My Misadventure of eating Jollof Rice in an outdoor restaurant in Lagos
It’s bad enough that I work very hard for my money, in Lagos money is earned and kept tooth and nail. Sun Tzu would rewrite his famous Art of War if He visited modern day Lagos. There’s no art in warfare here. No prisoners and no corpses are left behind in the business terrain.
So, surviving that kind of harsh climate and deciding that from time to time I deserve a little bit of luxury (Amen somebody?) to make futile attempts at detoxification by eating in an outdoor restaurant, I still get disrespected.
We should note, with contempt, that these outdoor restaurants don’t come cheap. I mean, these guys basically painted a scaffolding, hung a few plants here and there and then decide to bill you 3x the charge of an indoor, luxury furnished, air-conditioned, petrol guzzling restaurant. The economics doesn’t make sense to me. It’s almost as if they crafted their prices with a gleeful sneer and undiluted wickedness like Berberoka fairies in Celtic folklore.
I can already imagine their business plan presentation to their investors.
‘We’re going to make a triple-bottom-line profit, we are profiting at the cost line by putting together a shitty infrastructure that doesn’t need more than some dusting and mopping for maintenance. We will also profit at our supply line with our air conditioning powered by Earth Air Incorporated, a non-profit organisation and our electricity by The Daily Sunrise company group, also a non-profit by the way. We went through great lengths in getting these partnership deals closed. And finally, we will profit at the price line by charging 10x more than average market prices because we are targeting people living miserable lives and looking for validation of their existence as respected individuals.
The investors would have cheered and popped champaign bottles merrily like drunken Viking sailors. No, that's a disrespect to Vikings, I don’t think those guys get drunk. That's beside the point anyway.
The point is, I’m eating at this restaurant, fully aware of the evil-ry behind the experience, and yet I’m facing disrespect.
There’s a fly on my food. I’ve been fighting with it for the past thirty minutes with no success. A dramatic reminder of the harsh Lagos climate. Even flies will take from you your hard earned money after you’ve survived the venomous battalion of everyone else.
I mean, I don’t even know where it’s been and whatever germs coming off its hairy spiky legs as it keeps sanitising itself on my food. My hard earned money eating shit.
I’m disrespected by clients who sign SLAs and then pretend they have no idea what the S means, talkless of the remaining L and A. I’m disrespected by ISPs who take your money and then give you 10% uptime internet access. I’m disrespected by the Uber driver who hides under a tree waiting for me to cancel so he can earn N400 cancellation fee. I’m disrespected by the keke rider who tries to overtake me when I’m hitting 120 km/h. I’m disrespected by the danfo bus drivers who bump into my side and scratch my car with a knowing look on their face as if daring me to complain. Which I don’t, I’m not scrawny but I’m not ballsy either, these guys are intoxicated all the time. And not with chemicals by the way. I’m disrespected by the police officer who hangs around at those one way corners with a blind spot and potholed roads so you can’t see them when turning in and can’t escape when they pounce on you because the road is terrible and you’re thinking of the repairs to all your arm-bushings if not careful, not to even talk of the mechanics who are also part of the business of evil-ry. And the police officer will look at my license and then my face and decide I don’t look like the person in the license. I mean can’t a grown man earn money and gain weight for heaven's sake? Must I eternally look like the scrawny kid who was hustling for website jobs back in the day? I’m disrespected all day and now this unrelenting big fly is on my carefully selected meal, sanitising itself. It’s not even eating it, it just came to offload shit from Lord knows where spicing my jollof rice with a jollof spice of exotic faeces. No doubt from a local public toilet because hello it’s an outdoor restaurant with no toilets, where all the aforementioned people would have gone to defecate just so I could take their shit, literally, all over again. For good measure. At my demise and someone else’s profit.
The conspiracy is mind-boggling on a Nigerian election scale proportions.
The jollof rice is tasty though.
