I was in Mpape!
I have lived in Abuja for about 20 years but apart from a brief visit to Love FM radio station to feature in a live radio session, “Brekete Family”, I have never been privileged to visit and explore the nooks and crannies of Mpape the way I did this wet Saturday afternoon. So I was totally caught off guard by what I experienced.
Mpape is a suburb of Abuja. It is just a five-minute drive from Maitama, a highbrow residential layout, but it is eons away from Maitama in every other respect.
The roads in Mpape are virtually nonexistent. The reason I was in Mpape was to attend a meeting at a Catholic church, and in a bid to find my way I called up a friend who had previously lived there. He asked me where I was calling from in Mpape. When I told him, he said I was fortunate not to have driven any further. He advised me to park my car in a safe place and take a commercial motorcycle to the church instead. I tried arguing with him but gave up when he was persistent. Luckily I found “Good Friends Garage” a commercial car park, where I paid N200 for parking the car.

That advice turned out to be the best thing that happened to me! If I had used my car it would have taken me close to an hour of a gruelling drive to get to my destination but the motorcycle ride took less than 15 minutes. My car would surely have taken a beating as the road is well… nonexistent. My friend’s advice saved me a fortune.
Mpape is a sprawling mass of unplanned houses twined together, several without sanitary facilities. I saw quite a number of folks doing “the business” in full public glare. And with the rains falling the way it has been in Abuja lately, that is a recipe for disaster. Epidemic diseases like cholera would fester in such conditions.

Mpape is a jungle, literally. Everywhere I went there was no order. I don’t mean police; I saw a couple of police officers. The roads are chaotic; the stalls of the market compete with the only major road that dissects the town. Traders have taken over the road to display their wares and this narrows the road so much so that I was made to understand that during rush hours motorists spend hours commuting distances that should last just 10 minutes.
My experience in Mpape got me reflecting; if Mpape District, a mere 20 minute drive from the FCT Minister’s office and within the vicinity of Aso Rock, is this neglected I can only imagine the fate of my remote village of Tsar in faraway Vandeikya, Benue State!

Again it is obvious that both supporters of the APC and the PDP waddle through the quagmire that is the Mpape roads and suffer all the other inconveniences with every other person. But instead of these supporters holding their leaders accountable for the obvious dereliction all over the place, they daily serve us insults and pejoratives.
Mpape in a sense is a metaphor of Nigeria. Its location, on a hill overlooking Abuja, makes it full of potential. The breath taking sights of Abuja that behold you as you drive out of it would have been harnessed into a money spinner. But this is Nigeria!
The lesson for me in all of these that I believe you can also take, is that we need to fight the system that throws up the sort of leadership we have been saddled with for so long in this country. A leadership that sees nothing wrong with a Mpape like the one I experienced today is just not acceptable. If we don’t do that, perhaps in 20 years time someone else would still be assailing us with his or her sorry experience of a Mpape.
