THE LIGHTHOUSE REPORT
Research Bulletin #11
The Road to Abuja
May 2010
By Nmutaka Okongwu PhD
nmutaka@gmail. com
The Road to Abuja

INTRODUCTION
Shortly after relocating to Enugu, the main city in eastern Nigeria, from the beautiful countryside of upstate New York, I heard that its only airport would be shutting down for repairs and renovations. Initially, I dismissed the story as too outlandish to be true; however, it persisted, so I went to the airport to investigate. Upon inquiry, the staffers at the airport confirmed the story and added more in the way of detail ¯ the airport would be closing for six to twelve months in February (of 2010), while it was being upgraded from a local to an international airport.
After the story was confirmed, I continued to have my doubts; because, I am, in all my years, yet to encounter a functioning airport that was shutdown for repairs and renovations. It is not done because of the spillover which can manifest in various forms. For instance, the staffers, what would become of them?
Would they be benched, retrenched, or redeployed? What would become of their families? Then, there are the airport cabbies, for whom the airport traffic is bread and butter. How would they and their families fare? And then, there is the city, Enugu? How would it cope with an event that would only make economic life more onerous? Then there are the struggling airlines? What would happen to their business? And then there are the patrons ¯ business people, students, and vacationers? How would they fare in the new regime?
Fantastic to me as it was, February came and, in a brazen display of contempt for the spillover, the Enugu airport was closed. It was hard to believe that those in charge could choose such a line of action, but even harder was the lack of public outrage ¯ a complacency of the highest order. The only mention of it, that I saw, leading up to the event and in the immediate aftermath, was an advisory in the newspapers alerting would-be travelers to revise their travel plans.

 THE OPTIONS As fate would have it, I needed to travel to Abuja, the nation's capital, soon after the airport closed. My first option was to make the two hour road trip to Owerri, the second major city in the east, and then to fly out from there. But this meant, assuming a one hour flight time from Owerri to Abuja, and a three hour lag for contingencies, a total of six hours travel time, if all went well. My second option was to make the four hour road trip to Benin, a medium town in the west, and to fly out from there. Another three hour lag for contingencies and a one hour flight time to Abuja meant eight hours of travel time, if all went well. My third option was to travel from Enugu by ABC, a 'luxurious' bus service, with a reputation for being slow but safe. If all went well, this would take about twelve hours, which meant I would spend all day on the road. My fourth option was to travel by AutoStar, not to be confused with EuroStar, an 'executive' minibus service. This would take about seven hours, but the word was that it was less safe than ABC and cramped.
There were other less appetizing options, such as traveling by commercial sedan, or by Peace Mass Transit, another minibus service, but I ruled them out on safety grounds. After due consideration, I ruled out traveling by road to Benin or Owerri because, in further testament to the spillover, word had it that incidents of armed robbery and kidnappings had picked-up along both axes. I also ruled out traveling by ABC because word had it that it broke down more often than not. So, by default, I was left with AutoStar.

ADORATION
The business need manifested on a Monday. I spent Tuesday agonizing over how to go. On Wednesday, I settled on AutoStar and bought a ticket for early the next morning; however, it was not until the Adoration service started on Wednesday evening that I realized the glitch in my plan. The Adoration service of Reverend Mbaka is an all night church fest held every Wednesday nearby where I live. It attracts thousands from far and wide who spend the whole night praying, singing, and dancing. It would not be so bad but for the fact that in violation of all zoning conventions the all night service is broadcast to all and sundry, via numerous very loud speakers; therefore, it is almost impossible to get any sleep on Wednesday nights, unless you are willing to run your generator all night. But this is constrained by the cost of diesel (N115/liter @ 3litres/hr for 10hrs = N3450) and the further downside that when you run your generator through the night, the roving gangs of armed robbers are alerted that you can afford it and that your ability to hear them coming is compromised. Additional to the noise is the enormous amount of waste generated by the festive masses. Due to capital shortages, such as the dearth of waste removal trucks, and infrastructure limitations such as the absence of public lavatories, and gutters that drain to nowhere, the waste has accumulated over the years and is augmented weekly, thereby rendering the neighborhood a veritable cesspool, especially on Thursdays after the all night fest. All this no less, my immediate concern as I prepared to catch the early morning Thursday bus was that from 7:00pm on Wednesdays to 7:00am on Thursdays, movement in and out of my neighborhood was virtually impossible due to the teeming crowd. Therefore, if I was to catch my bus and keep my appointment I would have to walk from where I lived, through the Adoration Grounds, to where I could catch a ride to the bus stop. In keeping with this plan, I left the house the next morning at 5:30am dressed in native wear. This last because the Adoration service invites all sorts such as armed robbers and pick pockets, hence it is critical not to standout. Past the thick fumes of the Adoration Grounds, the only transportation I could find, aside from the commercial minibuses, which were packed to the gills, were the motorbikes aka Okadas. At 6:00am, the Okadas wanted an arm and a leg to transport me a mile and a half, so I continued on foot. It was touch and go at that hour, given the crowds from the all night service; however, I arrived at the bus station without incident and with some time to spare.

THE ROAD
The bus to Abuja left on time despite the attempt by some passengers to delay it over sitting arrangements. This was puzzling because seats had been pre-assigned upon ticket purchase and the merchant had not oversold. In any case, following the resolution, our driver broke every traffic law as he sped out of town towards the Enugu - Onitsha 'express' way. In no time at all, we reached the turnoff for the express road and shortly afterwards we were truly on our way. The Enugu - Onitsha express way was a four-lane dual-carriage road when it was built some twenty-five plus years ago. Today, as a result of the lack of maintenance, a problem that permeates every aspect of the society, primarily due to the import orientation, one carriage way has been closed, supposedly for construction, which will be difficult given that the rains have come; and the remaining carriage way stands as a degraded, pothole riddled, two-lane road, surrounded by eroded hills. Along this road, on view before ninth mile, the northern turn, is the shameful spectacle of the abandoned Iva Valley Coal Mine. Once upon a time it was an institution but now it is a garbage dump, complete with a sea of refuse. In its heyday, the Iva Valley Coal Mine powered the, now forsaken, 25mgw power station at Oji River (another mothballed institution) which it supplied with coal via an aerial conveyor system that moved coal buckets some thirty miles each way. Past ninth mile we turned onto the road to Nsukka where the driver continued at his breakneck pace. The Nsukka road was just as bad as the Onitsha road but the standout along this road was the short-supply of cultivated roadside plots. Twenty five years ago, they hugged the road and climbed the distant hills but no more. And even where there were present, they were, more often than not, being cultivated by women ¯ a clear sign of the flight to the townships by the young men who have chosen the uncertain vagaries of city life to the hard and slow but steady toil of farming. Yet, agriculture is supposedly the fastest growing sector of the economy. This would be possible with mechanization but where are the farms?

Further up the Nsukka road, past Opi junction, the thick traffic which comprised almost entirely of commercial buses and heavy trailers thinned down and like magic the poor road turned passable. This raised in my mind the idea that it was not just poor construction and non-maintenance that were responsible for the dismal state of the roads but also the uncountable heavy trucks and buses. In other words, the lack of a viable alternative, such as a reliable railway system had taken its toll on the roads by forcing all cargo and the vast majority of people onto the roads. The implications of this are vast since rail is by far the safest and cheapest way to move people and cargo over land. In brief, we could extend the lifetime of our roads, provide jobs to the army of unemployed, and provide a safer more efficient way to move people and goods around by constructing an adequate railway network.

Next, we arrived Oboloafor where the standouts were the young school-age boys racing through the market on horses and the elegant market women. The road remained narrow but passable until the outskirts of Itokpe in Kogi state, where the road turned into an obstacle course. Though I had heard it was one of the poorer states, it was not until this trip that I understood what was meant, because from inside the bus, Kogi seemed like a barren wasteland of undersized mud huts and people sleeping under trees. Further along, the road was being worked on by an engineering firm (TEC) with Asian engineers; however, it was mostly the regrading and asphalting of the two lane road. There was no shoulder and no provision for drainage, which meant it would surely suffer during the rains. Again, this got me thinking, why not an indigenous firm? We know what a road should look like and we have civil engineers, so why not hand them a specification and endogenize the expertise?

The road deteriorated once more, past Alloma, where TEC construction commenced. It was non-existent past the turnoff leading to the Federal College at Ugwulawo and it was a nightmare past the bridge at Itobe. Speaking of nightmares, during a later trip from Enugu to Abuja, our minibus broke down some distance from Itobe. To say that it broke down is being kind, because, as unbelievable as it might sound, the engine was mounted improperly and it dropped down into the undercarriage as we were speeding along the nightmarish road. This got me thinking about accountability. Had we not been so fortunate, what recourse would our families have had? Following the bridge at Itobe, we embarked a narrow, heavily trafficked, pothole riddled, road that brought us to Geregu. For those who do not know, this is the site of a new gas powered thermal power plant. Far from bustling, the site is near abandoned, ostensibly because the gas powered plant has no gas supply. There is no pipeline delivering gas to the plant, and though it is theoretically possible to deliver the gas by road for storage in gas tanks, the state of the roads suggests that this is nothing but a theoretical possibility. In any case, the Geregu plant just sits there like the abandoned/dismantle d steel plant at Ajaokuta which lies a little bit further down the road. Past Ajaokuta, we passed through Lokoja, the Niger-Benue confluence town, where the main attractions were the decrepit Stella Obasanjo Library and the shoddy Olusegun Obasanjo Park. We made a brief pit stop only to be accosted by an army of children begging for alms. After Lokoja, we embarked the Lokoja - Abaji -Abuja stretch which was the most treacherous leg of our journey. The two-lane road (which in all fairness is undergoing a dualization) was bustling with trailers, tankers, tippers, 'luxurious' buses and all other kinds of vehicles that treat the stretch as a race course. In testament to the madness were the charred mangled metallic remains littering the road side. This brought healthcare to the fore. In the event, god forbid, of an accident, what options did we have? Was there an ambulance that could be called upon to transport us, without delay, to a fully equipped (and staffed) medical facility? As fate would have it, we survived the deathtrap and arrived in Abuja at about 3:00pm. Here, no matter the vast sums that have been spent, the signs of decay are starting to manifest. The traffic lights, though present, no longer function, power supply to the hotel I eventually checked into was just as bad as in Enugu, the staffers at the ministry where I had my business where just as sleepy as those at the post office in Enugu, and perhaps, most disconcerting of all, was the sight of people defecating in the gutters in the Central District in broad daylight.

CONCLUSION
Following my road trip, I realized that what is on the ground is far worse than we obtain from the news. It takes the shuttering of a functioning airport to realize that those in control are utterly clueless. It takes going on the roads to realize how dangerous they are and that mobility, and therefore business, is severely handicapped. It takes the sight of the garbage dump that was the Iva Valley Coal Mine to realize the extent of the decay. It takes a near-mishap, or even better, the sight of all the accidents that litter the roadside to realize that you have no legal recourse or a functioning healthcare system should you need one. It takes the sight of workers implementing third rate repairs to realize that the end is nowhere in sight. It takes the sight of Geregu to comprehend the lack of planning that has given rise to the blackouts that we have all come to accept. And it takes the sight of Abuja to realize that it is just like everywhere else but for its displacement in time.
Long life and good health