional speedboats cruising on top speed on the high sea, you are guaranteed of one thing – your eyes will never lack for beautiful sights.

 

Apart from the pavilion, many relaxation spots dot the whole area around the jetty. In any of these spots suya (chicken and beef), fish (boiled, roasted or grilled), pepper soup and other delicacies, plus an assortment of drinks – from soft drinks to beer and wines – are available on request. And the intriguing thing is that virtually all the spots sit on the edge of the sea so that while chilling with your bowl of grilled fish and beer you are not denied the pleasure of the beautiful sights and the refreshing breeze. Plus a number of daily-needs shops have sprung up to ensure you lack nothing.

Of course, the melodious sounds and party beats coming from the speakers in almost all the joints add to the fun and can make party freaks want to get up and shake their bodies, yet it can at times get too loud for comfort.

If you care, you can take a ride in one of the boats to any of the villages across the sea – Ibasa, Ibeshe, Irede, Ikare, Iyagbe, etc – but your surest bet will be the Ibeshe beach which is another tale of fun on its own. A trip to and from Ibeshe beach will cost you only N400. But if you don’t wish to visit Ibeshe beach or any of the villages, you can simply pay N1,000 for a refreshing boat ride on the high sea.

While on the high sea, you don’t have any reason to fear as life jackets are available for every passenger on board. But accidents are very rare here as the boat operators are usually very careful.

While you catch your fun, you are sure to see mobile photographers hanging around and making gestures at you. Don’t be scared, they are only there to help you capture and document the moment just in case you forgot to come along with your camera.

Developed and promoted by Oriade Local Council Development Area, the jetty, located in the Ijegun-Satellite area of Lagos, off Lagos-Badagry Expressway, is accessible through Finiger bus-stop. When fully developed, it is hoped that ferry service will be available from the jetty to CMS, with provisions for park and ride.

So, welcome to Ijegun-Egba jetty. But before then, here’s a caveat: you may need to bring along your jacket or sweatshirt because the sea breeze can really get very chilly, often defying the heat of the blazing sun – or you might just go back home nursing a cold.

The ‘truth’ Fani-Kayode told the Igbo

CHUKS OLUIGBO

If you want to hear the truth about yourself, the best person to ask is always your enemy because your friend wouldn’t want to hurt you. It’s most likely your enemy who would be bold enough, in a fit of anger, to call you ‘smelly mouth’, and then you would be so ashamed that you would go look for the best and most effective mouthwash in town to cure your halitosis. Your enemy would have done you a world of good. I think this is what Femi Fani-Kayode (FFK) has done for the Igbo, even though I don’t believe he is an enemy.

I will not dwell on all the points that the former aviation minister raised in his article “The bitter truth about the Igbos”, which, understandably, has gone viral on the internet and social media. Just to say that while he was wrong on many counts, choosing to stand history on its head, on the issue of ownership of Lagos, he merely re-echoed what Alhaji Usman Liman said in the Northern House of Assembly in February-March 1964: “North is for Northerners, East for Easterners, West for Westerners, and the Federation is for us all.” Here are portions of Fani-Kayode’s article to illustrate my point:

“I have never heard of a Yoruba wanting to give the impression to the world that he is an Igbo, an Ijaw, an Efik or a Hausa-Fulani or claiming that he is a co-owner of Port Harcourt, Enugu, Calabar, Kano or Kaduna. Yet more often than not some of those that are not of Yoruba extraction but that have lived in Lagos for some part of their lives have tried to claim that they are bona fide Lagosians and honorary members of the Yoruba race. Clearly, it is time for us to answer the nationality question. These matters have to be settled once and for all...

“Lagos and the southwest are the land and the patrimony of the Yoruba and we will not allow anyone, no matter how fond of them we may be, to take it away from us or share it with us in the name of ‘being nice’, ‘patriotism’, ‘one Nigeria’ or anything else. The day that the Yoruba are allowed to lay claim to exactly the same rights and privileges that the indigenous people in non-Yoruba states and zones enjoy and the day they can operate freely and become commissioners and governors in the Niger Delta states, the north, the Middle Belt and the south-east we may reconsider our position. But up until then we shall not do so. Lagos is not a ‘no-man’s land’ but the land and heritage of the Yoruba people. Others should not try to claim what is not theirs...

“Guests, no matter how welcome, esteemed, cherished and valued they are, cannot become the owners of the house no matter how comfortable they are made to feel within it. Those guests will always be guests. Lagos belongs to the Yoruba and to the Yoruba alone. ALL others that reside there are guests, though some guests are far closer to us than others. The Igbos are the least close, the most distant and the least familiar with our customs and our ways.”

Well, I think Fani-Kayode has given the Igbo a raw piece of his mind, and he made sense to me. I’m not particularly interested in what the Nigerian constitution guarantees Nigerian citizens; the constitution has hardly protected any citizen at critical moments. You may also argue that, as a former federal capital, Lagos is a peculiar case, but does that make it any less a Yoruba territory? So, beyond the insults, half-truths and the outright distortion of history that he dished out, what I think FFK has said to the Igbo is this: you may have contributed to the development of Lagos, but you really have no stake when the chips are down. So, go back home and develop your homeland.

If we understand it this way, then it will boil down to the very same thing some of us have been telling ourselves for aeons. Some months ago I did a two-part piece “Igbos, think home!” published in BusinessDay. Before then I had asked, “Are Igbos suffering from collective amnesia?” In “Igbos, think home!” particularly, I urged the Igbo Diaspora to begin to think of returning some of their investments to Igboland. This is basically because, following ugly incidences in many parts of the country in recent times, not a few Nigerians are asking: can this country ever be one? They are right in asking – don’t mind the hullaballoo about centenary celebration.

This is certainly not what we all desire, but for now it’s the reality we know. The Nigeria of our collective dream has yet to happen – a Nigeria where every citizen, irrespective of his ethnic nationality or state of origin, can freely live in any part of the country without any fear of molestation, and be counted as a bona fide citizen of that area and have equal rights and privileges with every other person there without any discrimination, without being constantly reminded of whence he or his father before he came. Until then, let’s continue to think along ethnic lines; let’s continue to live with these primordial divisive sentiments – the very sentiments that Femi Fani-Kayode’s article has again brought to the fore.

So, while we wait for that Nigeria to happen, I continue to urge my Igbo brothers in Lagos to heed Fani-Kayode’s warning and desist from desiring Lagos as their own. Lagos does not and cannot belong to the Igbo. Igbo people in Lagos and other parts of Nigeria should remember that they are in those places to make money. Make your money quietly and go back home to develop your homeland. Let’s stop arousing hatred and jealousy through ostentatious flaunting of wealth. Let’s shed off this forgetfulness, this amnesia that has eaten deep into our fabrics. And let’s stop pursuing an ever-elusive pan-Nigerianism and invest at home. In the Nigeria that we know, Igboland is all we’ve got.

And then, I have to say that I do not believe that FFK spoke for the Yoruba people. But at the same time, I do not doubt that he already has a large followership among the Yoruba youth. If you doubt this, google FFK’s article and read the reactions trailing the post. That is why I expect well-meaning Yoruba elders, in the coming days, to dissociate themselves from FFK’s article and tell him to stop preaching hate. Not to do this is to arouse suspicion of complicity.

To conclude, what I said in the first part of “Igbos, think home!” can bear repeating here: “Supposing, just supposing, considering the vagaries of our daily existence in this hole of a country, something happens to Nigeria right now? Sorry to say, but given the unquantifiable loss the Igbo have suffered, in man and material, in riots across Nigeria since 1953, it would be most tragic if, this time around, the Igbo are caught napping, with all their eggs in one wrecked basket.” A word should be enough for the wise.

Gov Fashola and Nd’Igbo

By C. Don Adinuba

The Abia State government last year came up with an ingenious policy. All non-indigenous employees in the state public service, including teachers, were to be relieved of their duties because the government’s resources were meant for the indigenes. Over 80 percent of the people affected are from Imo, Ebonyi, Anambra and Enugu States. Most leaders maintained a conspiracy of silence on this policy which for long will remain one of the greatest impediments to Igbo unity. Abia State was actually treading the path of the Enugu State government which had in the late 1990s decided to sack all non-indigenes in the state’s public service in order to “save resources”. Almost every casualty is Igbo.

But a number of Igbo social activists have now suddenly found their voice. The overnight activists have created an unmistakable mass hysteria in both the social media and the traditional media over the bogey that Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos State has been “deporting” Igbo people from the state. Some politicians who are determined to make political capital out of the so-called repatriations have been busy simulating the hysteria. But perhaps, unbeknownst to these people, they are hurting in a most profound manner strategic Igbo interests. No people can survive, let alone progress on a diet of lies and emotions, or by allowing politicians to create and sustain a culture of paranoia or siege mentality, otherwise called persecution complex.

The Lagos State government launched a few years ago an ambitious project to turn Lagos, Nigeria’s economic nerve centre with a population of some 16 million, into a true megacity. This entailed, among other things, the enthronement of a new social order and a different aesthetic regime. Consequently, the state began to clear thousands of homeless people, beggars and urchins from the streets. Thus, a large number of “area boys” who are mostly Lagos Island indigenes, like the governor, are to this day still arrested and hounded into “Black Maria” trucks by Kick Against Indiscipline (KIA) officials. Borrowing a leaf from such places as New York and Hawaii, Lagos initiated a programme of returning many destitute individuals to their home states. Over 3,000 of such people have been relocated back to northern states where they have now been reintegrated with their families. When about 80 were sent to Oyo State in November, 2009, the governor screamed to the high heavens that “they were dumped on Molete “Bridge” in Ibadan.

About 14 destitute people from Anambra State were sent to Onitsha last week because of the failure of the state’s Ministry of Social Welfare to arrange for the arrival of these people, unlike those of Akwa Ibom and Katsina States which made proper logistic arrangements for their own people. A section of the media has since gone to town with the extremely dangerous propaganda that the Lagos State governor is driving Igbo people out of Lagos through “brazen deportations and repatriations”. Even professionals and scholars expected to be more thoughtful and strategic in their actions have capitulated so easily to the mind-poisoning reports and have been responding exuberantly. A man who introduced himself as a professor from Nnewi called me on the phone on Thursday morning to assert with so much authority that “only Anambra indigenes are being targeted for expulsion from Lagos because all Nigerians know that Anambra is the leader of the Igbo nation”. A lawyer in Maryland, United States, wrote that Fashola dare not relocate beggars of northern extraction, alleging that the Igbo are the whipping boy of Nigerian politics. He is blissfully ignorant of the thousands of northern beggars taken away from Borno Street in Ebute Metta and environs.

How did the industrious, highly republican and intelligent Igbo people embrace, all of a sudden, this level of groupthink that has made us look like a people with unimaginable amnesia? Only last month, a very big plaza in Olodi Apapa belonging to Igbo entrepreneurs and housing hundreds of 1gbo traders was burnt at night. The next day Fashola was at the site and promised to rebuild it at the Lagos State expense. No Igbo governor has visited the place up to this moment, and none has promised to assist the victims. Last December, Ngozi Nwosu, an actress, was reported to be down with a serious liver ailment, so an appeal fund was launched. No Southeast government, including her home state of Imo, responded, just as no wealthy Igbo men and women did. Only N1.5 million out of N6m needed for treatment in the United Kingdom could be raised. Fashola provided the remaining N4.5m. And now some so-called Igbo activists are accusing him of anti-Igbo sentiments.

Two months ago, Fashola completed the biggest housing estate he has built and named it for Emeka Anyaoku, an erstwhile Commonwealth secretary general from Anambra State. At a time some Igbo people cannot be hired as teachers or civil servants in Southeastern states other than of those of their origin, Fashola recruits them in large numbers, with some becoming judges and magistrates. His commissioner for Economic Planning and Budget, Ben Akabueze, is from the Southeast. The chief executive of the state Infrastructure Maintenance and Regulatory Agency, Joe Igbokwe, is an engineer and publisher from Nnewi. Mac Duruigbo, from Imo State, is Fashola’s personal assistant on Media.

Fashola gave Ikemba Nnewi practically a state burial last year in Lagos, the only non-Southeast governor to accord the famous Biafran leader this high honour. He was the only governor who attended last March the Chinua Achebe colloquium at Brown University in Rhode Island, United States, where he praised Achebe for his monumental achievements at a time the great writer was the butt of criticism by the Yoruba political establishment following Achebe’s unflattering remarks about Obafemi Awolowo in his new book, There Was A Country, a personal account of the Nigerian civil war. So, how did some of us come about the brainwave that the dynamic and cosmopolitan Lagos State governor is anti-Igbo? Simply because his government relocated some Igbo elements to their home state, some of whom came to Lagos to do business but instead took to hard drug consumption and became urchin, better known as “area boys”! Interestingly, when Fashola began to crack down on “area boys”, most of whom are from his state, Igbo traders were over the moon rejoicing that the governor had saved them from the miscreants of “area boys” who had for decades been tormenting the traders daily, extorting huge sums from them and viciously assailing those who refused with dangerous weapons.

There are more Igbo people in Lagos than any other state. There are so many investments in Lagos because Lagos has for long welcomed the Igbo people, enabling Nd’Igbo to prosper in Lagos more than any other state. And no governor in Nigeria’s history has demonstrated as much affection to our people as Fashola. Commonsense dictates we protect in a strategic manner the interests of our people and reciprocate the friendship of well-meaning individuals and groups. It will be a colossal tragedy if we savour the dishes of salacious lies and terrible propaganda which we are being served by opportunistic politicians and garnished by hysterical Igbo social activists. We must be guided at all times by truth and reason.

Adinuba is head of Discovery Public Affairs Consulting.

Africa: A continent of beggars?

AKUA DJANIE

What is going on in Africa? From Burkina Faso to Madagascar, from presidents to street children, I have never come across so much begging in my life. Every single day, no matter which African country I am in, I am accosted by beggars. And I don’t just mean the regular beggars we see on the streets everywhere in the world. No. The African culture of begging permeates all spheres of life – from extended family members to the young bank teller; everyone seems to think begging is okay. In fact, some of us have even become professional beggars and live solely by this way of life. Can you imagine the frustration of arriving in a country and dealing with immigration staff that are nothing more than beggars in uniform? I have known situations where immigration officers, on the pretence of checking for contraband goods, have rummaged through my belongings and begged for whatever item catches their fancy.

Recently, on arriving at the airport in Accra, Ghana, I was disgusted when an immigration officer actually begged that I give him the biscuits I had bought for my children. Just ordinary biscuits, which he could easily have bought on the streets of Accra! Naturally I refused. Can you believe another young officer escorted me to my waiting car, all the while trying to convince me to part with the biscuits? What kind of begging is this? After extracting myself from that irritating situation, it was time to go home. But not before the hangers-on at the airport had demanded I give them “pounds or coins”. All across the continent, you see young men standing at the airports, ready to help you push your trolley to your car for some “small change”. Whether you seek their assistance or not, everybody is keen to “help” you.

But of course you soon find out this “help” comes at a cost. These days, one of the biggest beggars (like our immigration officers) also comes in uniform. I am talking about African policemen and women. Even if you are the victim of a crime, the police have no shame in begging you for money before coming to your assistance. Right now, drivers in Ghana are being accosted every day and night by these “beggars in uniform”. Because of the high incidence of robberies in the past, the Ghana police started mounting barriers at night, as a way to protect innocent members of society. The idea really is for the police to search each vehicle to make sure it is not full of robbers carrying dangerous weapons such as guns.

Instead, when a driver gets to a barrier, the police shine their pathetic torch lights in the car and, sometimes, ask for something “small for iced water or Fanta”. I mean, what kind of life is this? Why should policemen and women turn themselves into professional beggars? I know they are underpaid, but come on, begging for money from the populace is not cool. These “beggars in uniform” are all over the streets of West Africa and travelling by road from, say, Ghana to Benin, is no laughing matter. You will come across so many barriers and you know at each one, a beggar in uniform will demand something from you. For doing their job! That is what gets to me the most. The majority of people begging in Africa are in full-time gainful employment.

Yet they beg for money from you for them to do their jobs! Can you imagine, after withdrawing your money from a bank, the bank teller begs for “something” from you? I have heard of secretaries who, no matter how many times you visit their offices, will tell you their boss is unavailable. Yet the same secretaries have no shame in begging you for “something”. “Something” which, when it materialises, guarantees you a meeting with the “absent” boss.

This culture of begging has permeated the whole African social order, from our governments down to every sector of society. In the classrooms, teachers beg schoolchildren for their “luxury foods” such as apples which they cannot afford on a teacher’s salary. Pathetic but true! Visit any establishment and the security officer will act as if he is helping you to find a parking lot. The minute you step out of your car, the begging starts: “Oh madam, I dey ooo!”You stop at the traffic lights and young children who are supposedly trying to earn a living by cleaning your car windows or selling chewing gum, all of a sudden turn into professional beggars. These days, many of our young men are creating work for themselves by filling in the potholes on our roads, whilst at the same time begging for money!

What is going on? Why have we turned into a continent of beggars? Our leaders go abroad to beg for “aid” to support the national budget or else they can’t run our countries. They beg for loans, grants, and experts to develop Africa. It makes no sense, when you have everything you need at home to cook a good meal, to go begging your neighbour for their food. You may not be a good cook, but once you have the ingredients, surely you can only try. For as long as we keep begging foreigners to produce for us, we will never know how to manufacture anything. We may not know how to mine and polish diamonds, but how can we know when we do not learn? We would rather beg foreign investors to come and do it for us, on their own terms!

This article was first published in New African Magazine in 2010.