Live, work in Apapa? The State is after your life!

Apapa, the semi-Island port town in Lagos, has a powerful nostalgic effect on me. It’s what they say about every man’s or every woman’s growing up years. In case you don’t really know this, here’s what they say: that our growing up years (our boy’s and girl’s years), are our most impressionable years. They are years when, for some reasons that only the omniscience, omnipresent God, and maybe a little bit of science, can explain to us, the young mind is open to receiving all sorts of things – good and bad. It’s the reason why it is perhaps only in childhood that boys and girls are open to easily learn any language, no matter how difficult. When we are grown men and women, it is for this same reason of having an impressionable mind that we fall back to nostalgia, thinking of our growing up years as the best time of our lives. In many cases, especially if you did remember them as that, then you are likely to be right. They do turn out, especially upon becoming an adult and you come to the brutal shock of how selfish and wicked adults can be, that those years are, indeed, something to remember!

Now, because I have an overpowering nostalgic feeling every time I find myself in Apapa, even long before my office moved here, it hits me seeing what mess it has become as a result of crass neglect by those in government who should know better; especially people who put themselves forward promising to “serve Nigerians from all walks of life”. I know Apapa pretty well because I walked and played on some its once beautiful streets and landmarks (by the way, it was at a Jazz club besides Apapa Amusement Park that I first watched Femi Kuti handle the saxophone with such dexterity that I cemented my love for those genres of music called jazz and Afobeat). I lived in Apapa when much, if not most of it was reserved living area. Apart from the Apapa Wharf and its immediate surroundings – Creek Road, Warehouse Road, and the areas around Apapa Post Office and Apapa Health Centre, where you had Kingsway, Leventis and UTC Stores, as well as the unforgettable Roxy Cinema, the rest of Apapa, in my boyhood days, was a vast area of decent living dwellings. They called it European Quarters then. And that was because many of its inhabitants were expats who worked in Nigeria in the days when the economy boomed and companies had a swat of foreigners as staff and needed to accommodate them in decent living areas.

There are one or two things that could possibly be ringing in your head as you read this. I know of one for sure. And this could be from your possible self immersion in the songs of Bob Dylan, especially his unforgettable, ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ third studio album. That’s one of the easiest ways to describe what you now find in what was once one of the quietest parts of Lagos, even Nigeria. And times are not only changing, they have changed for what is clearly the worse. This is how serious it gets. And you know that once you reach a critical point such as has been reached in Apapa, the state, which should take care of all of us, is openly asking for trouble. It’s the kind of thing that you get from entering a supermarket in the United Kingdom and on walking into the refrigerated section to pick up margarine or butter, you come face to face with one with the name, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter! You are sure to be left confused trying to make sense of the message and therefore wasting very valuable time, especially if you didn’t have any particular brand in mind when you set out to go to the supermarket!

And if you are a movie buff, you being far away and hearing all the complaints about going into Apapa and not sure of coming out, you would begin to imagine that the place is now the new Nightmare on Helm Street! Not that you would be particularly wrong if you were afar and thought of the Apapa, Lagos town as that. You see, it is a nightmare all right. But people have not started disappearing yet. I reckon the Nigerian State wishes it was exactly that. After all, people are disappearing all over the place, citizens are being bombed out of existence on a daily basis; and this BIG State with all its apparatuses of violence is hopelessly incompetent to deal with it. It is not just that it is hopelessly displaying incompetence; it is also displaying total arrogance, suggesting that it doesn’t give a damn! There you are folks. Your life doesn’t really matter anymore. It never did, anyway. After all, do you matter during elections? Does your vote matter? Would it count even if you thought it mattered? That’s one of the biggest reasons why the state can treat all of us like this and we just lap it up and do the Fela thing, Suffering and Smiling. We are slowly dying and the state is happy! Did I say slowly? Yes, that’s what is happening in Apapa, Lagos. You are in traffic for six hours going to work or going into your home in Apapa. You are in traffic for six to seven hours getting out of Apapa. And you call that life and living? That’s death man. And the Nigerian state is celebrating your slow death.

I can bet that when they sit down to discuss this, some people amongst them will chip in these words: “Is it not just traffic? That’s common in big cities!” Do not laugh. It’s the truth! Our lives mean nothing to them and the Nigerian state possibly sees us as enemies and even though, if we admit we are enemies because we have to occasionally hold the state to account for its bad governance, we are not enemy combatant! Are we? We are just ordinary citizens going about our daily lives of eking out a living regardless of the State and trying to make the best of the present situation to do right by ourselves and by our families. For the Nigerian state to openly be after our lives by not acting to deal with what has now turned to a traffic nightmare in a town where it rakes in trillions of naira, then this Nigerian State must be governed by people who are naturally sadistic! They are evil! They are wicked. These are evil men and women that Lucifer has released upon this country, because I can’t accept that across the entire system there is nobody with the necessary ideas to make a difference! God help us all and save us from these monsters in power!

PHILLIP ISAKPA