“Nigeria is a zoo,” says Genebahaga. He is an 18 year old security guard at my friends house, where we are staying in Lagos. He is frustrated with the state, where some people are filthy rich and the majority of the 180m dirt poor. There is nowhere to go. He shows me his mathematics book, he is studying differential equations for the exams to get into the university and study medicine or biotechnics. He doesn’t yet have the €70 needed for exams.
He figures out we’re from ex-Soviet Union and is fascinated by Stalin. I try to explain that Stalin killed a lot of people, he remains convinced it was for a good intent.
The social layers are striking in Lagos. The super-rich who drive hummers, the thin middle class who have a job and own a car. The people who take the bus. And then the people who walk or just stand on the streets. The hummer people are maybe a 1000 – top government, oil hustlers, oil robbers. The compound-habiting middle class maybe a whole 1% which makes it to 200k folks. And then you have 20m of everyone else.
If you wanna get anywhere in Nigeria, you need to learn pidgin fast. Naively I though pidgin was just broken English, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. For the first couple of days it was impossible to comprehend anything that was said. The first phrase to learn: no wahala – no trouble, all good.
The crate with the bikes is stuck in customs, it was dirt cheap to send the bikes here, but quite pricey to get the bikes out of customs. It didn’t help that I misinformed the customs about the number of bikes in that crate. They didn’t like it when they opened it up. But there is progress, we should have the bikes through customs on Monday. Or Tuesday, Wednesday, any other day …
Today we found the Lagos prime bike shop – Victor is a nice old dude, who lived in Japan for 6 years and now runs this shop / breakage yard. We got a new battery for Suusi and I’ll need to take Kotilda there to repair the ignition block that was ripped out by the east London hooligans. Victor imports old power bikes (the non-scooters) in a container from Japan. When I ask about customs, he explains that he takes the plastic off and removes wheels, handlebars etc. Then he declares it as a container full of spare parts and pays merely €2000 for the whole container of ca 20 bikes, where the customs for one bike would be ca €800.
Africa loves music and it plays music like the boss. We ended up in a backyard of a restaurant, where Innercity Jaz played mellow afro grooves in the background. Today we have VVIP (very very important ppl) tickets to a local highlight of a pop festival. Rhythm and beats seasoned with stand up comedy acts. Much looking forward to the musical highlight – a visit to the Fela Shrine, a club to keep the soul of Fela Kuti alive.
Some scenes on video here.
Shared album – Kristo Käärmann, Võike Kulmus
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