The Nigerian Market

I should be talking about something serious, like the 'Nigerian' guy who tried to bomb a plane in the US on Christmas day. Honestly, I have my doubts about his true identity, because we all know, Nigerians love life too much to consider things like suicide. Haven't you heard about the Nigerian who wanted to kill himself? He hung himself from the waist, because "that neck own too dey pain person". I mean, I'm just saying... Anyways, I'm in too good a mood to write out what needs to be said about Nigeria today. It'd be too depressing. That said, RIP Mariam Babaginda.

Anyways. my topic today has different topics:

1. The Nigerian mobile market: I mean like the market in traffic. Honestly, they've taken street trading to a whole new level. My Dad was on his way to Ife, in Osun State one day, and he forgot his glasses at home. He bought a new pair somewhere on the highway. I mean I understand Gala, Fanyogo, Bananas and even windshield wipers, but Glasses, really?! On a serious note though, I read recently that the government is trying to get these traders off the streets, for safety reasons. My question for the government is, 'What are these people supposed to do with themselves now?' A good number of them are degree-holders who were not able to find regular jobs. Thankfully, they made better choices than those who took to armed robbery. I'm cracking my brain for ideas to help these people if they really are swept off the streets. Please lemme know if some genius plan occurs to you.
2. This thing about change: I think I talked about this on my other blog sometime ago. At this point, if I put together all the change that I was told to 'come back and collect' I can buy this pretty good Range Rover that I spotted a few hours ago. I think it sounds like the guy will gba my oju with this deal, (see me talking like I'm going to buy it tomorrow). I really want a car though, and what's wrong with being hopeful? What was I talking about before sef? Yes, change. So, as I was saying... I don't get it. How can you run a business and not have change? Oh and then, the really bold one would now encourage to 'buy something' with the change. Something? I look like a vending machine abi, so I have too much money and I can overlook 'mis-spending' N850.00 because you can't find me money? Mschew!
3. 'Buy from me or else': My cousin and I are driving home from work and this guy selling phone credit begins knocking on my window hard enough to crack it just a little bit. He's so sure that the reason I've not called him, is not the obvious one of my not needing any, but simply because I'm ignoring him. He expects that as soon as I look up and see him, I'd suddenly realize that the N1500 I just put on my phone will miraculously expire in the 15 minutes it'd take me to get home. Oh also, one of my pet peeves is being touched by people I don't know. Handshakes are 'alright', but like don't hold my arm or waist or anything like that. So, you can only imagine my reaction when someone selling men's shirts at the market grabs me by the arm and pulls me towards his store...

Lemme just stop.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New 2010 to you all!

Talk to you in the new year!

Tips for Looking Extremely Busy At Work While Accomplishing Absolutely Nothing

Arrive early: This may seem counter-intuitive, but when the rest of your team gets in to work, they assume you’ve already been working for hours and got the majority of your work done in the wee hours, and were not in fact, catching up on your favorite blogs and posting witticisms to Twitter

Spreadsheets: Despite what you heard, they are your friend. Find the busiest, craziest looking spreadsheet you can (download one off the internet if you must) and have it open on your computer at all times. When someone walks by, furrow your eyebrows, sigh deeply, and type in a new formula

Circulate: Always have a stack of papers, files and folders handy, sitting in a scattered mess on your desk. Every hour or so, gather up these files and rush about the hallways. Stop by a few people’s desks and stop to chat for a few minutes (more like forty-five) about how difficult your day has been. In the hours you’ve been wasting since you got to work, you should have come up with a pretty good story about a bitchy client, a troublesome vendor or cantankerous manager to tell to all who will listen.

Lunch: Always be the first to go to lunch. This may seem counter-intuitive as well, but if you are the first one out (let’s say you leave at 1pm) and everyone else leaves later (say at 1:30), you get back before them (say at 2:15) and they have no idea you did not take a fifteen-minute lunch and get right back to your arduous spreadsheet instead of, say, going to get your nails done. Every so often, grab a coffee (or in Naij, a meatpie) for those seated around you. This will engender goodwill and is more likely to get you support should the poop ever hit the fan.

Coffee Breaks: Take many of them. Wander over to the breakroom, sighing heavily, pouring yourself a cuppa joe with great deliberation. When someone walks by, make a comment like “I don’t know how anyone handles this level of work without copious amounts of coffee. If I could have it somehow deposited intravenously into my bloodstream so I could never leave my desk, I would so sign up for that!” The advantage of this is that this person (and anyone else close by) knows just how dedicated you are, plus it may also lead to another elaborate time-wasting conversation about the intricacies of Intravenous Caffeine Injections (ICIs).

If you have a flexible office with no assigned seating, change your seat often. This way, if anyone has the ludicrous idea of assigning you any work, they have no idea where to find you.

If you’re in a client-service field, take your laptop with you to the bathroom. It may sound gross, but when your laptop is not on your desk but the rest of your things are, your colleagues assume you’re in an important meeting with the client, not updating your Twitter page in a bathroom stall, or ordering a hit in Mafia Wars. Make sure no one sees you entering or exiting or they’ll just think you’re a weirdo, and you want to blend in as seamlessly as possible.

Open up a blank Word document and begin work on your next blog post describing for your readers how you’ve spent your last few weeks at work (see above)

Keep your resume updated.

A Very Under-developed Community Development Program

This intro is for people who are not familiar with the NYSC program.

In addition to the primary assignment that each Corper is given (mentioned by SongSmith in the previous post), depending on where that job is, you'd have a Local Government Development Area where you'd meet once a week, with other Corp Members, for Community Developement. There are different groups - Charity, Enviroment/Beautification/Sanitation, Dance and Drama, etc. As a part of each group, you're supposed to develop projects, in line with the concentration of your group, that would help develop your Local Government area.

* * *

Now, except playing errand girl and making trips to the bank for a CD coordinator counts as some sort of community development, I believe that this entire thing has been a waste of the last 30, or so, Wednesdays of my life.

Yesterday (Wednesday), we actually did something 'useful' - we walked around the LGA and picked up trash and stuff; generally cleaned the environment. (And then I did a quick bank-run).

Don't get excited though, 'doing something' is just one very small bit of the hoopla. You have to get your CD cards signed too! They have these yellow and green cards that you have to present for the coordinator's signature every week, as proof of attendance. You would think they were the ones that signed N 1, 000.00 notes.
"Who said all of you should come upstairs? See how this place is hot and smelly. Oya, down! Everybody!"
Then she'll shout through the window from the second floor (third floor American nomenclature, lol. It took me almost 6 months to get it right when I just got home) - "Five people should come at a time to sign their cards".
If she sees five and a half people - "You people don't want to leave this place today. Everybody downstairs!"
How this helps community development is something I'm still trying to wrap my head around.

All of us who hoped the NYSC program would give us an opportunity to work for a better Nigeria would just have to make sure we survive this year of torture first, and then find other ways to develop our comminuties, and country as a whole. I can't decisively say that the NYSC program should be scrapped, because I think that it can serve a very good purpose. It just has to be totally restructured.

Oh, and then, everybody likes to get 'settled'; as in "You, Corper, when you're leaving you'll settle me o. All the work I did for you - signing your card, doing your clearance. In fact, your debt is serious, you're my daughter's namesake".

See me foolishly thinking she was just doing her job...

To Serve With Love, Part II

As promised in my last post, here comes the second installment of the nightmare that was NYSC camp. My biggest beef with it, far above the poor sanitation, the brutish officials, the ‘cozy’ living quarters, was really just the stupidity of the whole thing. It’s three weeks where you take grown-butt adults, make them share rooms like prepubescents, tel them when to go to sleep, when to wake up, make them perform stupid dancing drills at 4am, make them march for the governor and to what end? No one seemed entirely sure .

The whole thing was run by a bunch of illiterates, who resented foreign-trained students instead of seeing them for the valuable resources that they are. The thing with these “foreign-trained” students (that phrase was always spat out with the most bitter venom imaginable) is that they’ve seen how things are done outside of a country that is not run by money-obsessed orangutans. They’ve seen that with just a little bit of effort, conditions can be exponentially improved. They understand the meaning of customer service. They get that people who have voluntarily (somewhat) enlisted to serve their country must not be treated like vermin, but like heroes. Instead of capitalizing on the skill-set and worldview that these students bring to the table, they are treated as persona non grata. You these fake Nigerians, please get back to your country – awon omo obodo oyinbo --if you love it so much. (Trust me, I’m working on it).

The main culprit in this regard was the Camp Director. A slow-thinking, slow-speaking chore of a woman who cannot ever have seen the insides of a grammar school at any point in life. On one particularly interesting night, following a bonfire party that promised to be hot but fizzled out early, the boys decided to revolt and storm the female hostels which were bolted shut to protect the female corps members’ virtue. They were unable to breach security but caused enough of a fracas to get everyone a bit worked up. Camp Director Lady is mad and someone is going to bear the brunt of it but who would it be? Who could she blame for the male corpers acting in such an unruly fashion? The female corps members, naturally. She goes from dorm to dorm admonishing the girls for “waving around their dirty, smelly c*nts” even though “almost 70% of the camp has tested HIV positive”, advising girls to not accept any requests for “blowjoys” as it is an indication that a man cannot perform and should have his “hammer” chopped off, and advising that condoms are not safe because “when he is at the height of his excitement, HE WILL REMOVE IT!!!” This is who is running the joint and who convinces herself every night before she goes to bed that she is empowering and educating the future of the country.

On another night, a couple was caught inflagrante delicto in the bushes behind a bus. Two adults. Two consenting adults. Two nasty adults, but two consenting adults nevertheless. They were flogged in front of the whole camp, allegedly until the guy broke a tooth. Greater than being a waste of time and a health hazard, the biggest affront of this entire process was that it was being run by people with absolutely no sense of propriety or decency.

Anyway, the whole thing ended with you being posted to a primary assignment where you’d serve (aka work like a slave for very little pay) for a year. Some were pleased – they got posted to the cushy lawfirms and accounting outfits. Some were hesitant – they got posted to the banks, where corporate prostitution in the name of attracting more customer deposits is not unusual. Some were distraught – they had clearly been posted to teach in a secondary school (using the term ‘school’ loosely) or work in a local government. Regardless, we all left the camp that day (on my bloody birthday, no less), with nothing but our hopes, our dreams and our vows to never again reurn to the dreaded Iyana-Ipaja.

To Serve, With Love Pt 1

I am extremely grateful to be writing this blog post from the relative safety and comfort of my own home, Milo in hand and Michael Buble in ear. You see, I have just recently escaped from the NYSC Concentration…err, sorry…Orientation Camp in someplace called Iyana-Ipaja. I’m impressed with myself; I survived a good solid five days before bolting for the security-clad gates. There’s really only so much a girl can take.

First and most offensively, there was the matter of the pregnancy test. See, if you’re pregnant, you’re not allowed to serve. If you can’t serve, you can’t work. If you can’t work, you starve and you die. So there’s great incentive for an expectant mother to try to pretend that she was not in the family way. As such, each female is expected to submit herself for a pregnancy test, performed in the most sanitary of conditions and by the most capable of medical professionals. Or standing over a ditch filled with someone else’s urine, outdoors in the compound of the NYSC camp with three apparent market-women screaming “WHERE IS YOUR PISS?? IF YOU CANNOT PISS, PLEASE LEAVE THIS PLACE!” at you. Same difference, really.

After overcoming this minor indignity (read: most dehumanizing thing you’ve ever, ever done), you’ve got a registration process ahead of you that you can expect to last no fewer than seven hours and which consists mostly of filling out triplicate versions of the same form seven times and taking verbal abuse from the power-hungry wenches manning each booth. At some point, you get your uniform, which, remarkably, has the ability to be both too big AND too small for you. (If it fits you perfectly, please return immediately. There has clearly been a grave error). The uniforms appear to have been crafted by a tailor who is simultaneously blind, finger-less and very, very stupid and to whom the concept of button-holes and zippers is clearly foreign. It seems perfectly clear what’s happened here. Money’s been appropriated to the purchase of uniforms for the nearly 100,000 corpers that must pass through the program every year, but has probably gone to outfitting someone’s house in Mayfair instead.

On to the matter of your sleeping accommodations. When I was in college, I had a roommate. A perfectly lovely girl from Seattle whose only annoying quirk was the fact that she had to live with me. You see, the room was just so SMALL! How could two people be expected to live in there? My NYSC dorm-room was just about the same size, only instead of just the one roommate, I had twenty-seven. Twenty-seven. Well, there WERE twenty-seven until about Day 3, when I came home to find they’d moved in the fifteenth bunk-bed bringing the grand total up to a nice round thirty. With four such rooms on each floor, this meant that 120 girls were sharing four bathrooms. This in turn meant that in order for all the girls to be ready in time for the 5am drill (and by ‘ready’, I mean showered, dressed and made up because who doesn’t need makeup for a 5am drill??), preparation had to begin at about 2:30am. Not such a problem, unless your roommates were having a good ol’ time gisting about who Bioye was or was not sleeping with back in university till 1am EVERY SINGLE NIGHT. Of course, when you realize that water stopped running in all the bathrooms by Day 2, you’ll have to factor in another hour for all 120 girls to fetch water from the borehole. So long story short, you’re not sleeping in camp. Sleep when you’re dead.

Stay tuned for part II

Sounds of Silence

Love that song by Simon and Garfunkel. It's like 10.00 at night and its dead quiet outside. NEPA just got turned back on in my neighborhood so there is not a sound from a single generator. Strangely also, there are no horns going off and no huge trucks passing by. There is no ruckus going on outside from the people who normally chose to have night time arguments directly outside my house....it is just so QUIET!

Is it completely ridiculous that this made me terrified for a couple of minutes. I've gotten so used to the noise of Lagos that it has become so normal! I swear I was frantically turning off my lights and trying to stare out the window to discover some kind of alien invasion. (We have an inverter which is why I didn't notice the nepa thing immediately)Africans, especially us Nigerians do not believe in doing anything quietly. We must shout and make noise no matter what, lol.

On a side note, there are a few people I wish I could revoke their right to speak. People who don't deserve the right to speak until something that makes sense wishes to come outta their mouth. Crazy tactless individuals who say things like "only people who have no faith in God get sick and take medicine. Medicine is for non-believers". I'm a Christian and I really take offense when people make comments like that. This person should thank their lucky stars that nobody in their family has a life threatening illness...let's see how long it will take for them to run to a hospital. I believe you go to seek medical help and pray to God or whatever you believe in that it all works out for the best.

Anyway, after that little rant, I'm off to savour this rare moment as I am sure it won't last for much longer. Thank you Jesus for this beautiful and divine silence.

Have a blessed weekend.

Lagos Driving.

I am going to give all of you a chance to laugh at my inability to draw, because this post just won't many any sense without a sketch.

I learnt to drive in the US of A. Nigerians feel bad for me as soon as I tell them that, for the following reasons:

1. Americans know how to drive.
2. Americans obey traffic rules, and not just because someone may be watching.
3. A manual transmission car has to be specially requested in the US.
4. Sanity is common on the American road.

Now, when I came home in 2006, I was driving our old school auto-transmission Merc around Festac alone (because I didn't have a Nigerian license). I was looking forward to cruising my ride again when I moved back home, but I found out that it would be unavailable for a while. No problem. Taxis became my best friend. (I think I'm a pro at haggling taxi prices now.)

Anyway, my brother started learning to drive, with a VeeDub Beetle (I mean the really old ones o), and my folks started challenging me, talking about - 'your brother is a gee at maneuvering a gear shift, and you're here talking about knowing how to drive a car, when your left leg doesn't even know what a clutch is'. Fine! I started learning how to really drive, since apparently, auto transmission vehicles are 'toy cars'.

I now understand the clutch/accelerator dance, but I'm only starting to shift to gear 3. The first time I tried it, I was in the car by myself. The car jerked and made a funny sound, and I fugured I'd ventured to gear 5 instead of 3. Ah well, I'm sure I'll be perfect soon. I'm still only allowed to drive around Festac and Dolphin, but I'm sure I'll be a pro before I get into the real world.

Driving in Lagos amazes me. I'm not even talking about traffic jams. Check out my less than perfect sketch:

This is what an intersection close to my house looked like a few weekends ago. Absolute chaos! Now, someone please tell me why Nigerians simply don't turn correctly like Car 2 is doing? Everyone pulls a Car 4 left turn, and I really don't get it!

Car 1 broke down right at the intersection, and no one thought it would be smart to push it out of the way. How are those indicators supposed to help?

Car 5 can't see what's in front of Car 1, so he's just going to check. And then get stuck somewhere in the middle.

Car 7 is trying to be patient to let the madness clear out but Car 6 doesn't see the importance of that. You can only imagine the pile up and honk-a-thon going on behind Car 7. Unfortunately, a woman is driving the Car 7, so everyone is going to insult her, calling her 'Woman Driver' though we all know she's doing the right thing.

Car 3 is too busy cursing out the okada that's overtaking him on the right side to see that he's about to lose the front of his car to Mr. I-don't-know-how-to-make-a-proper-left-turn in Car 4.

Don't even get me started on the way all the okadas are maneuvering themselves through the chaos. Look at the one next to Car 1; he's going to want to cross over to the right side of the road without looking, in a few seconds.

God will help us in this our Lagos o.

AMEN!