no first-aid for hit-and-run road victims - good Samaritans suffer
Hospital detains traffic victim helper
Every work day, impenetrable traffic jam on Lagos streets makes it impossible to enjoy the nice tropical weather, coastal beaches and the pleasures of the natural environment of this industrial capital of Nigeria – Africa’s most populous country. Hence on Sundays when nobody is rushing to work and the traffic at least moves a bit, people want to go on family visits or to friends or just to cruise through the many posh neighbourhoods, islands and extensions that make Lagos so interesting. Here is a true account of the extremely amazing, nasty experience of a Dutch-Nigerian family that set out to relax on a Sunday midday in 1983. Cruising in a self-driven car from their Adeniyi-Jones reservation quarters in Ikeja, they hoped to tour Lagos streets quietly. In the car were the husband driving with his wife sitting beside him in front, with their three 6- to 8-year old sons plus their house servant sitting in the back of their posh Toyota Super Saloon car.
All windows were wound down to let in the maritime breeze of Lagos air, and the car radio was tuned to soft music from a local station. At cruising speed, they took notice of every bit of the scenery that unfolded ahead in front and on both sides of them, as tourists would do anywhere. They passed various local markets, saw varying architecture of expensive villas and mansions with security fences, gates and guards in private uniform, rows of ramshackle houses, shopping centres and expensive hotels in Ikeja, Airport Road, Maryland, and Ilupeju, as they changed from highway to highway and from main street to main street.
Then suddenly, as they drove past a crowd, they noticed one man at the centre of it, sprawled on the street, dead still, certainly wounded if not already dead, while the crowd was moved to tears in deep sorrow at the sight of him and his blood wounds. Curious, the Dutch family reduced their cruising speed while passing the seemingly dead man, everyone lamenting as they continued on their Sunday tour.
The poor wounded man had been hit by some hit-and-run car perhaps half an hour earlier at that very spot in the busy traffic. Then suddenly, just as the Dutch family almost lost sight of the wounded man, the three children still looking from the back of the car, said to their father from a last glimpse, “He moved, he is not dead!”. That was enough to trigger their father’s purely human desire to help the poor dying man, if only because there was no ambulance service nor emergency police help in Lagos, nor anywhere in the whole of Nigeria. The only chance of survival for victims of road accidents depended only on the kindness of passers by.
The family therefore quickly put their car into the reverse, and parked it beside the dying man in the midst of the crowd, to assess his condition. Applying all he knew from past training in first-aid procedures, their father checked for signs of life in the road accident victim. The man was losing blood fast, and would surely die if he did not get medical help at once.
Although their car was already full, they regrouped, loaded the children squeezed into the front between their mother and their dad as driver, and picked up the dying man to lie on their back seat next to their house servant who was watching over the man. That from the bleeding man blood stains would dirty their car seat was no hindrance to helping him. Luckily, they quickly found a private small medical hospital nearby and explained the case to the attending nurses and doctor as they carried the wounded man still alive from the car unto a table in the hospital. Then something totally unexpected happened.
As the kind Dutch family turned to return to their car and resume their Sunday drive, the hospital staff seized one of the three children plus the house servant, and pushed both to the back of a clinic counter to detain them. Hospital staff demanded that the Dutch family should give full details of the dying man’s name and address, and also make a down payment for the expected cost of emergency treatment of this strange victim of a road accident.
The Dutch family’s plea that they knew nothing about the wounded man, and that they only helped to bring him for humanitarian reasons, was all to no avail. The doctor in fact wrongly accused the Dutch family of having injured the dying, and that they were now just dumping him to escape paying the medical cost. The dying man was too unconscious and in shock to speak for himself. Soon, a big quarrel developed as they tried to get the detained Dutch boy and servant free.
To avoid violence, the only way out for the Dutch family was to go back to the crowd at the scene of the accident to get witnesses to prove that they had not wounded the dying man. Even this Nigerian medical staff could not believe that anyone would ever help a dying victim of a road accident hit by a hit-and run motorist. With their son and servant held captive, the kind family was back at the crowd on the site of the accident within minutes, to pick up witnesses who they took back to the private hospital so hospital could free their son and servant.
Upon return to the private hospital, they found that their own son and servant, as well as the dying victim were no longer to be found. All three had been taken to some unknown destination by the hospital staff. Alarmed by the new turn of this ridiculous drama, the Dutch family had to take to the streets in urgent search of police help to locate their child and servant. Their Sunday leisure city tour had by now turned into a serious personal tragedy all because they offered humanitarian help to a dying victim of a road accident that had nothing to do with them.
After hours of fruitless search, they managed to wave down a passing police Jeep carrying seemingly senior cops in uniform and with two-way radio communication antenna, the type that whisks government ministers through traffic control on highways. Luckily, this police vehicle stopped, the policemen listened to their story, and followed them first to the sight of the accident, and then to the private hospital where their son and servant were last seen.
From first-hand witnesses, and from the blood stains inside and none outside the Dutch family’s car, the police were surely convinced of the truth that the Dutch family was suffering for helping a road accident victim. Hence the police determination to help them get their son and servant back, but also to trace the whereabouts of the dying man. With Lagos so big, and hospitals so scattered over great distances, it was a complex undertaking to find out which hospital they should look for in tracing the detained boy and servant.
As they would in tracking down highway robbers, the police started to radio to all of their colleagues in various parts of Lagos from Agege to Victoria Island several dozens of kilometres away. Meanwhile, the police Jeep and the Dutch family in their own sedan went in a convoy hopping from hospital to hospital along the way, in search of the detained boy plus servant.
Then far way, in Ikeja General Hospital, they found the dying man lying on a stretcher in the entrance hall with some nurses in a panic. The police team queried the hospital staff there to know those who had brought the man to Ikeja since those would know where the captured Dutch boy and servant were. Luckily, the query worked; for it revealed that the Dutch boy and servant were being kept away in a doctor’s waiting room there, with lies that they had caused a road accident. The police themselves told the hospital to stop lying and release the boy and servant to their kind parents who were only much needed good Samaritans.
unreliable, corrupt, at war with itself, degenerating, social blindness, armed robbery, thief-money, police
Nigeria – no nation. Only a territory at war with itself.
Everyone in Nigeria and most of those who have had significant contacts with the place will agree that Nigeria is most accurately described by the single word – UNRELIABLE. Why is Nigeria – Africa’s most populous administrative territory not a nation nor a real country? Why does Nigeria not meet the most elementary criteria for any nation and country? To begin with, the name already says a lot. Nationhood has a definite meaning, and to be a country requires a certain control over own affairs – including security and protection of own people, own finance and banking, basic infrastructure facilities for transport, health care, education and identity.
As to identity, the name Nigeria came from an abbreviation of Niger Area – a meaning so vague, it affords no clearer identification than ‘somewhere around the Niger river‘. Mind you, that river flows for more than 4100 kilometres from Mt Kissifougou in northern Sierra Leone and Guinea through some four or five countries before emptying into the Atlantic Ocean just before Cameroon where the West African coast takes its big bend southwards. So vague was the description by Mrs Lugard in a letter to her friends in England, given as her address from an undefined territory in West Africa. Since her husband Lugard was to be lord and Britain’s colonial master over the folks he hardly knew nor cared about, her vagueness gave the territory the name – Nigeria.
Until today, the area covered by the name Nigeria is still so vague as to its northern borders that some individual tribes and clans sometimes actually claim to be within Nigeria, and at other times claim to be just outside Nigeria. Some northern provinces of Nigeria have misused this point to boost their electoral quotas in national elections by driving masses of such border folks to come into Nigeria and vote as Nigerians. In addition, definition of its eastern coastal border is still a subject of serious dispute with neighbouring Cameroon republic at the United Nations.
One can argue that Nigeria is not the only African republic with border definition problems, and therefore its geographical definition issues should not automatically rob it of nationhood. If so, what would it still take for Nigeria to be a nation? According to the authoritative Oxford English Dictionary, the English word nation means a community of people of mainly common descent, language, history and customs sharing one territory, government and political institutions.
Nothing has divided Nigeria more surely than the lack of common descent, language and history of its numerous folks, despite six decades of the post-colonial experiment to forge a marriage of mutually unloving parties. That was and still is the harsh fact. What love, tolerance or affinity is there between the Hausas, the Yorubas and the Ibos who form the overwelding majority (perhaps 90%) of all folk groups that form the Nigerian population? How can they love each other when they know so little of each other?
Even today, many learned Nigerians and local political leaders including oba’s and emirs from both the north and the south do not know the names of the tribes, let alone the names of the languages, nor the history nor the customs of the many other folks with whom they now share the name Nigeria. When government ministers and parliamentarians are not even sure what tribes there are, how can they be aware of the impacts of their parliamentary decisions or government on those various tribes?
How can they understand or promote the feelings and needs of folks whose existence they are not aware of? With dozens of languages as different as English is from French, and more than a hundred dialects, Nigerian folks have hundreds of complex local patterns of customs, values, norms and internalised rules unknown to their other folks. Folks cannot claim to be united as a country – Nigeria – if they do not know each other.
Its very huge population of which Nigeria so proudly calls itself ‘biggest in Africa‘, makes it far too divergent and complex for its various folks to understand and appreciate each other’s ways. That makes it too complex if not impossible to convey meaningful respect for each other. This is evident in the regular outbreak of massacre of southerners by northerners in northern towns like Jos and Kaduna. As I write these lines on Easter Day in 2012, world news is again reporting the senseless killing of over forty southerners in the northern town – Kaduna as fanatic Muslims butcher victims just to discourage Christians from celebrating Jesus life.
To date, no government in Nigeria whether municipal, provincial or national has ever addressed this unnecessary mass killing effectively. This serious failure continues irrespective of whoever leads the country – northern parties or southern parties, northern president or southern president. Such repeated massacre with impunity is intolerable in any country. The question is do Nigerian leaders really care? If they do, what stops them from acting effectively? Surely not Nigerian law. Until and unless Nigerian government meaningfully enforces its laws, it cannot rightfully claim to run a country.
Huge differences as to the appreciation of education, religious openness, economic determination, personal drive and resourcefulness translate into sharp differences in what is perceived as opportunity, national purpose, needs and desires.
Add to this extreme partisanship in all forms, and the stage is perfectly set for corruption of the worst kind. One has seen highly expensive road-paving and bridge-building equipment piled up in a tiny northern village that has no river over which a bridge is needed, and with no motor roads coming or going to anywhere. Yet, the equipment and needless bridge that lies wasted in that village cost several ,million dollrs of federal money. Meanwhile some thousand kilometres away, large Nigerian cities are connected by highways with potholes big enough to serve as burial graves. This is no exaggeration.
Rather than develop, Nigeria has been regressing for decades now. Strangely enough, the very big cities and industrial regions which are starved of much needed basic resources, are the very ones contributing the most to the industrial output of Nigeria. This is a most uneven factor behind Nigeria’s degeneration. It is for example the issue at the very root of the Ogoni problem which still remains unresolved after more than half a century of neglecting the oil-rich Niger Delta region while the desert dry areas drain federal money.
The Ogoni are not the only ones so neglected. Nigeria used to be the world’s biggest supplier of palm oil, cocoa, kola nut. Due to government negligence as to development budget and incentive policy, southern Nigeria lost its capacity to produce these essential ingredients of modern industry.
Since independence, northern export of ground nuts which was once the world’s highest, has dwindled to a halt. Palm oil and products derived from it are a vital motor of the world’s pharmaceutical industry today. Malaysia and Asian countries which now lead the world export, started by importing the plant and seeds from Nigeria. Cocoa is a vital ingredient of the world’s chocolate snack sweets, drinks and food. Nigeria lost its great potential in these vital sectors by over-relying on crude-oil income.
An effort to develop viable rubber export in southern Nigeria failed due to lack of federal government support, and misplaced preferences by government ministers too blind to see local opportunities outside their own tribal locality.
Even national interest is allowed to suffer under local partisanship in development efforts regarding infrastructure. How can one otherwise explain the fact that Nigeria – Africa’s most oil-rich territory that supplies the USA and Europe with very significant proportions of their crude oil needs, must itself import petroleum?. It is a shame that Lagos motorists have to wait in long queues to tank for fuel, and at higher prices than in other countries that burn Nigerian crude. That would not happen if Nigeria were a real country. That the Nigerian government is so very irresponsible in this respect, deprives the territory of being a country.
Today, Nigeria is much worse off than it was as a colony if one considers the state of its road system in much of the south, the archaic state of its minuscule rail-road system, and the disastrous performance of its airlines and shipping sectors. That is just transportation alone. Its national record is just as shameful and disappointing when you look at its internal service system – the postal system, its telephone and communication systems, and its public health services – all vital areas that should have nothing to do with local tribal differences.
Nigeria is the one territory where people do pay for electricity but are sure not to get it; where people have long given up all hope of telephone lines that work; where individuals build houses and cannot rely on the state to provide water supply, nor a sewage system that works. One may say that failure in these essential respects only makes Nigeria a developing (in reality an undeveloped) territory, but does not deprive it of being a country or nation. The one fundamental communal need that any country worth the name should be able to provide for its people, is an ordinary feeling of security and safety of life and property at home and on the streets. Even in this respect, Nigeria fails woefully. How can it then be called a country?
Nigerians from the south are so unsafe in the north, they are too often arbitrarily butchered like animals by another folk as if the victims are not humans. Surely, the victims of such unprovoked violence cannot realistically feel they are one and same people or folk. This security problem is rooted in the arbitrary way the British and the French claimed and defined colonial territories, without consideration of the folks who got lumped up as Nigerians without affinity for each other.
Their definition was as arbitrary as telling all those in a huge crowd in some old-fashioned, open-air market to freeze and stay put wherever they stand at some one moment, and then inform them that each and everyone should henceforth take whoever is standing next to him or her at that moment as own spouse and family for the rest of their lives. Such is the forced marriage between Nigerian folks.
Of course, marriage does not work like that. Yet that disaster caused by Britain was continued by the post-independence experiment called Nigeria. As folks, the Hausas, Ibos and Yorubas are more different between them than the Russians, the British and the Portuguese are. That is so geographically, linguistically, culturally and in religious outlook. Unfortunately, there is very little effort to learn more about each other as is needed to get along well together.
As a result, Nigerian politics is driven by tribal opportunism, personal greed, share illiteracy even in some high places, and lack of appreciation of each other’s innate values, desires and needs as humans. This last point could be called social blindness to each other, causing great disrespect for human values. This disqualifies Nigeria from being a real country.
Social blindness makes it easy for one, who in the Biafran War lost all family possessions, not to feel too much compassion for another who was recently victim of armed robbers. Nor can a fanatic Muslim who takes non-Muslims to be kafirs unworthy to be humans, ever know the pain of Christians whose homes get burnt down simply for being in a Muslim-dominated town.
Inter-communal feeling suffers even more seriously when some group is overwhelmingly better educated, or is more successful in trade and industry, or is professionally more serious about career pursuit than the other group. Feelings get dangerously opposed to each other if in such circumstances, the least motivated or least prepared group gets the most power to decide over the output and resources of the more serious, more productive group. For too long, this has been the situation in Nigeria, especially in that divide between the north and the south. Yorubas and Ibos are able to respect each other’s industrial, religious and cultural attitudes more than the northerners are able to respect these folks.
Meanwhile, the British-induced illusion of being one country has so misled Nigerians into wanting to claim in the resources of each other’s regions, that most people assume that what the other has can be shared. Yet, what is from own area is seen as own thing as people lack the natural sense of true mutual communal care for each other.
In big urban centres where the concentration of people from different regions is highest, this translates into indifference about the security of others. This social indifference plus high unemployment in such areas easily gave rise to high rates of burglary and armed robbery, first in cities, then along highways, and finally also in smaller towns too. Now, nowhere is anyone safe in Nigeria.
Armed robbery and burglary is now so rampant in Nigeria, even aircrafts that upon landing are still taxiing towards the airport gates, get attacked by dare-devil bandits forcing open the cargo doors to get their loot. According to one stewardess, airline crews are so unsafe in guarded Lagos hotels, and attacks on property everywhere got so intensive that KLM has stopped all flight arrivals in Nigerian airports.
Travellers arriving from abroad if identified outside on the street, easily become victims of armed robbers who seek hostages to demand ransom in foreign currency. Women refrain from wearing jewellery, and workers avoid expensive dress to work, just so as not to be targets of street robbers. Stealing has gained a higher meaning in the Nigerian context.
Whereas in many countries, burglars steal just money, jewellery or loose objects from homes, in Nigeria thieves steal your whole house, with emphasis on – whole house. Nigerian bandits come in large groups – often a dozen or more, armed to the teeth like any army, complete with whole trucks to load your things into, even in two or more rounds during the same night.
Sometimes Nigerian burglars even announce to their intended victim before hand that they are coming. To be prepared to appease thieves, most households always keep a bundle of cash ready at hand to give to thieves when these arrive. With ready thief-money, they hope to prevent the need for the armed robbers to use weapons to force victims into submission.
Any weapon available to the police and army individuals are also available to those Nigerian thieves – machine guns, machetes and grenades or whatever can injure people and property. If Nigerian armed robbers come and they find a target house too tightly locked up and cannot enter, they simply burn down the whole house plus anyone who is inside. The ideas is to flush out victims using fire.
Burglars in Nigeria are known to have robbed not just one house at a time, but at times whole rows of houses together, as they hop from the one house to its neighbours, baffling even the toughest private security guards. One can report from first-hand experience as victim that a whole house was so thoroughly robbed, Nigerian thieves stole even the glass windows, the doors of all the rooms, the water taps and flush-toilets, baths and water pipes, the electric meters and electric cables, the built-in double-glass roof window that was imported from Europe, the electric generator, some roofing sheets and much more.
On this one specific occasion out of nine earlier ones, the thieves came deep in the night – at 2:00 a.m for a first loading, and returned three hours later for a second loading of loot from the same house. You would ask is there no police in that country?
That is the very point in this story – that by its very inability to provide that most elementary security service called police, Nigeria disqualifies itself from being a state, nation or country. The very word police came from the Greek word polis meaning a state that provides own security for its members. That was the basis for the modern words politics, policy, polite and polity. There are numerous cases of Nigerian police officers being party to robberies and burglaries.
In the above-mentioned case of one house that got robbed twice in the same night, by the time the thieves returned for their second loading, the security guards and the home owners in the whole neighbourhood managed to so team up that they scared off many of the thieves. They actually captured two of the thieves plus their loaded truck which were therefore brought to the police station for arrest. The police locked up both thieves in a cell, just until bribes could be paid by the bandits and by the victim.
Sadly enough for the owner of the robbed house, just two days later, the police released the two arrested thieves and their truck. The same police refused to return the stolen goods on the truck to the owner till today – now years later. No real country or nation would let its police get away with such a terrible level of corruption.
Quite apart from insecurity from thieves in Nigeria, there is another fundamental definition that disqualifies Nigeria from being a country or nation. Every country has representation abroad, often called embassies or consulates manned by its very own people to care for its own nationals in foreign countries, and to promote its national economic and so-called diplomatic interests overseas. From personal experience, one has too often seen Nigeria’s foreign services (embassies and consulates) manned at important levels not by Nigerians but by total foreigners.
For example, in The Hague, Indonesians handle visa applications of travellers to visit Nigeria, and often turn down native-born Nigerians living abroad. This more than anything else confirms beyond any reasonable doubt that Nigeria is for these applicants not really a state worthy to be called a country.
What is even worse, the payment for the Nigerian visa had to be paid not to nor at the Nigerian embassy, but exclusively only at a strange Dutch bank kilometres far away from the Nigerian embassy where the visa applicant in Holland has to deposit his visa payment. Worse still, the visa money so paid at the strange Dutch bank is deposited into an American bank account in the USA, not to Nigeria’s Central Bank. That is, Nigeria as a government or territory proves to be incapable of even collecting payment in its own name in Europe and has to rely on a US firm – rather on its own Central Bank to receive its visa fees. This inability to have a reliable central bank, directly disqualifies Nigeria from deserving to be called a country.
As a result of the points given above, Nigeria has built such a bad reputation abroad, that many Nigerians abroad are ashamed to be seen as Nigerians. Which Nigerian graduate in banking would in America or Europe gladly mention at a job interview that he is from Nigeria? Doing so would almost automatically disqualify him or her from being employed, out of fear of being untrustworthy.
The best trained Nigerians with good professional experience leave Nigeria because it is unsafe to live a decent happy life in Nigeria. In the USA alone, there are well over 75000 Nigerians with multiple post-graduate university degrees who will no longer return to Nigeria. The reason is that Nigeria with all its corruption and insecurity has proven itself to be unworthy for deploying their professional skills. In short, Nigeria is not worthy to be their country. Of those left back in Nigeria, most at every level of education, would if given the chance, gladly emigrate too.
Nigerians are known to have settled in Ireland and Britain in large numbers, abusing the social security system of their host countries by claiming multiple unemployment without qualifying for it, by claiming subsidised housing which they then rent out for higher rental fees, and other similar crooked practices.
