A Love Affair with Traffic
Center of Excellence?
The time is 3:30 AM in Lagos, you are lying in bed awake with heavy eyes. You’re weak from lack of adequate sleep. You roll over several times, pondering why you’re awake at a time people in other parts of Nigeria consider “odd hour”. Reality dawns fast, you got a job to go to. You remember adulthood and the many bills to be sorted. Now you’re brushing your teeth and showering at the same time; you clean up nice then leave to dress up. A quick look at the time again because lateness is not an option, more so in the poverty capital of the world where losing your job is a big deal. Let the day begin.
The time is now 4:45 AM, and your “wahala” subscription is about to kick start. At the bus stop, after waiting minutes to get a fairly priced vehicle, you finally enter one with a rickety body. The chairs are made of hardwood and iron. There’s no leg space and passengers are crammed in. If you own a car, your subscription is just a tad different. I mean, you still have to drive on the road, there’s no escaping this wahala. The journey is smooth at the beginning till it’s 5:30 AM and the famous yellow buses “loading” passengers block a portion of the road, then crowded bus stops with commuters slowing both human and vehicular traffic. The only thing on your mind at this point is overcoming this phase and getting to work early. How’s your day going now?
With an estimated population of 22 million people, it is no surprise there are many commuters in the commercial capital of Nigeria. According to a CNN report in 2019,
“more than eight million people, moving in five million vehicles cram into a tiny network of just 9,100 roads every day. This is the reason why Lagosians spend an average of 30 hours in traffic each week or 1,560 annually, while drivers in Los Angeles and Moscow traffic spent only 128 and 210 hours respectively in the whole of 2018. Lagos is projected to become the world’s biggest city by 2100, with a population of 88.3 million. It urgently needs better road facilities and a high-capacity transit system”.
The number of productive man-hours spent commuting from one place to another in Lagos is often pushed aside. Let’s say you manage to get to work early, you almost cannot escape heavy traffic going home. This affects the mental and physical health of many individuals. In Nigeria, with poor healthcare and a terrible culture of not seeking routine medical checkups, it is easy to predict the negative long-term effect of this phenomenon on quality of life.
The government does not seem to have a clue how to manage the situation even though there is a lot of literature on traffic management in Lagos state. Citizens are on their own in this regard. The roads have become a nightmare. Stress builds up and illness follows suit. The Lagos blue line rail project that would have mitigated this problem is nowhere near completion, despite billions of naira already spent. Policies put out to manage traffic in Lagos state have had little to no positive effect; a testament to the government’s incompetence.
With the ban on commercial motorcycles, many are left to walk long distances to arrive at their destinations faster. Lagosians subscribe to this wahala by default and have grown to love it. They brag about it too. It is now a measure of how hardworking Lagosians are, while they die slowly in traffic. A sad relationship but love nonetheless.
