Serving Nigeria 2

To God Almighty for the enablement to continue.
Also to friends, whose encouragements spur me to action always.
“If you don’t know where you are going, any turn may just take you there.” – Wale Adenuga (WAP)
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WHEN ARE WE GETTING THERE?
I could not stop myself from looking back as our ‘Peugeot’ vehicle drifted away from Israel’s figure. It was going to be a long journey and I was in a dilemma of thoughts. 'Should I think about the wonderful hospitality or envisage the journey ahead and how Zamfara will be?' I soliloquized. I was in the middle of my deep thoughts when our vehicle had a hiccup.
'We have not even travelled up to a kilometre!' I screamed within myself. 'What a bad omen to start a long journey'! I was bitter at the occurrence but little did I know that it was a blessing in disguise. I used the vehicle-wreck-opportunity to look for a place to fill my bowels. Well, it is a fact known to most of my friends
that I do not joke with edibles. As the great architect of the universe will have it, I did not trek far before I saw an individual saddled with the responsibility of peddling my favourite, ‘BB’—Bread and Beans. Immediately, I remembered what Tunde, a university colleague, had said one day we were meant to go to the field at 4 p.m. and I decided to eat ‘BB’ even when the time was 3:50 p.m. “This Lembo boy, make dem talk say heaven gate go close by 5 p.m., him go still go chop bread and beans for 4:59 p.m.”
I forbade it though.

I did not mind that the place looked scruffy, I ate to my satisfaction. I was also flabbergasted when those that condemned my decision to find a place to eat, left the temporarily damaged vehicle for where I was just to force food down their ‘yeye’ mouths. It took about two more hours before the chauffeur could fix his Peugeot. We hopped in again and prayed we would not have to face another of its kind. The driver over-sped this time. It was crystal clear that he was trying to make time for the period wasted as a result of the stop. The car was filled with youths, so most of us did not complain or did not complain openly.

During our journey, I got to know that both Kwara and Niger States have a town called Jebba. We passed Jebba, Kwara State first, then Jebba Niger State later. There was a border check-point where ferocious armed men guarded. Their faces were cantankerous as if they had seen a violator already. They temporarily blocked the road with sand sacks just to aid their work. I did not hold any contraband but I was scared of them, initially.

Niger State was where we spent most of the day. Gracious goodness! At a point, I got tired of checking the bottom parts of sign posts because everything was Niger State. We moved through Makera, Pandogiwa, Kotangora to mention but a few; all in Niger State. At about 1:30 p.m., the driver halted at a filling station and advised that we stretch for about an hour. My mind went to a former Head of State and recalled the thievery his government once came to exemplify when I learnt that we were still in Niger State.
“So this man stole all these lands for himself?” I whispered to myself, making sure no one heard even a strand of such unforgiving thought. In between the hour stretch, someone pointed to an obvious computer centre along the road and told us to go there and make photocopies. I stumbled upon a fellow passenger as we went to make the copies of our documents.
“You mean we have spent about four hours in Niger State alone?” He pounced on the thought, as if he had been thinking about it before.
“Na so we see am o my brother,” I replied, happily finding someone who reasoned the way I was. You cannot give us one whole hour just to stretch; that is too over exuberant. We decided to do other things on our own. The filling station was a common place for travellers to relax for about an hour or two, so there were dealers in all sorts of things that could make you dip your hand in your pockets to buy stuffs. After making the copies, my eyes went about 45 degrees away from where I stood and immediately saw a long row of smoked meat(suya) peddlers. I did not think twice about it before approaching one of them and spoke what I heard people speak to him —“bani tozo”. I asked for suya worth of a hundred naira and watched as the young man kept slicing and cutting for me. The substance was garnished with their flavoured pepper (yaji) which I love so much. It would have surprised me that the suya was much but I remembered that meat is in abundance in the North and so could be sold in large quantities even to visitors like myself. I purchased a bottle of ‘Viju milk’ drink to soothe myself in the vehicle whenever I eventually felt like taking it.

After about 45 minutes, we continued our journey as scheduled. It becaae boring at a point. What we saw were endless plantations of millet. I initially thought the grains grew on their own until I was moved from the thoughts when I saw farmers threshing millets in the hot sun. The houses were sparse and antediluvian. Even the few inhabitants were so obsolete in their dealings that I thought I was seeing a documentary.

I tried not to tell anyone that the Northerners at the filling station made me ask myself if they were Nigerians or ‘Somalis’. They bawled and wailed haphazardly. Their incoherent arrangement even with their fuel kegs was nothing to write home about. I initially thought they were there to get water because they were very careless with the oil. The place was so macabre that one would pray that an explosion doesn’t happen. The filling station was as well crowded with petrol seekers and lots of bicycles of roughage sellers. The sellers pushed their bicycles so close to the fuel dispenser as if they were also there to buy fuel. Every one of them did things obstreperously and one could not help but conclude that it was part of the first experience.

Other passengers also did more than stretching as they got junks for themselves too. Soon, mouths started rolling in the vehicle. Before eating, I felt somehow anomalous about what I bought but I could not just figure out why and what for. The answer was not far-fetched; it came like a bang to me. The suya I bought and thought was plenty meat was actually plenty fat. The first munch was appalling, chewing it was preposterous and everyone could read belligerency on my stroppy face. I hissed at myself, spat out and frowned before fellow passengers started laughing at me. I narrated the ordeal euphemistically. It was then I was told that tozo meant ‘meat with fat’.
“You should have said bani nama (give me meat)’, Sola corrected, as both disgust and regret filled my face.
As if that was not enough, I decided to find solace in the drink. What I sipped tasted like N10 sachet of powdered milk. I should have seen the rap before buying it, the design was faint and the cover was not firm. In a nutshell, I bought an expired drink. What an afternoon! What a town!! What an hour of unhelpfulness!!!

The long journey continued. I tried to put the sardonic situation behind me. I love knowing places but do not like travelling. Yes, how Ironic? It was not long that I started feeling uncomfortable. I had sat for too long and my bony buttocks started eking out pains. At about some minutes before six, we reached a Y junction and the driver made for the left. He told us that the right led to Kano State, though, we were in Kaduna State. There were no obvious geographical differences between Niger and Kaduna States, well, maybe at the border. In Kaduna proper, the population was denser than Niger’s. At least, one could still see from afar, another hut. The drive inside Kaduna State was not long. We got to Yankera in Katsina State in an hour. Fellow passengers were already slumbering but I was anxious. I wanted to take note of every area as well as notable occurrences in that area. The driver made a left turn at Yankera and it was not long before I saw the big sign that shouted at me— Welcome to Zamfara.
‘Wheeeewh, finally!’ I exclaimed.
Surprisingly, everyone woke from their sleep at that time. One could read the innate joy in their minds. We were stressed as if we had been working all day. We were in Zamfara but how to locate the Orientation Camp at Tsafe appeared the bothering question in our minds?
“I only ply Ilorin to Gusau, the state capital, I don’t know where Tsafe is,” the driver answered, as if he had read our minds.
Someone in the bus then opined that we ask passers-by. After asking the third person, we got the same response the first and the second gave—"Ba turenchi" (I don’t understand English).
It was then the driver decided to speak the tainted Hausa he understood. We got a discouraging response this time. We could not even decipher what the passer by uttered. One of the passengers just mentioned something about corpers and suddenly, the Hausa man caught a glimpse.
“Kofa! Kofa!! Oh, yowa!!!”
I didn’t understand what he said afterwards but I knew he gesticulated that we keep moving forward even as darkness enveloped the skyline. We were in the early minutes of 8 o’clock. We squeezed through, all our senses at alert; we could not wait to alight from the vehicle.

Alas! We saw lots of buses parked in an area, people alighting with luggagese, smiles everywhere and instantly knew we were there. The big NYSC Orientation Camp sculpture was built in form of an ark with “Tsafe, Zamfara” completing the circle. We alighted and stretched well enough after a long and tired journey. Nobody knew what awaited us inside camp, but one thing was certain, it was going to be a time filled with awe. How was it going to appear????????
………………………………………..To be continued