I sat on a bench near an express road in the middle of nowhere, waiting. It’d taken me over two hours to get there from Lagos. I was going to Ibadan to meet a man and had to be there before noon. We’d been discussing over the phone for three months, but I finally insisted we talk in person.

I was enthusiastic about the conversation but also scared to meet an old man I barely knew, alone. I was waiting for my friend, who agreed to come with me. 

When my friend finally arrived, I called the man again for directions. One cab trip, and a short walk down a dirt road later, we arrived at our destination. First, it was just a wall, then on the other side, dozens of students were crammed into a long room partitioned into three sections. The roof was patchy, the doorways narrow, and none of the nine windows had burglary-proof or window fittings. Two chalkboards were hung on the wall, and one read “Agricultural Sciences.” This was a school; all of it. 

In the middle of the building, grinning and waving his hands, was the man we’d come to see, Kayode, in Ankara shirt and pants. I assumed he’d be many things; a farmer, a this, or that, but the one thing I didn’t expect was that he’d be an active teacher. He put the chemistry textbook he was holding aside to shake our hands and offered us the seats across from him. 

***

I struggled to hold a political opinion in the 2023 elections. I was 20, feeling overwhelmed by the media frenzy around the elections while trying to graduate from university. Despite fighting to get my voter’s card and finding my way to the polling booth, I remained undecided. The older folks where I live in Ilorin were convinced the young people supporting the opposition—whether Peter Obi or Atiku Abubakar—were ignorant. It also didn’t help that I knew so little about any of them.

I paced the polling booth nervously and panicked at the thought that my political decision could determine the trajectory of my life over the next decade. So I left the polling unit without voting; the guilt plagued me for months. 

It pushed me to a tipping point: I needed to understand what it means to vote in Nigeria, how people choose their leaders, and the factors that contribute to these decisions.

My curiosity led me to old newspapers at the National Library of Nigeria in Yaba, Lagos. I found stories through papers from the 1979 elections, the inception of Nigeria’s presidential democracy. I wanted to see how elections and leadership shape Nigeria. 

To ground my knowledge, I spoke to several people: my grandma who remembered nothing but held on to her 1991 NEC-issued voter’s card. An old man – Obe, whose apartment got burned down, alongside his landlord who had supported a different political party in 1983. My friend’s mum, who was an underage voter in 1979. Kayode, I was curious about more than most: he’s voted in every election since 1983, until his recent disillusionment with the political process – with his choices shaped by several underlying factors.

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Life in Ṣakí, Oyo State, was simple in the 60s and 70s. 

The first day Kayode showed up at school, the Universal Primary Education Programme had already paid for his tuition. Awolowo established this initiative as Premier of the Western Region in 1955.

Every day after school, Kayode would drop his bag and head out to help his parents on their cocoa farm or help his grandfather, a produce buyer. He observed how little they made and swore that one day, he too would become a farmer, but one that actually turned a profit. 

By 1979, just before Kayode completed secondary school, the military government of Olusegun Obasanjo asked every student not to pay school fees – his last school fee was ₦10. That same year, the military returned to the barracks and gave way to democracy. Shehu Shagari, of the National Party of Nigeria (NPN), secured a narrow and controversial victory over Obafemi Awolowo. 

Kayode, then only 17, experienced his first Nigerian election. He’d volunteered as an electoral officer at a polling booth in Ṣakí. It felt like being part of a revolution; Nigeria was finally returning to civilian government after 13 years of military rule. This time, the Obasanjo-led military regime decided to go for an American-style democratic system as opposed to the British parliamentary system Nigeria had used throughout the first republic from 1963-1966. 

Kayode was eager to see how civilian democracy would play out in Nigeria. Over the next few years, Nigeria started to experience a severe contraction in federal revenue as a result of the global oil glut and the government’s deficit spending.  Kayode likened the government’s corrupt tendencies to that of Ali Baba and the forty thieves. The Obasanjo-led regime, he said, had introduced Peugeot 504s  for government transport, but when Shagari became president, government officials started to show up in Mercedes.

“They also started importing a lot of rice, which reduced local agricultural production. We used to farm rice at Ilero and Ilesha around where I grew up, which was even better (tasting) than the imported Thailand rice.”

When the government eventually restricted imported rice in 1980, the market price tripled. A bag of imported rice would arrive in Nigeria at a wholesale price of  $52 and be resold at $180—about ₦99 at the time. 

Through the economic decline, university tuition remained fully funded by the federal government. This meant Kayode didn’t have to worry about tuition or meal preparation at the University of Ife, where he was studying Agriculture and Economic Extension, in 1980. He only needed to take a 50 kobo meal ticket to the cafeteria, and he’d get a full-course meal.

Towards the end of Shagari’s first term, just before the 1983 elections, the economy had gone into turmoil. The government tried to keep Nigeria afloat through an emergency stabilisation plan that cut spending. The federal and state governments halted new employment, and reduced imports due to foreign exchange shortages, leading to inflation in basic commodities and food. They halted the “Operation Feed The Nation” initiative that was designed to revive small-scale farming and pay students to farm during the holidays. 

All indicators showed that Nigeria had already been driven to a dead end in economic, political, and social terms before the 1983 elections, but Shagari still wanted to run for a second term. In his campaign, he promised the basic needs of life: food security, effective medical care, electricity, water supply, housing, and industrial transformation—all the things he failed to do in his first term. 

Kayode looked forward to change, and he believed that only Awolowo and the UPN could bring about change in Nigeria if they held power at the centre.

“We had it very well in the Western Region, LOOBO states, where Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) was the political party in power. We had many of Nigeria’s firsts—the first university and polytechnic, the first government secretariat, the first television station, the first to use Ultra-High-Frequency (UHF) waves for quality TV sounds, and more.” 

Kayode credited everything to Awolowo. He played a major role in the government’s decision to establish the University of Ife in 1961. He also built Cocoa House, a 26-storey building in Ibadan, which served as the headquarters of “The Nigeria Cocoa Marketing Board” until 1986, when the board was scrapped. The board used to buy cocoa from farmers, process it, and sell it to international buyers, and the profits made were used for development projects and initiatives.

On a warm Saturday morning, the day of the 1983 elections, Kayode lined up with students from different faculties at the polling booth in Fajuyi Hall's courtyard. When it was his turn to vote, he pressed his inked thumb on the ballot paper and cast it for UPN—Awolowo for president and Bola Ige for a second term as governor of Oyo State. Professors from Western universities openly supported the UPN, and to Kayode, “If notable academics here can be with Awolowo, why not join them.”

Throughout our conversation, Kayode kept referring to “The Progressives” and the ways that, in hindsight, they shaped his political opinions. The Progressives Parties Alliance (PPA) was an opposition bloc and political reform coalition led by Awolowo to transform Nigeria radically. They addressed concerns raised about the economy, government policies, corruption, transparency in the electioneering process and more–openly supporting national interests.

Kayode consumed proceedings from their meetings in newspaper bulletins. Leaders from different political parties were members of this coalition – Bola Ige, Adekunle Ajasin, Olabisi Onabanjo, Olusegun Osoba, Balarabe Musa, Ambrose Alli, Muhammed Goni, and others. The only hope for Kayode was to elect a progressive federal government.

He was sure every student in his polling unit voted for Awolowo. But what he saw that evening was a total reverse of what he confirmed in the morning: the results had been overturned in favour of Shagari’s NPN. 

The 1983 elections saw the NPN clear 13 out of 19 states, including three western states Oyo, Ondo and Bendel, while the UPN won only Lagos, Ogun and Kwara. Kayode felt a rush of sadness, and it wasn’t just because Awolowo had lost but also because it made no sense that UPN had lost all of Oyo State too. The loss was nearer to him than the national level.

Awolowo described the elections as a tragic mockery. While the NPN called it a landslide victory, Awo's supporters cried foul, and violence followed. Kayode’s campus went into chaos. He saw Professor Wole Soyinka, a lecturer at the time, chasing a man everyone called 007 around the University of Ife campus in his Jeep because 007 was a member of the NPN. The police were also everywhere, intimidating and threatening people who dared to protest. 

Riots broke out in various parts of the Western region. In Ondo, when their incumbent governor, Adekunle Ajasin, was defeated, UPN loyalists boiled. Ajasin had lost to Akin Omoboriowo, his former deputy who had crossed to NPN to become the gubernatorial candidate.

The day the Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) declared Omoboriowo the new governor, violence erupted in the centre of Akure, spreading to other parts of the state. In about a week, 40 people were killed in Ondo, and about 33 in Oyo, including two party congressional candidates who were reportedly set on fire by an angry mob. Eight election officials were burned to death.

Eventually, the country seemed to reach its own tipping point. On Saturday morning, December 31st, 1983, Kayode and every Nigerian with a TV or radio were dialled in. 

“Fellow countrymen and women,” the voice over the radio began, “I, Brigadier Sani Abacha of the Nigerian Army, address you this morning on behalf of the Nigerian Armed Forces. You are all living witnesses to the great economic predicament and uncertainty that an inept and corrupt leadership has imposed on our beloved nation for the past four years.”

The military suspended the 1979 constitution, dissolved the democratic government, banned political parties, imposed a curfew, suspended flights, cut off international communication, closed borders and airports, and threatened martial law. A coup was in full swing. 

On New Year’s Day 1984, Major General Muhammadu Buhari, the new Head of State, provided a rationale for the coup, stating that, “The corrupt, inept and insensitive leadership in the last four years has been the source of immorality and impropriety in our society since what happens in any society is largely a reflection of the leadership of that society." This new regime’s hallmark was a War Against Indiscipline.

Kayode welcomed the coup as a relief from unrest since the soldiers restored law and order, but his expectations of betterment were shattered when, in his final year of university in 1984, Buhari declared that the government could no longer afford to feed university students. “In my first four years as a student,” he recalled, “I only had to take a meal ticket to the cafeteria, and I would have a feast. Buhari came, and all of that comfort just ceased to exist. Feeding became a la carte.” 

Buhari’s government ordered price control for essential commodities, and soldiers took over the streets, invading warehouses and shops to dictate the prices goods should be sold. It didn’t matter that inflation had hit the market. Soldiers with horse whips and rifles on their backs asked market women how much a commodity was sold and forced them to lower their prices. Despite the severity of the military enforcers, prices didn’t go down; things only got worse as traders began to hoard the goods to avoid selling at a loss.

Kayode had thought the Buhari-led government restored order, but it became apparent in 1984 that he’d only create more problems in every sphere of Nigerian life. 

In 1985, Ibrahim Babangida, himself a veteran of several military coups and regime changes, overthrew Buhari for failing to end economic mismanagement, saying the government had been too rigid and unpromising. IBB promised to release all the Nigerian journalists and critics Buhari jailed, subsequently detaining him.

Kayode began to perceive IBB as a better leader, but he realised he had been sold a lie when IBB promised to return Nigeria to civilian rule nine times, and reneged every single time. Whenever Kayode heard him say “Insha Allah,” after promising on TV, he knew it was a lie.  

When Kayode finished university, he was thrust into a wicked economic depression. He was convinced he had a shot working in a bank. Before leaving power in 1979, the Obasanjo-led government established a Rural Banking Scheme that mandated all commercial banks to open branches in rural areas. They also established the “Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund” which allowed farmers to get loans to facilitate their operations, an opportunity Kayode felt his degree would fetch him working in a bank.

He had worked as a clerk at a First Bank branch just before enrolling in university, and that gave him more confidence to apply again after completing his mandatory service year. But the bank had no money to pay. That was when Kayode realised that no entity or government was coming to save him.

Life in Ṣakí, Oyo State, was gloomy in the 80s.

After Kayode's First Bank rejection and the many that followed, he moved to Ibadan in 1986. He spent the next few months finding new means to earn a living and exploring different forms of farming, but nothing seemed to stick. “It was one thing to be a farmer,” he admitted, “and it was another thing entirely to make profits from your farm produce.” 

In 1989, IBB eventually declared a two-party system: the National Republican Convention (NRC), led by Bashir Tofa and the Social Democratic Party (SDP) by M.K.O Abiola. And in 1993, after postponing the election three times in three years, IBB finally decided it was time. 

For Kayode, it didn’t matter if it was Abiola or Tofa, he just wanted IBB’s government out. Abiola had been a former member of the NPN, and Kayode remembered his Concord newspaper reporting anti-Awolowo stories during the 1979 elections. But the people loved Abiola, because he embodied the Nigerian dream, rising from nothing to contesting for the highest office in the country. In his manifesto, he promised to revive all the agriculture initiatives that had been cancelled, as well as the manufacturing industry, bringing back car companies like Volkswagen and Peugeot to employ Nigerians. 

“That was why we called it Hope 93,” Kayode said, “Most of the progressives in the North and the South showed support for the SDP.”

By the time of the 1993 elections, Kayode, now 31, had gotten married and was with a child. The money he made – from trade or farming – never seemed to be enough, so he moved to Lagos for better opportunities. He ran a fishery consulting business with his friend while coaching science students for university entrance examinations. 

It rained heavily on the night of June 12, 1993. Kayode considered it a sign; many people did. A new era had come that would finally bring peace and progress.

Earlier that day, he stood in line at his polling station in Oshodi. It was the Option A4 system, where people lined up behind their preferred candidate’s banners for a headcount, eliminating the need for ballot papers or boxes. Convinced that an SDP presidency would help him live off his true passion, farming, he stood in line to be counted for Abiola. 

With the results halfway announced, Abiola had won 19 states, including Tofa’s home state, Kano. But a few days after the election, the NEC announced that the election results had been suspended. 

Nigerians began to voice their disapproval quickly. Labour unions announced workers’ strikes, and student unions flooded the streets. Protests took place across the Southwest and even in the North, and they remained peaceful for a few days.  

But the bubble broke in Lagos when thugs hijacked the protests, looting and destroying properties. They burned barricades, broke into shops, and burgled cars, and what started as a peaceful protest became an ethnic attack against Hausa and Fulani everywhere blaming them for the annulment because a Northerner was in charge. The protests ended the day after the military security forces intervened, killing scores of civilians all over Nigeria and arresting many more. 

IBB refused to renounce the annulment. Instead, he stepped down and installed an interim government headed by Ernest Shonekan. For three months, unrest continued; the military saw another opportunity. 

On November 17, 1993, 10 years after he addressed the country to announce a military regime, General Sani Abacha overthrew Shonekan’s government and delivered another speech. This time, he was going to run the country himself. 

Kayode’s hopes plunged again. 

Abiola still wanted to claim his mandate. With the backing of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), a broad coalition of Nigerian Democrats, he called on Sani Abacha’s military government to step down, declaring himself as the president of Nigeria. He was subsequently charged with treason and was detained for four years. It was only after Abacha died in 1998 that Abiola had any hope of regaining his freedom; he died the day he was to be released. 

By this time, Kayode had moved back to Ibadan to run a poultry farm because the agriculture sector had improved during Abacha’s regime.

The new head of state, Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar, organised new elections and oversaw a transition to democracy in 1999. After 16 years of living under military rule, former head of state, Obasanjo, jailed during the Abacha regime, was elected president of Nigeria under the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

Kayode didn’t vote for Obasanjo in 1999 because of the stories he read about his term as head of state. In 1978, Obasanjo established the Land Use Decree which meant no one could own land, and everyone was now the government’s tenant by the law. Kayode also believed that Awolowo could have become president in 1979 if Obasanjo wasn’t against him. The military, Kayode believed, backed Shagari and the NPN. To him, It seemed like Obasanjo had sworn an alliance with the North and wouldn’t prioritise the South. 

Instead, he voted for Chief Olu Falae, an economist from Akure and a Yoruba man. He believed Falae could have carried out good economic reforms for the country. Progressives like Bola Ige, who was a columnist with the Tribune, were also against Obasanjo, forming public opinions about him. The progressives used to draw comparisons from other countries, envisioning what Nigeria could be if specific measures were implemented. Kayode would scour several newspapers for their ideas. Without intending to buy and take the papers home, he’d pay about 5 kobo,  read, discuss with others at newspaper stands, and place them back on the vendor’s table. Since he moved back to Ibadan in 1993, he’d do this every morning to read what the progressives had to say in Daily Times, Sketch and the Nigerian Tribune. 

But in 2003, when Obasanjo wanted a second term and his major opposition Buhari, was a Northerner, Kayode said, “He’s our own (Yoruba man); let him do it.” Obasanjo won. To Kayode, Obasanjo was fiscally disciplined with the nation's affairs as he was in 1979. “That’s the reason our debts were forgiven,” he said. 

Kayode’s life also began to pick up. 

He coached science students and ran his poultry and fishery businesses at a scale larger than he’d ever been able to accomplish before. “When the economy is thriving, it’s easier to do business. I found my bearing,” he said “I could plan my finances, and didn’t have to worry about my children’s school fees.” This was the time he got his first car, a Peugeot 504.

By 2007, Kayode was excited to vote. What stood out for him in that election was that Yar'Adua had a Master's degree in Industrial Chemistry, which meant he had great analytical skills. Yar’Adua was the first university graduate to become president of Nigeria. “He wanted to reform the Land Use Act. The man had good intentions for Nigeria, but didn’t live long.” Before Yar'Adua's 2010 death upended his government, Kayode bagged a Master's in Agricultural Chemistry in 2009. 

In 2011, he voted again. This time, for Goodluck Jonathan, who he later considered unprepared for the position. “As his administration progressed,” Kayode recounted, “the PDP had become a monster, looting left, right and centre.” His government was also criticised for its slow response to the Boko Haram insurgency, depletion of the foreign exchange reserve and an attempt at fuel subsidy removal. Buhari never stopped running for president since he started in 2003. Ahead of the 2015 election, Kayode recounted, his campaign, and the media presented him as the saviour: a morally upright man who was disciplined, frugal, and everything Jonathan was not.

But Kayode had no fond memories of his dictatorship in 1984, so he voted for Jonathan in the 2015 presidential election. When Buhari was declared president, Kayode felt betrayed by everyone and decided that was his last straw: he’d never vote again in a Nigerian election “I have seen all these leaders inside and out, there’s nothing they have to offer me,” he said. And so, after actively participating in Nigeria’s electoral process for 40 years, Kayode stopped voting.

My heart sank a little as he said, "Even the local election they did in my backyard last week, I didn't go. I won’t vote again." It felt like an exercise in futility as I wanted to hear insights that would prepare my mind for the next presidential election. Instead, I discovered his now profound disillusionment with the political process. 40 years of casting ballots had yielded neither strong leadership nor economic growth for the country. The once-burning optimism of the 17-year-old boy in Saki had been quenched. 

It was stirring to watch Kayode bustle around the small walls of his school, coordinating the students.  It was their lunch break when we visited. He explained that he founded the school in 2012 as a small effort to give back to the community. “The essence of knowledge,” he said, “is to navigate the circumstances at your disposal, and use them to your advantage.” What started as coaching sessions at his veranda, had grown into a school. As he sat across from my friend and me, in his Ankara prints, his eyes burrowed deep in mine, and he sighed, praying we never have to witness the economic depression he was subjected to in 1986. 

When Kayode last voted, I was barely a teenager casually vocalising, “Sai Baba, Sai Buhari!” I heard it repeatedly over the radio, every morning while commuting to school. My parents and the adults around me actively endorsed his change mantra.

Buhari was our new messiah. I was told he’d save the Nigerian economy as he did in 1983. He’d also release Nigeria from the constraints of the PDP’s 16-year rule. I stayed glued to the TV as INEC collated the results all evening. When Buhari won the election and was inaugurated as the new president, I was happy and certain it was an era of change. 

In 2019,  Nigerians gave Buhari a second chance after he argued his efforts only amounted to helping the country out of a ‘depth of decay’ and then a foundation, which, if re-elected, would serve as a basis for a stronger country – the next level. He insisted he had not reneged on the promises he rode on to win in 2015: security, economy and anti-corruption.

But when Buhari refused to condemn the attack on the young Nigerians in the 2020 #EndSARS protest, I was 17 and began to see him for who he truly was. In 2021, he suspended Twitter access in Nigeria after a tweet from his account was deleted for violating rules; it felt like a reincarnation of his Decree 4 of 1984. 

When I asked Kayode, now 62 years old, what he was hopeful about these days, he said he only wants his school to one day serve a greater purpose. If he had his way, the students wouldn’t pay school fees, but the times continue to be hard in Nigeria. As with most senior citizens I’ve spoken to, Kayode was happy to tell us stories from his life while we listened. As he walked us to the nearby junction, he continued recounting his experience. 

It was when I settled into a bus after I reached Lagos that Kayode’s life began to properly register. When I went to Ibadan, I knew little beyond the headlines I’d seen or books I’d read. I returned to Lagos weary from the long day, but awake to what feels like a new reality. 

I began to think through Kayode’s choices and the factors that influenced them: the media, his strong attachment to his tribe, his sense of intellectual belonging, etc. He participated in eight elections, and his desired candidate only got in thrice. For every time he tried and they didn’t get in, he could only imagine what could’ve been.

I could feel anger brew in my chest as I entered my home in Gbagada. I wondered how many people across the country stopped voting because they believed it wouldn’t count. Of the 87.2 million Nigerians who obtained their permanent voter’s card (PVC) before the 2023 election, only 27% got to decide who became the president, and I wasn’t one of them. The president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, won by a narrow margin with 36.6% of the total vote cast. His major rival, Atiku Abubakar, polled 29%, and third-placed Peter Obi, with  25%, even won Lagos State where Tinubu had an eight-year reign as governor, with a string of successors who gained his approval first. 

The only election with vote percentages this close was 1979, when Shagari cleared 33.7% of the total vote cast, while Awolowo polled 29.18%. One thing was certain: regardless of whether I voted, the leaders in power held the ability to shape my life and our nation’s trajectory for decades to come—this remains a constant source of dread. As I count down to the 2027 election cycle, I continue to sit with the consequences of my indecision. 

It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together

• Finally publishing this story brings me immense relief. It's been six months since I started researching - the longest I've ever spent on a story. This is also the most complex piece I've ever written. 

• The first challenge was deciding what story to tell. How do I tell a story about what it means to vote in a country like Nigeria and make it meaningful to me? 

• My editor, Fu’ad, asked me to start talking to people. And that’s what I did. In between speaking to over a dozen people, travelling, and becoming a regular library visitor, It felt like I was onto something. 

• One night, I decided on a whim to visit Kayode in Ibadan, and that changed everything. It was a turning point, and it was there that I gained the clarity I needed to ground the story.

• It took four drafts and countless revisions until it finally felt right. On the road to the first draft, besides Fu'ad's rigorous editing, there was Afolabi asking very tough questions about why this story should even exist. There was Samson, who’s covered the last two election cycles, interrogating my perspective. I'm grateful for them. Aisha Salaudeen constantly pushed us to get this story to the finish line. 

• I like to sketch, and so, it was great to work with artists to sharpen my sense of art direction; I’m grateful to Mariam for that. Also, Penzu for the character illustrations, and Kenny Owolawi for bringing the infographics to life. 

• I've learned that one story can lead to many others, and ideas can grow from a single question. I'd never written about politics before, but now I have a wealth of information to explore. 

• I'm grateful for the interviews, especially the one with my grandma; it turned out to be our last conversation. 

• Family, friends, and colleagues gave me many pointers. They shared their knowledge, referred me to people, and endured my endless chatter about the story. I especially appreciate Muhammed Bello for following me to Ibadan at such short notice.

• This story exists because The Election Network commissioned a story—a “just explore it” story—about what it means to be an electorate in Nigeria. Vistanium found an angle true to its values and curiosities. Most importantly, Vistanium’s members continue to back experiments like this. 

• This story is deeply personal and significant to me. Hitting publish felt emotional. My political awareness has improved dramatically. I began with a limited understanding of Nigerian politics, but now I have a clearer grasp of how it works. Still, there’s so much to learn. This story has helped form the basis of my political perspective. 

Thank you all for helping me bring Ballot Ballads to life.

One Thursday morning in late November 1999, my classroom was a hive of quiet anxiety. Parents and guardians checked their children’s notebooks for completeness, neatness, and other things adults wanted to see. Some parents looked pleased; others were livid. At his desk, the class teacher was talking to my mum, and she was nodding slowly, smiling whenever she looked my way. She nodded a lot and smiled whenever she looked my way. 

At the back of the class, beside his desk, my class teacher pinned a cardboard sheet with the class roster to the wall. Beside my name, there was one word declaring my status: “Excellent.” With just a few days to my eighth birthday, Primary 4 was off to a stellar start. 

Every Open Day, children's store vendors set up stands in my school; they sold everything from children’s books to films. As a reward, my mum took me downstairs to the stands, and a few minutes later, she’d bought me two tapes: Science for Kiddies and Superman. Each time I ended up at a toy shop—from Idumota to Surulere—I always begged to leave with anything Superman. 

Thursday nights in our house were for freshly made fufu, but I knew that night would be a Jollof one. My mum returned to her office while I waited for the closing bell when my brother would come to pick me up. 

My brother and I had a commute ritual. He’d pick me up at the school gate, and we’d walk to Ojulegba Underbridge Bus Stop. We’d buy a copy of Complete Sports or the afternoon paper, PM News—he’d take the Sports section while I dug into the Man Kills Neighbour Over Garri section. And whenever he had extra change, we bought roasted corn for the two-hour-long trip home to Ikorodu. 

That afternoon, the driver and his conductor at Ojuelegba ruined our routine. When we reached the bus stop, passengers stood outside the danfo, protesting the doubled bus fare, and we joined them. The conductor, unfazed, continued to call out the route in his raspy voice: “Ketuojota-Mile-twelveeeeee.” 

One by one, protesting passengers gave up and took their seats on the bus. We didn’t have enough for a newspaper, so we missed the front page of PM News, which was just fresh off the press. About thirty minutes into the commute, the passengers started protesting again. Just before we reached Ketu Bus Stop, one stop before ours, the driver parked and turned off his engine.

This driver and his danfo weren’t going any further. 

“See front,” the driver pointed. At Mile 12, almost two kilometres away, a pillar of black smoke surged upwards into the white sky; it looked like Darkseid.  If the driver had kept going for a few more minutes, he’d have ended up at the heart of the flame. 

“What are we going to do,” I looked up at my seventeen-year-old brother, scared and confused. He looked at me, held my hand tighter, and said nothing.

People were talking around us.

“Wọ́n jà ní Mile 12.”

Awọ́n OPC atí Mọ́là lọ́ ń jà.”

A loud bang came from the direction of the smoke, and while everyone had theories about what was really happening, every around had the same idea: run.

I remember half running, half gliding from the pull of my athletic brother. When we stopped to catch our breaths, we were at Ojota, a healthy distance from the chaos at Mile 12.

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Somewhere in Lagos, my mum was leaving work and going through the same motions we’d gone through. An inflated bus fare, some uncertainty about why, and black smoke. But when my mum saw the pillar of smoke and people running away from it, she had a singular thought: “My boys!”

And so, she pressed forward in the direction of the smoke. 

The central artery connecting Ikorodu to the rest of Lagos ran through Mile 12. At Ketu, side streets create a network of backroads, an alternative to going through Mile 12 on heavy traffic days—or days like this. 

With a small group, my mum turned into one of the side streets. She scanned for her boys, my brother and me everywhere she turned. They’d move forward cautiously, then run back when someone yelled, “They’re coming!” Two steps forward, “Go back!” and one sprint back. They edged further, on narrow streets and alleys between houses, until they reached a point where there was no forward or backward movement.

Suddenly, men wielding sticks and machetes materialised. At that moment, my mum realised with horrifying clarity—they'd walked right into an ambush. The men ordered them in a single file, and the interrogation followed.

“Where you from come?” a man in the mob screamed at the group. The first person in line was a Yoruba man. 

Two people dragged him and bludgeoned him till he became a bag of pulped flesh and blood while the line interrogators continued their questioning. 

Eventually, it was my mum's turn. 

“Oya, where you from come?” My mum froze, muttering a prayer under her breath, clutching her bags and heels to her chest. My mum, Àbíkẹ́, was born in Lagos Island to the Olaniyan family. A century earlier, one of her ancestors migrated to Lagos from Old Oyo. She couldn’t have been more Yoruba.

“Talk!”

Just as she was about to speak, one man from the mob slapped her head from behind. “This one na Igbo na. You no see as be?” Abike was also light-skinned. “Oya go!”

She started walking, part thanking them, part begging for her life. 

People were screaming, begging and crying, but she kept walking. She walked past more bludgeoned bodies. Ahead, the smell of burning flesh hit her before she saw the burned bodies. There was one thoroughly burned body that, from a little bit of unburned fabric, told you that a few hours earlier, it must have been a kid in school uniform. It wasn’t cream shorts or purple check, the colours of my school uniform.

“My boys. They'll be home.” 

She kept walking. Another burned body had simmering shit beside it. Whoever it was must have, in their moment of final painful breath, had a final dump. 

She walked to Owode Onirin, a bus stop about three kilometres from Mile 12 and a little closer to home. Another group of men wearing shirts with OPC printed on them were gathering and planning to stage another offensive against the Hausa traders or anyone they considered Hausa at the market. 

“My boys.”

After walking a few more kilometres, she finally found a bus heading home. 

“My boys. They’re at home.”

When she finally reached the gate of our housing estate, she broke into a half-run, clutching her bag tightly. An aunty who lived with us met her just outside our flat. Breathless and desperate, my mum asked if we were home yet. When my aunty responded, all her worst fears came alive. None of us had returned: my dad, my brother, nor me. 

Her knees buckled, and she fell to the ground, screaming. 

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After we’d caught our breaths from running and my brother could gather himself, he checked his pocket for his last change, looked at me, and made a decision. An hour later—heading backwards and two bus trips later, and a long walk that should have been a third bus—we were at my aunt’s house in Shomolu.

We got in early enough to catch playing football—one-touch and Monkey Post—with boys in the compound. Later that night, dinner was unremarkable, but the TV wasn’t—my cousins were playing Mortal Kombat, and watching was enough entertainment, even though I wanted to rub the pad as badly as they did. It was while they were playing my dad arrived. 

He looked worried and became more worried when he realised my mum wasn’t there with us. He’d tried to go home too but turned back: the violence had gotten too intense and spread to Ketu. I felt worried about my mum. I also remembered Superman and wondered if I should have held on to the tape instead of giving it to her. 

In the housing estate where we lived in Ikorodu, enough people had returned home that evening with stories of what they’d seen with their eyes and heard in the danfo on the way home.

Mile 12 Market is essential to Lagos' food supply chain. It’s one of the markets where agricultural produce from farms all over Nigeria, especially the North, first arrives in Lagos. When prices shift in Mile 12, it’s felt across Lagos, from smaller markets to roadside traders. A significant part of the supply network was controlled by people from Northern Nigeria, most notably Hausa. 

The stalls had opened, and the roadside sellers had come to Mile 12 as usual that Thursday morning. First, there were unusual movements of men across the markets as everyone went about their business. Then, people started to hear noises and whistles. What began as a long-wound power struggle between OPC members and Hausa traders in the market escalated into violence. The OPC, they said, wanted to rid the market of non-Yoruba people, especially Hausas and Igbos. The Hausas, in return, were carrying out reprisal attacks.

This was the story reaching home from people returning from a long, tumultuous day. Most families in our estate had marched to the gate out of concern for their loved ones who hadn’t returned or to be there for their anxious neighbours. 

They huddled together like airport arrivals. A fully loaded bus would stop, many people would hope one of their own had returned, and only one passenger would alight. One family’s worry would end, while the remaining families would get more worried. 

“My boys. My husband.”

My mum waited by the bus stop until the buses stopped passing through. Then, she returned home and sat on her praying mat. 

On Friday, there was no school, so I spent the morning at my aunt’s playing with my friends. While we were playing downstairs, we started hearing commotion at the gate. A woman was crying, running and falling while clutching her baby tightly to her chest. 

Some women in the neighbourhood, including the Alhaja always sitting at the gate, managed to get her to stop. She narrated her ordeal as she caught her breath. 

She’d been in the house with her sick mother and baby when a mob arrived on their street somewhere in Mile 12. They first tried to hide, but there was no hiding space in a single room. Her mother begged her to leave.

The last thing she heard as she escaped through the backyard was her mother’s scream piercing through the roar of the mob. 

I stopped playing ball. 

On the news that night, they reported about the riots. The state-owned station, LTV, said people had died in their dozens. People in the living room were talking about hundreds. Everyone went to bed right after the news, and there were no late-night movies or Mortal Kombat. My dad spent most of the night by the balcony. Everyone thought about the same thing, but no one could blurt it out. Earlier that day, he’d gone to my mum’s office to see if she’d come. She didn’t. Neither her colleagues nor us had seen her since she left work on Thursday afternoon. 

My aunty’s home had a landline, but no one we knew had one in our housing estate in Ikorodu. Everyone hoped.

By Saturday afternoon, after the news said Ketu/Mile 12 was under the firm control of the army, all of my mum’s men – my dad, brother and me – huddled into our family Toyota and began the trip to Ikorodu. I settled in behind the driver’s seat and slept off as we drove onto Ikorodu Road through Palmgrove. 

“Ketuojota-Mile-twelveeeeee.”

I woke up at the Maryland Bus Stop as we made our way to the bridge before Ojota. At Ojota, my dad was talking to my brother about the armed presence of soldiers and police officers. At Mile 12, I smelled badly burned things: rubber, meat, and the resilient smell of rotten tomatoes. 

I slept off again. 

When I woke up again, it was because of the noise around the car. My ears picked it up before my eyes could adjust. At first, it sounded like loud, angry voices, but as my eyes adjusted, it sounded like celebration and praise. 

“Adúpẹ́!”

“Alhamdulillah!”

“Olúwa oṣè!”

“Thank you, Jesus!”

Our neighbours were standing outside the car, celebrating: Mrs Ajani and her kids, Mummy Michael and Uncle Femi, who had run a pharmacy for so long that everyone started to call him Doctor. I heard the squeaky sound of our gate, and when I looked, my mum was standing there. 

“Dapo, so you’re at home?!” my dad exclaimed to my mum. He was loud, like he was telling a story and had gotten too excited, but my dad froze like he’d seen a ghost: shock and relief. 

I was also in shock, and I don’t remember if it was because my mum was safe or because I just heard my dad speak in clear, no-Yoruba English with my mum. 

She wasn’t saying anything, just standing there, smiling and murmuring something. I could barely see her eyes with the sinking sun on her face, but I could tell they were swollen and barely open from days of crying. 

She pulled us all into a big hug – my dad, brother, and me – and I could hear her murmuring from inside her chest. The neighbours were still jubilating, but I’d stopped hearing them. All I heard was the murmuring, the exact phrase, over and over: Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulilah. 

Before we could settle in properly, dinner rolled out, and she made everyone sit in the living room. The meal looked like it was made on Thursday, but it tasted like it was meant for that moment: Jollof rice, fried beef, and plantain. Just as I was about to start eating, she showed me my tapes. 

I blushed. It wasn’t a night for Science for Kiddies, so I grabbed the other tape. 

“Up in the sky! Look!”

“It’s a bird! It’s a plane!”

I moved from the chair to the floor directly in front of the TV. My mum didn’t stop me.

“This looks like a job for Superman!”

The laser beam from The Mad Scientist’s tower sent Superman tumbling to the ground. For a moment, Superman looked defeated as he fell to the ground. Then he got back up, pushed back against the beam, and began to punch, punch, punch. He punched back at the laser until he destroyed the source, rescued Lois Lane, and threw the Mad Scientist in jail. 

“Take coke,” my mum said as she returned to sit down on the mat she’d spent the last two days praying. As I watched Superman in awe, I peeped at my mum as she watched us from the side of my eye. I could see her, still murmuring, and even though I couldn’t hear it, I knew exactly what she was saying under her breath. 

In that moment, life was perfect.

Author’s Notes

• This story took one week to write, and it probably happened this quickly because it’s been sitting in my mind for 25 years. My own recollection and my mother’s recounting of the event cooked into this memory stew, such that her own sensory experiences feel like mine, even though I wasn’t there.

• This story has two more reasons for being:

• First, I’ve been worrying a lot about my state of done vs perfect here, looking at all the drafts that I continue to consider not good enough. And so, I told myself I was going to try to break free of the long drafts trying to kill me and blitz through something.

• The second reason this story exists is this tweet. I watched it, and it unlocked a very specific and intense memory. The first draft was ready in three days.

• I was going to make this a thread, but Seyi said, “You should make it an essay.” So here we are.

• Ruka is not satisfied with this draft, but I told myself I would publish it after one week. Whatever is good about it, she made it possible. Samson fixed some grammar at the last minute, too. Shout out to them.

• Whatever confidence led to me publishing is because Nana likes it.

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When NEPA brought light that evening,  the last flicker of Dami’s hope burned out. 

In front of her was a familiar scene as she walked home: people out on the street and balconies—sitting, walking, talking—and some light in the sky to feel like a day but not enough to pierce the gathering darkness burying the faces and buildings below.

One moment, there hadn’t been electricity for a whole week, and the next, just as her house came within view, NEPA brought light. The next instant, alarm bells and sirens started going off in people’s homes—loud enough to drown out the noise of generators so people knew to switch power to NEPA. Then came the people going berserk, screaming UP NEPA, on the streets and in their homes in one loud but dense roar. 

Dami was 27, lived with her parents, and had been screaming UP NEPA her entire life. That year, 2017, if you asked ten people living in Nigeria, a little less than five would tell you they had access to electricity. 

This fact was part of a larger reality setting in for Dami. The electricity that was restored was temporary. She knew with certainty that power would be out at best in a few hours or days. She’d organised her entire life around this unpredictable flicker: what to refrigerate, what to wear, when to charge her devices what times she woke up or went to bed. Beyond power, even more was happening around her. Whenever she landed a job, it didn’t pay well or consistently. When she started seeking writing opportunities abroad, she couldn’t be eligible for her income – PayPal didn’t exist in Nigeria. Other times, she’d try to seek out opportunities and have to fill out her country information and Nigeria wouldn’t even be an option. As the months passed, the opportunities became fewer and hope dimmer.

Her life in Nigeria—no matter how much potential it had—would constantly suffer interruption in many forms, leaving her teetering on the edge of frustration. 

“Why must it be so hard to do basic things,” Dami asked herself.

The more she considered her future—doing work that gave her joy, starting a family—the more she knew she didn’t want to create that future in Nigeria. As she arrived home, she texted her brother, who lived in the UK, and they started researching a path out of Nigeria together.

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I wrote a commercial for the first time in 2015. Dami was the friend who coached me through the fundamentals of writing ads and made sure I pulled it off on time to meet my three-day deadline. Dami had only a few years of experience, but she’d put in the hours writing ads at a small agency for several media: print, radio, TV, and the growing Nigerian Internet.

When Dami decided to leave Nigeria, her frustrations were familiar. I’d heard it in small talk at events and big decision conversations with friends, and I’d felt it in my own life. We had frustrations; then someone would reach a tipping point, go through the tumultuous process, pack or sell everything they owned, and leave the country, hoping for the best. 

Sometime in the middle of 2020, while spending lockdown alone with all the books I was reading, all the podcasts I was listening to, and all the work I was struggling to do, I arrived at a deeper understanding of what this clear and growing discontent we all felt meant.

Rewind. All the way back to Integrated Science class. JSS 3. 2004. 

I sat in a class with thirty-four other boys, listening in awe to a teacher, less for what he was saying and more for his technique. The teacher was the only one of our twelve who never used any notes, just straight from his head.

“What is osmosis?” he asked as he chalked the topic on the top of the blackboard. “Osmosis is the movement of molecules,” he continued before anyone could respond, “from a region of lower concentration to a higher concentration through a semi-permeable membrane.”

The teacher started illustrating on the board: he drew a two-dimensional bowl, one line down the board, to the right and back up. Then, he drew a line connecting the two tips. He added two squiggly spheres he called potatoes.

When potatoes are placed in salt water, he explained, they become limp because the water inside them moves out to the more concentrated salt water solution. 

“Now,” the teacher asked, “who can tell me the stages of Osmosis?” No one answered.

Osmosis is a biological process that mirrors a specific human desire. In the middle of 2020, I realised that just as water seeks a higher concentration, we, too, are drawn by natural law to seek out places where our greatest aspirations can flourish. We yearn for a world that resonates deeply with our ambitions and values. The world is our water bowl, and we’re the water trapped in a drifting potato.

In the first stage of osmosis, a concentration gradient is established: “The water is saltier on the other side of this potato.” 

Our world is only as big as the information accessible to us. A century ago in Nigeria, your world mirrored the breadth of your interactions. Expansion came from a teacher, a page of The Daily Times, a traveller who sailed back from Liverpool, or a pilgrim who just made the tumultuous desert trip from Hajj in Makkah. Our world expanded further as TV entered homes and global travel became more accessible. And, of course, the internet. Each click, a country, each swipe, a new scene to yearn for. 

By whatever means the world comes to us, one truth is constant: the moment the size of our reality stretches to accommodate new possibilities, something shifts. 

This is the defining displacement of our generation—the constant conflict of first-world aspirations within a third-world reality. We’re engaging with pieces of a world vastly better than our own—stable systems, smoothly run societies, more opportunities and most of all, hope.

When this difference in reality is established, a gap exists between clarity and the audacity to act on it. The gap is sometimes a leash, tethering us to our current reality, resisting the momentum for osmosis to happen. 

For starters, moving to another country is expensive, with costs ranging from proof-of-funds to certifications, applications, flight tickets, and finally, the money to ease settling into a new country. Only a small fraction of Nigerians will ever be able to take action or follow through. The gap is also filled with a mix of emotions. There’s the fear of grappling with identity, loneliness from being so far away from loved ones, the guilt of leaving them behind, and the unknown.

One way this gap manifests is optimism, the idea that incredible things are possible despite the bleakness. The nature of optimism is that it’s stupid until it’s visionary. The optimist finds a purpose, feeds it, and when confronted with bleakness, says: 

“This work matters; these small bricks will build the future.” 

Their optimism is an act of resistance confronted with harsh Nigerian realities. Some truths don’t change: optimism doesn’t immediately improve spending power, make the highways safer, or make the job market more friendly. Nigeria continues to bite for the time being. 

So, how do you survive with your aspirations intact in a society that mocks their existence? You build a bubble. 

In Nigeria, there are 200 million governments. We’re the custodians of our welfare. Without public utilities, we power our homes and provide our water. We hire our private security or privatise public security; about two in every three policemen in Nigeria are attached to VIPs who can afford it. When we’re lucky, we find communities—people who see the world as we do and with whom we can forget the nature of our reality.  It’s in the spaces where people affirm our aspirations, whether they’re corners of the internet or offline in offices and events. 

But the things to control—water, security, power—never end. For example, replacing public power with solar power can cost up to ₦22 million. Private security is expensive. The basic comforts of a dignified life that we pay for are, in fact, luxury.

There’s a small message in everything: the sound of the generator at close range, the news that an entire village disappeared overnight, and the tension as you drive up to a trailer carrying a container. 

Everything says the same thing: “Something is broken. Everything is broken.” Our panic is prophecy because the nature of bubbles, no matter how much we fortify them, is that they must burst. 

One day, someone in your family, maybe your aunty, would go to a hospital to complain about a pain in her chest. The overworked doctor in an understaffed hospital would prescribe painkillers for what would be discovered two years later as stage four cancer. One evening while watching TV, you’ll receive news that your in-law has been plucked off a highway in broad daylight by kidnappers, and his life will be snuffed out unless you pay a healthy ransom. 

You’re safe behind your private security, but one day, you’re at a checkpoint with a policeman who insists that what you know to be white is, in fact, red. When you’ve had enough, you protest with young people like you to demand change.

Everything you’ve learned from building your systems—logistics, security, communication, support—ensures you’re prepared, but it won’t be enough. Tuesday night, October 2020, the Nigerian army will show up in Lagos and open fire at tired protesters, then pretend it didn’t happen. It won’t be the first time they’d massacred Nigerians or protesters; they just happened to have their biggest audience. 

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A hedonometer measuring the degree of happiness or sadness showed that Bloody Tuesday was one of the saddest days of 2020. That night, something shifted in many people. 

Several months ago, a former colleague arrived at my house a few minutes before midnight. He was doing the final rounds before leaving the country. For my stop, he showed up with an extensive collection of twenty-year-old magazines he believed should be digitised. He also shared stories about the tumultuous process of finding a country, any country in the West, with a clear path to citizenship for him and his family. Bloody Tuesday was his tipping point; he called up another friend that night.

“We can’t continue in this country,” he said to his friend, who agreed. It took them almost three years, but now, they live outside Nigeria on two continents over 7,000 kilometres apart. They used to live less than an hour from each other. 

When hope is diminished and opportunity means little, we begin the draining journey through the semi-permeable border. 

Back in the classroom, the teacher drew two arrows pointing out the potato and into the rest of the bowl. “Now,” he said, as he added finishing touches to his crooked arrows, “the molecules of water start moving out and into the more concentrated solution”

Japa is in full swing.

As a child, seeing people off the airport always felt bittersweet; a loved one leaving meant I couldn’t see them again but also a toy or a shirt was coming back to me in my future.  

As an adult, the first friend I saw off at the airport left in 2019, a decade after he first got paid to write software. Farouq’s final straw broke over three months and multiple stress points. First, he felt like he’d hit his technical ceiling locally when companies couldn’t afford to pay him enough for his depth of experience. He’d contemplated an offer in the UK for a while, and just a few hours before the offer closed, he applied. He left with his family in three months. 

Murtala Muhammed Airport departures had an electric sense of urgency. If you had a flight ticket, it was easy to get in. Everyone else had to prove why they deserved to see their family one last time:

“I’m her mother.” 

“He’s my husband. See our wedding ring.” 

“I’m his brother.”

I managed to get in with a lie and one of my friend’s suitcases in hand. Everything felt hurried: getting in, the security checks. I watched him in the distance as he checked in, turned a left corner, and turned around to sneak in a final goodbye. 

It was Farouq’s first time leaving Nigeria, his first time on a plane and the last time he’s set foot in Nigeria. Every few months since then, I’ve had a last brunch, a last hangout, or a last excursion to the airport. For everyone japa-ing, there’s the bitterness of leaving a familiar world behind but the optimism of going to a new world with hope and opportunity. 

It was the same with Farouq; it was also the same with Dami.

After that night in 2017, Dami began the slow and tumultuous process of making a new home in a new country. She took any gig that paid and saved all her earnings. She, a writer of essays, papers, advertising and screen, took an English test. She got married—her wedding was our last hangout—and started a new life in Canada. All in eighteen months. 

I counted all the people who left after Dami. Friends, people I’d liked enough to hang out with at least over and over. I stopped counting at twenty-six. One Whatsapp group has twelve guys trying to catch up as we got busier and the stakes at our Lagos jobs climbed. Only five of us still live in Nigeria. We’re all forming new rituals across continents over WhatsApp and Google Meet. Every other month, they’ll send photos of the kids, and we’ll also say, “Oh wow, she has grown so much. She used to be so tiny.” Always over Whatsapp, never them in your arms. 

Every time there’s a departure—when someone dies, a colleague resigns, or a friend japas—the left-behind ask themselves, “Why am I here?” Whether the answers soothe or trouble them, the left-behind will have their loneliness to manage. 

Japa feels like a slow-burning refugee crisis. It’s migration driven by desperation. The fatalities are vastly different in scale to a humanitarian disaster as hope dies a slow, flickering death, but the human cost is real. In 2006, almost 2,600 Nigerians arrived in Canada as permanent residents. In the next decade, over 33,000 Nigerians became permanent residents. In 2022 alone, over 22,000 Nigerians landed in Canada as permanent residents. 

Nigerians have migrated for decades. Every year, thousands of young Nigerians scatter across America, Europe, and the Middle East, but the current drain scale is unprecedented by all indications. 

This wouldn’t seem like much of a problem. What are a few tens of thousands of people leaving every year when there are over 100 million of us? But it’s not just any tens of thousands—it’s people with skills critical for an emerging economy. Of the twenty-six people in my life who’ve left in the past five years, three are health workers, seven are designers and engineers, three are in finance, and eight are creatives. Most of them were at major inflexion points in their careers. 

Their destination countries—the US, UK and Canada as leading destinations—have immigration policies that say,  "Come to me,” but with a catch: “Come to me, the best of you who are tired and weary, I’ll give you rest.”

2004. 

I was at the back of the class, struggling to stay engaged, as were most other boys. The teacher was pacing the class, cane in hand. I don’t remember his eyes because he was such a prolific flogger. You held a gaze for too long, and then what? What if he asked you a question, and you didn’t know the answer? 

“The reason osmosis happens,” the teacher explained near the end of his 35-minute class, “is because equilibrium has to occur. The concentration has to become the same on both sides of the membrane.” The same concentration, within or outside the potato. 

I think a lot about what equilibrium means. It’s not an absence of movement; it’s a system in flux, an even movement back and forth. in this case. Sometimes, I think about it as people who’ve left for one reason or another returning home. 

In January 2020, I had a conversation with an engineer who went from interning at Tesla to returning to Nigeria. 

“I work in the off-grid industry providing electricity to the unelectrified,” he said. ”You can only do that in Africa, and Nigeria has one of the largest unelectrified populations in the world.” He sounded the optimist at the beginning of osmosis again. A force that holds people back had, in a sense, brought him back home.

Perhaps equilibrium could also mean maintaining a sense of connection with home, whether it be the balancing act of shuffling between two countries over months, years, or a lifetime. But one way it manifests is perhaps in how people, no matter what, choose to maintain some form of connection with home. It could be a bag of shirts and toys, a car, or a few dollars here and there. They add up. 

We, the people, are Nigeria’s second biggest export after oil. We leave weary, seeking to become more in the world and return refined ideas and, quite significantly, hard currency. In 2022, Nigerians sent home almost $21 billion, compared to the Nigerian government’s leading source of income, crude oil, generating $45.6 billion.

Our artists sell out the most monumental venues across the Americas and Europe at unprecedented scales, performing to thousands of audiences and singing back to them word for word. There are large non-Nigerian audiences, too, but the Nigerian horde in most of those halls is undeniable. 

Whenever I see a well-made Hollywood movie, I sit through the credits, looking for a Nigerian name. I do a small yay when I find one, wondering if they left sometime in the last decade or if it was their parents who left a generation ago. 

It’s bittersweet to seek out other places to reach your full potential, but any sweetness is welcome when you leave home because, as the poet Warsan Shire describes it, “home is the mouth of a shark.”

A few weeks ago, I was trapped in the airport's departure lounge in Accra; my flight back to Lagos had been delayed for two hours. While I was there, a loved one was dealing with a crisis: she’d received a job offer from Germany. It came in the middle of her crisis; she’d done impactful work for most of the past decade, working as a creative. But she’d also hit a ceiling; there were no longer enough opportunities for her locally. The job in Germany offered a better salary compared to her Nigerian income. 

There were buts. As a creative where the work you produce is largely tied to the context and environment you produce it, it meant that she’d have to leave a lot of it behind. She would move to a country where she barely knew anyone, live in temporary accommodation for six months, and begin to build a new life in a cold country. She’d spend a few years, and when she qualifies for citizenship, there’s a possibility she might revoke her Nigerian citizenship. A life in Germany would most likely offer her a much larger life. But at what cost? 

As I paced the lobby, I wondered about my fate. I live in Nigeria. I understand inertia in my personal life. I work on Archivi.ng, a product that demands to be nurtured from zero to one from here. I write on Vistanium, where most stories attempt to capture the Nigerian condition from the ground. 

It’s work that matters to me and the world, I believe. But I know optimism is not enough. Nigeria is on the offensive, and I need to maintain a bubble. I always have measures to make a living here more bearable. Worrying less about power. I use multiple internet providers to reduce downtime. I make new friends I know will leave, just as the old ones did. I save in dollars when the naira falls, then in naira when it puts up a fight. I step on my throttle when I drive past a trailer. I try to de-escalate every time I’m at a checkpoint. I’m in the gap between clarity and action. 

I know all the other tipping points have missed me for now, and I wonder what it’ll be. Will it be when the money in my hand is worth less than toilet paper? Or when I lose another loved one? 

Does it even matter what it will be? Because what kills a hundred-year-old, heart failure or natural law? 

It feels like sand in my palms; the harder I squeeze, the more sand seeps out. 

Dami has lived in Canada for over four years now. Everything she’d hoped and prayed for—light and safety—was now abundant. It didn’t come all at once; there was the struggle with adjusting, culture shock, missing the familiar, and landing opportunities that made her happy. The one thing that was in abundance from the first day was hope. 

Some things still linger. She turns off the lights, not just to save power but because she still struggles to grasp having it in abundance. She still catches herself heading home, wondering if there’s light. “That feeling of not having the basic stuff you should have,” Dami’s voice note said, “it follows you.”

“I miss home every day so much,” she told me in a voice note over WhatsApp one Monday in March. “Then I remembered things aren’t any better than when I left. There are things I want my children to experience about Nigeria that they never will, and that’s sad.” They’ll build new traditions and experiences over Zoom, WhatsApp, and holiday visits back home every few years.

Maybe this, too, is a form of equilibrium: missing her home country but feeling truly at home in her new home in Canada because, in the end, Dami is happy.

It Took A Village (and a lot of time) To Bring This Together

• I’m not sure when the idea for this essay first came, but I know it was in 2020 after reading The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class, an exploration of consumption habits in contemporary America. Understandably, it was quite American in its lens. But it made me ask what that looked like in Nigeria and what the motions of this demographic might be. That question set in motion everything this essay has become. So, shout out to Elizabeth Currid-Halkett for writing. 

• This approach to the essay is a third attempt. The first one felt like a commentary on Elizabeth’s book, trying to explore the idea of a Nigerian Aspirational Class. Derin and Afolabi read it in 2020: it wasn’t working. So I abandoned it. The second approach was closer to this, centring the journey and phenomenon, but it felt hollow. But it was this third one that turned out to be the charm. 

• I was supposed to work on another essay based on Ope’s recommendation. But two things happened as I paced the airport lobby: the idea for the cover image, a remake of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam, came to mind. I immediately sent a voice note to Mariam. Mariam and I, what we have is telepathic, so she responded with this cover art. There was nothing to improve. Shout out to Mariam. 

• The second thing I realised was that I was trying to write about this experience without writing myself into it. When I added my perspective, it started to make sense. 

• This version then went through a series of rounds of editing. Afolabi interrogated the argument, Solomon interrogated the copy, and Ruka interrogated the structure; Sonia and ChatGPT did a final sweep for typos. They made this bearable. If Ruka had asked me to make one more adjustment, I might have burst into tears. I’m tired.

• I spoke to many people to put this together; thank you to all of you, especially Zainab, Eruke, and most of all, Dami and Farouq. 

• It took so long to get this published, and the only reason this exists for you to read is because of Vistanium’s members. Their membership is what pays for this writing and allows it to exist. If you believe it deserves to exist, then become a member here. 

Akobo, Ibadan, Nigeria

Around 7:44 p.m. Distance from Ground Zero: 13 km

I wake up at the sound of something tripping in the dark. I’d fallen asleep while watching a movie, my reward for a productive day at work. The sound was a loud thud that tore through the silence of the evening,¹instantly triggering memories of my neighbour’s recent robbery. I’d received a call that midnight, my shrill iPhone ringtone separating me from the arms of my babe. My neighbour was in disbelief: “I saw him escape through the kitchen.” “How did I leave the kitchen door open?” “My phones…”

I sit up; there is a lump in my throat. My palms are sweaty, and my mind conjures the image of the intruder in my home.

I call out my housemate’s name, but there is no answer. I stand up, my legs crippled with fear, walk to my front door and push it open. It is clear, quiet.

My housemate appears from the next room. I can see his darting eyes in the dark. “Did you hear that,” he asks. I tell him there’s been someone in the house. It’s the only way I can explain the sound I heard earlier: the jarring sound of the window, the burst of air, and the deafening silence that followed.

We stand outside the apartment, hoping to see a trail that confirms my suspicion. Nothing but the cold harmattan breeze slaps our bare chests. I have a new theory: it must have been the breeze. I forgot how cold it has been.

Twelve kilometres from my room, on a closed road in Bodija, two old men, gripped by the icy hands of fear, lock themselves in an embrace. An Okada rider is thrown off his motorcycle. A car alarm rings out; several car alarms ring out. This is not a typical dusty Harmattan night. 

There’s been an explosion.

The two old men break apart when the explosion and the roar of crumbling buildings subside. In the dark, foggy night, with their bodies buried in dust, the men ask each other if they’re okay. They ask each other before they even worry about their own selves.

These men – night guards for Bodija Estate Baptist Church – didn’t know it at the time, but they’ve just survived an accident that will remain with them forever.

My phone rings as soon as I step back into my room. It’s a friend who never calls.

“Are you okay,” she asks.

“I’m fine. Why’d you ask?”

“I heard there was an explosion in Ibadan. Are you okay…?”

Her voice trails off. A tight knot forms in my stomach. The thought of an insurgency fills my mind. It’s a –

“Did you hear anything at your side?”

“Oh no, no,” I respond. 

I drop the call and check WhatsApp; another friend, Anthonia, has a video up. She’s on a bike hurrying home in a haze of smoke. I can’t see her face, but she’s talking about an explosion only a few kilometres from her shop at Sango. 

“Me, I dey run go house,” I hear the fear in her voice. 

Anthonia is panicking; everyone is panicking. A former classmate says it’s the insurgency his pastor predicted at the start of the year. A co-worker thinks it's a kidnapping attempt gone wrong. 

I switch apps; X is raging with memes. 

The people on X are in their element. “Ibadan” sits at the top of the trends table, but every tweet with that word is either a question or a meme that plays on the word “bang.” It’s a party of panic on one side and influencers farming for engagement on the other. 

I switch back to WhatsApp, but my phone rings before I find any news.  It’s my mother. Her angry voice fills my left ear, asking if I’m home; she’s heard about the explosion. 

“Do you know what they say it is?”

“No, ma.” 

“Má jáde o, má jáde o,” she warns me to stay indoors.

The call ends.

Back on X, panic continues to spread from timeline to timeline. Some conspiracy theorists say it’s the start of an insurgency in the West. Some say a filling station blew up. The proximity to a gas station at Bodija, they say, and the presence of a large shopping mall — Ace Mall — must have amplified the explosion. 

“It can’t be a bomb,” I tell myself as I push out images of insurgents marching through Ibadan from my mind. Ibadan has been mostly peaceful since I started visiting when I was six. I am comforted that the state governor, Seyi Makinde, has always taken security seriously. He was instrumental in founding Amotekun, a regional security outfit in all South Western states. 

As the fear continues to spread, so does the sense of loss.

The time is 9:40 p.m., two hours since the loud thud in my Akobo apartment, two hours since two old men clung on to each other for life, two hours since hundreds of residents of Bodija watched their homes collapse, and two hours since two people breathed their last in a haze of smoke and panic. 

Two hours in, and the jokes and memes have remained. 

By morning, the facts have become clearer: the official story is that there’s been an explosion at the Dejo Oyelese axis of Bodija, and several buildings have crumbled to the ground. Seyi Makinde shares more details through his official X account: he estimates that around 230 properties were directly affected: torn roofs, fallen fences, broken windows, and, in extreme cases, total collapse. 

The losses extend beyond the material; two people have died, and another 77 were injured. 

Two days later, on the 18th of January, the state government updates the casualty figure: three more victims have died, and this brings the fatalities to a total of 5. 

Nigeria is a hubbub of calamity. Sandwiched between a crippling economy, it cloaks itself in robes of humour. We turn difficult situations into Atellan farces, make faces at our predicaments, and share memes about them.

Perhaps we are in a comedy of errors, and we are the players. 

“The ‘bang’ happened when I tried withdrawing money from my empty bank account at the ATM,” a tweet says. Others turn the situation into an opportunity to try pick-up lines: “The gas explosion in Ibadan made me remember how my love for you exploded, and I wasn’t able to control it. Anyways, you don’t have to respond, say hi to your mama fa me!”

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Sango, 11 a.m. (Two days after the explosion)

Distance from Ground Zero: 1.2 km

Sango is a commercial centre in the city of Ibadan. Busy, loud, and impatient, an abandoned railway track dating back to 1896 runs through the illustrious town, extending into Bodija, a calmer and serene part of the city. 

I stand by the shop of my friend, Anthonia, and I take some pictures of the busy town. It hums and screeches: nothing out of the ordinary. The picture I just took reveals the stark contrast from two days ago.

Two days ago, this town was in smoke. The shops were locked. Antsy legs filled the streets. The explosion had rocked their ears and shook their hearts so violently that Sango had become a ghost town. 

I reach a shop where the impact has cracked a window. The shop owner is a woman in her early 30s; she greets me in Yoruba. Her hand extends towards mine; I take it and ask about the explosion. 

“Everybody sáré,” she says about that night she fled on an Okada. 

“Ìgbà tí mo dé láarọ̀, mo wá notice pé glass mi ti fọ́.”

“It’s just a crack,” she explains about her broken glass, “but it could have been worse.” 

Ace Mall, Bodija

The first time I visited Bodija, I was sure I’d rent an apartment there after university. Bodija was a town that thrived on quietude. The tarred roads and upscale houses were a needed contrast in a city famous for its brown roofs and seventy-year-old buildings. 

Bodija wasn’t cut off from the rest of Ibadan. Everywhere in the city connected to Bodija, its huge food market brought traders from all over the state, and its restaurants – particularly Amala Sky – brought visitors from all over the country.

As I’m getting closer to Ground Zero – Google Maps says I am 3.7 kilometres away – the atmosphere changes. 

When I visited Ace Mall with friends for the first time three years ago, it was packed with an enthusiastic crowd. The gaming area was buzzing: shouts of “goal!” and defeat rented the air in intervals. The restaurants had queues that spilt out of their doors. Within its grand walls, bathed in the soft glow of its humming lights, a scene unfolded before my eyes: a picturesque background for the lens of an Instagram picture. The scene naturally captured the attention of people, who then took turns taking pictures. 

Today, the mall has suffered a massive stroke; only one-half of its body hangs for life. Its roof has fallen on one side of the building. The once-bright lights, which sat right beside the large “Ace Mall” banner, are dead, and most of the outlets are closed. It’s a funeral of what once was, its Instagram-coloured walls almost like a distant memory. I see a large polythene bag plastered across one patch of the building, a bandage for its broken part. It’s a mirror of the dystopian blast from two nights ago. 

I drive further down the road, and I catch a glimpse of a broken window. It is a Domino’s, operating despite its broken windows and shattered roof. The loss is minimal, lives are preserved, and business continues. 

DEJO OYELESE CLOSE: GROUND ZERO

After some difficulty with Google Maps, I arrive at a small, secluded estate. The area is deserted, save for a few cars packed on the side of the road.

I walk until I reach an affected building. Its stone walls are a sharp contrast to the heap of rubble only a few inches away, which used to be buildings. The windows and doors are broken, and several parts of the roof have fallen out, but the building stands; the Stone Technical College still stands. 

Straight ahead behind an estate gate sits Ground Zero, a small crater that’s the primary site of the explosion. Armed soldiers are now guarding the rickety gate to the estate, ordered to let no one in. I approach one of the soldiers. 

“I am reporting for –

He pays me no attention. I try again. 

“I just need to see the scale and I will be out before you know it.”

“ID Card?” he asks. 

I tell him I’m not carrying any, but would gladly provide any other proof he needs. He debates my offer for a few seconds, and then pushes open the gate. A group of sympathisers squeeze in as I walk into the estate. 

My heart breaks.

A man sits in front of his destroyed home, his eyes boring into space. His face sits on his hands, almost as if they no longer have the strength to continue. As I walk by, his gaze lingers on me as if he is protecting the last fragile pieces of his ruined home.  Across him is another fallen house – its gate the only sign that it ever existed. Two nights earlier, this house was a one-storey family home, its windows adorned with curtains, its walls bright with colour. Laughter and the smell of burning food rented the air. 

But with dawn came a new reality; the once sturdy walls of the house now bear scars of the explosion. The laughter and sense of homeliness are replaced by an eerie silence interjected by the roar of an excavator.

The debris of ruin extends deeper into the estate. Two cars are squeezed into each other as if they have just come from the junkyard.

Ground Zero is nothing but a crater surrounded by a heap of stones, drawing the attention of sympathisers, large excavation trucks, and uniformed care workers nestling under a canopy a few feet away from the destruction.

It’s a rubble of broken appliances, meshed wires, clothes, and furniture items. In it lies the proof of life that used to be here. People used to live here. At 7:40 pm two nights ago, life bustled here; by 7:45 pm, it was rubble.

The atmosphere carries the stench of an old rag. A dusty haze hangs in the air. Dirt has taken over the land, its stench wafting through the hot afternoon. 

Some of the ruins hold the former home of Timilehin Oseni; his camera, lights, and other equipment are buried beneath the rubble. His family house is deserted, its walls torn down by the explosion's impact.

The loss here isn’t a crack in the window. It is a tear in the fabric of life that holds the Oseni family together. But Timilehin is optimistic. We’ll build a home again, he tells me. 

But things are different for Fatoba John’s aunt. 

Her home was the last thread of sanity. Thirty years ago, she and her now-deceased husband moved into a 6-bedroom Duplex at Dejo Oyelese Street. This massive house soon became a home for a family of five. Within those walls, she raised her three curious and wide-eyed teenagers whose hunger for independence preceded everything else. Eventually, this curiosity fueled their decision to fly far away from the familiar net of a family home. Shortly after the death of their father, these children moved to different parts of the world, leaving their mother with a large, empty nest. 

The loneliness tore at her heart. But she took refuge in the memories smeared across every room. Every tread on the stairs. The pictures on the wall. The familiar arrangement of the sofas in the living room. Sometimes, John tells me, she sits in the living room for hours, staring straight ahead at her television, her mind no doubt filled with the memories of her family in this house. 

When the explosion occurred in Dejo Oyelese on the 16th of January, she was deeply asleep. The impact cracked down the roof, instantly jolting the old woman to reality. Unable to make sense of the falling debris and wood, she screamed for help, but her voice got buried in the wave of calamity. 

She woke up in a hospital ward with a slight injury to her arm. Her pillow was soaked around the outline of her head, a consequence of the hot teaching hospital. A small crowd of family was gathered around her. She knew what was coming; their faces were cast in gloom, the weight of regret heavy in their eyes. 

The destruction of her family home in the explosion was akin to losing a part of herself. It wasn’t death; it was a loss perhaps greater. It was the loss of the only thing to live for, and isn’t that dying in itself?

John’s aunt refused to speak and had to be taken in for counselling. 

Five days have passed since the unfortunate explosion in the city. The Oyo State Government has completed its excavation exercises, and the Emergency Operations Centre has given the victims all the care it can offer. The official report puts the death toll at five, with over 100 injured and around 250 houses affected. 

The Oyo State Government promises a thorough investigation, but here’s the word on the street, according to someone who lived on it: a certain man everyone called Mali illegally stored dynamite in his rented home. On the day of the explosion, his wife and kids left the estate minutes before the blast. But in a recently published Leadership piece, Mali – real name, Alhaji Sawane Youssouf – denies any connection to the event. He claims he is a registered miner with an Oyo state licence. 

However, a certain Muideen Olalekan Olagunju, a former Oyo House of Assembly member, disagrees with Youssouf’s claim. While the Malian miner has a licence to operate legally in the state, Muideen believes this has never stopped him from engaging in illegal mining activities. The next accusation is more damning: Youssouf and a group of miners have formed a secret company which exclusively operates in illegal mining. 

These accusations solidify an earlier narrative, but it goes one step further to echo a warning into the ears of the state’s government: the possibility of hidden explosives in rented apartments loom large over us. 

The thought of another explosion turns my stomach. 

After walking through the ruins on my visit, two days after the explosion, I stand at the estate gate, my hands clinging to its bars. Night has fallen, and the rubble looks like a sleeping monster. Behind me, a group of Christians hum a hymn. It is a candle service for the departed souls. I let go of the bars, turn around, and join the wake. 

The candles burn at the gate of Ground Zero. A community of believers pray for souls they never met. Several miles away, at the University College Hospital, a group of undergraduate students queue to donate blood to the victims. Earlier, this same group of believers handed out food packages to government workers at the site. It is love. A sense of loss that unites. A sense of community. 

Ground Zero is an unneeded tragedy of errors, its rage tearing through a close-knit community in Bodija and its impact reverberating through the entire city of Ibadan. But it is also a tragedy that has tested the boundaries of our communalism as residents of Ibadan. 

A test, nothing more. 

I drive back home, humming a hymn: it is well, it is well with my soul. 

Editor’s Notes

Fu’ad here. As always, it took a village to put this together.

• When the explosion happened that night, I was on X like everyone else, trying to understand what was happening. I also texted someone on WhatsApp: I needed a writer willing to go to ground zero. Someone who was feeling it on the ground in a way that none of the Internet could. Everything picked up from there. 

• I found David, the author of this story, through another writer (the writer was too terrified to be around blood or gore). 

• I ran it by Vistanium’s Staff Room – the editorial Whatsapp group – to see if they thought it was a good idea. Ope thought it was, and everyone else agreed. I took the lead on editing.

• Then David got started. By the time he sent in his first draft, he hated it. We took multiple stabs at it, but it eventually came together when we tried a new editing approach. 

• I’d heard somewhere that as part of the editing process many years ago, some New Yorker editors would sit the writer down and rip apart a story, word by word, line by line. In this case, we spent at least five hours with David reading his words aloud to taste them, negotiating every word and sentence. Many darlings were killed, but some stubborn ones remain. Ruka thinks we did good.

• For art direction, Mariam was critical in shaping the direction and mood, designing the cover, while Precious made his Vistanium debut designing all the illustrations within the story. 

• Jolomi did some research while Aisha played enforcer to the finish line. 

• Most importantly, the hours were paid for by Vistanium Members, who continue to make chasing stories like this possible. They will always matter to me. 

P.S: This story is part of a broader experiment at Vistanium. I’m learning that I can’t write all the stories I want to see. Now, I’m beginning to explore a world where Vistanium has writers across Nigeria. I wonder what it’d take to get them to consistently craft stories about their world for you. I’m telling Vistanium’s members all about it here.

I had turned 18 only a few months earlier and was navigating a law degree at Kogi State University. 

Flood. It was a word removed from my reality, something I read about—like wars and famines. I put the phone back under my pillow and went for my evening bath. 

As I left for the park the next afternoon, I told my roommates that I was going to Lokoja briefly and would return soon. I believed myself when I said this. 

As the bus approached Ganaja, a village on the outskirts of Lokoja, the tragedy settled slowly on me. The settlements immediately after Salem University, a private university just before Ganaja, were half immersed in the overflow of the River Niger. Residents stood haplessly beside heaps of bags, electronics, furniture—property they could pull out of their homes. Our bus drove slowly through the flooded Gadumo road; I saw people on their balconies, watching the river flow towards them in slow, menacing strides. 

“We’ve always taken from this river,” a woman on the bus said in Igala. “Now it is coming for us.”

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We lived in Adankolo, an inner-city suburb near the River Benue. My family lived in a neighbourhood called New Layout — a paved street with working drainage and fenced apartments. Down the road, residents lived on lowlands, in the soggy areas closest to the river. They were the first victims.

I got home before sunset. My dad and I went to assess the flood. First, we needed to know how much time we had before it made its way to our home. After several minutes, he said we had only 24 hours as half the area was already immersed. Debris of forgotten, abandoned, or irretrievable items—paper from school books, plastic bowls, single pair of old shoes—were floating on the water’s surface. Canoes hovered from a distance, waiting for their moment. In a few days, canoes would be the only means of transportation. 

We had less than a day to move everything from our four-bedroom flat. There were a few options of friends and family who lived on the side of town unaffected by the flood. My dad was hesitant to try the first option. He didn’t like the idea of depending on anyone, so he would go out at first light to look for an apartment. 

In the morning, the neighbourhood droned with the mechanical hum of trucks moving our neighbour’s properties. 

At full daylight, the water had advanced towards our neighbourhood and was already within view. Along with hired hands, I moved things out, piling them in front of our house. My stepmother and my last two siblings—younger than five—were home. My dad had had no luck getting a new place in a decent location on such short notice. We were on the brink of desperation.

By mid-afternoon, the water was a few hundred metres from our home, and my father still needed to find a new house. There were no vacant spaces, and the few he thought we could manage had doubled rent. Finally, he conceded that we could move our things to my stepmother’s uncle's home. There was a white Mitsubishi truck ready to move our stuff in three trips. We were loading the first turn when my friend, Bash, who had been frantically helping his family load their property into another truck, announced that we had lost someone we knew the night before.

My heart stopped. 

Dan’assabe was one of my earliest acquaintances when we moved to Adankolo. We played football together on the pitch at Government Day Secondary School. The night before, Dan'assabe's little sister slipped as she helped move things out of their flooded house. No one noticed for a while, and when they did, Dan'assabe dove back in, looking for his baby sister. 

Bash said they'd just found her body; they never found Dan'assabe's body.

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The flood was already close to our home, but now its effect felt even closer. With quivering hands, I helped load the truck.

By the time we were loading the last batch of property we could salvage, we were ankle-deep into the flood. As the Mitsubishi truck pulled out of New Layout, Adankolo, the few people left on dry land stood outside their homes, beside piles of their collective misery, waiting. Many weeks later, the water would recede into the river. Nothing remained the same.

In 2012, Nigeria experienced its first significant flooding in 40 years. The flooding was caused by unprecedented excess rainfall, which led to the overflowing of some important dams around the country. Excess water from the Lagdo dam in Cameroon was released into the River Benue, while Shiroro and Kainji dams also released water into the River Niger. As a result, both rivers overflowed, flooding the communities along their banks.

According to the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), the floods affected 30 of Nigeria's 36 states. Between July and November 2012, 363 people were confirmed dead, and over 2.1 million people were displaced. Since 2012, what was considered a one-off disaster has become an almost annual humanitarian crisis, leaving death, destruction, and poverty in its wake. 

Named after the Hausa word for “river”, Kogi State lies in the middle-belt region of Nigeria. Its capital city, Lokoja, lies at the confluence of the River Niger and River Benue—two of the largest bodies of water in the country. The state’s proximity to these rivers has put it in a precarious position, leaving it susceptible to flooding. Moreover, because of the state’s dependence on agriculture, many of its residents live in low-lying areas along flood plains, vulnerable to the devastating effects of floods.

Ten years after the 2012 floods, not much has changed. Every other September, Nigerians brace themselves for the impact of another wave of flooding; and every other year, a new family falls into a new dimension of hardship. 

The Abdullahi family is one such family.

In 1996, a young Aboh Abdullahi, the fourth child of eight, moved to Adankolo with his family. His father had just purchased land at the bank of River Niger, joining other people who had started setting up base in the Adankolo lowlands. He had first built a small house, just enough to cram his young family into, and as they grew older, he allotted portions of the land to each of his six sons to build and raise their own families on. Like most of the Bassa Nge people—one of the earliest settlers in Lokoja—the family subsisted on farming and fishing. This location was essential to their occupation and livelihood.

As they transitioned into adulthood, Aboh’s two sisters married and left the family land. His brothers married too and began raising their own families. In 2005, Aboh married Lami; they had four children. Together with Aboh’s brothers, they expanded the existing structure on the land into a bigger house with five small rooms.

The entire family has now been forced to consider moving in light of their current situation.

In 2012, when the first flood came, they watched the water levels rise but did not imagine it would get close enough.

“We had never experienced anything like that,” Aboh told me. “We didn’t know what to do. We didn’t move. We just kept watching and watching the water until it came into the compound. After it started getting into the house, we started gathering up things to leave.”

They moved property they could salvage to the homes of friends and neighbours whose homes were unaffected. Most houses along the bank of the river are built with thatch, wood, and blocks made out of clay. His family’s home was one such house, and when the flood came, it didn’t take long for it to fall apart. Aboh and his brothers crossed the river to their farms and stayed in the farmhouse while the women and children squatted with relatives. Immediately after the flood, the troubled brothers returned to rebuild the house. With every flood, the house collapsed, and they rebuilt again. 

The 2022 floods, named the worst national disaster in a decade by the National Emergency Management Agency, forced the family to retreat to the Internally Displaced People’s camp in Adankolo.

St. Luke Model Primary School Adankolo serves as the makeshift camp for people internally displaced by the flood. It’s adjacent to the Adankolo junction, a few hundred meters from the Adankolo market. Before converting it into an IDP camp, the state government used it as a Covid-19 vaccination centre.

The school has five classroom blocks, but only two have been made available to IDPs because it's in session. With over 500 displaced people in the camp, only seven rooms are available in both blocks. Women and children occupy six rooms, while one is left to the men. Every night, over 50 people sleep in each of these rooms.

When I got there on October 21, 2022—a sunny Saturday morning, most occupants sat on the balconies outside, watching as charity organisations distributed relief packages of food and medicine. A bus offloaded rice, garri, and packs of noodles at the compound's centre. Members of the Vigilante Group of Nigeria, whose Lokoja branch has its head office within the school premises, hovered around, providing security. Older women in the camp participated in sorting, measuring and distributing the food items. Officials of the State Emergency Management Agency (SEMA) supervised the process.

“The meals are little and a bit irregular. They don’t help much,” Lami Abdullahi, Aboh’s wife, told me. They have been forced to live in the IDP camp since the beginning of the flooding two months ago. Lami is a petty trader, but current realities have prevented her from doing business. She depends on handouts from relatives for sustenance while in the camp. Her oldest child, Mariam, is 16 and a Government Day Secondary School student. While her mother ensured her family members didn’t get passed over in the distribution of relief items, Mariam cared for her three younger siblings. 

Now and then, arguments erupted over the distribution of relief items. While I waited by the shade for Lami and her daughter, a gang of agitated men approached me to register a complaint – the oldest was probably 24. Their grouse was that the camp administration had failed to recognise them as part of the camp and had deprived them of benefits accessible to the other occupants. 

“They're not displaced. They're only here to cause trouble,” Ayatu, a member of the Vigilante Group of Nigeria, told me. 

“Sometimes those boys steal, and when they're caught, they're brought to us. We either handle it internally or hand them over to the police,” he told me.

Ajolo “AY” Ayatu is from Lokoja and lives in Adankolo. Like Aboh and his family, the flooding has badly affected him. Since 2012, his house had withstood the impact of the flood, only needing a mild renovation. However, with the 2022 flood, whatever is left of his home currently floats on the flooded banks of River Benue. 

His pregnant wife and three children are at her father's house at Old Poly Quarters—a working-class area at the centre of town.

When I asked him how much he's paid to work for the Vigilante Group of Nigeria, he laughed wryly, “Pay ke? Nobody pays us anything o. We are just doing this thing for the people.”

He manages a block industry owned by a friend. There, he oversees the sales and delivery of building blocks. “It's not a monthly thing. I have some good days and some bad days. I take home around ₦2500; nothing on bad days.” 

But his good days are few and far between. On average, he made around ₦15,000 per month, all of which went to family expenses. His properties are scattered around the camp, and he cannot account for many of them.

The two-kilometre stretch of tarred road that passes through New Layout, Adankolo, stops abruptly at a swamp in front of the Chapel of Integrity, a new-age Pentecostal church at the end of New Layout. From there, the drainage is clogged, and the terrible road forms, stretching to the intersection where the Agbayi neighbourhood begins. The community shares proximity with the River Niger and is prone to flooding.

Some of the homes closest to the bank of the river, like Ayatu’s, had been completely submerged. At the flood's peak, most residents took refuge at the Internally Displaced People’s camp on the other side of Adankolo while others sought shelter with family members in unaffected parts of town.

The residents who lived close to the road trickled back as the flooding subsided. The water had receded away from their homes, and they needed to clean, dry, fumigate, and resume their lives. In the last week of October, some of the residents brought out their damp furniture for cleaning while others swept water deposits out of their houses.

Zainab Aleru, a 21-year-old student of the Federal University, Lokoja, had spent her entire day cleaning the house with the rest of the family in preparation for their return. They spent the last month at her aunt’s place, and she couldn’t wait to return home. 

She is the second of four children in the Aleru family, and although she’s no stranger to floods, each year came with an emotional strain.

“Every time the flood was coming, it was hell. My mum has this thing where she starts to experience sleepless nights, you know, going through the entire grieving process before it even happened. So when this starts, it reflects on everyone, and we all start to experience panic. We start to worry about money, the stress of moving, and the discomfort of staying with people.”

She had spent the past month at her aunt’s place at Army Signal, towards the outskirts of town. But she didn’t find much comfort there as her parent’s home afforded her more convenience. 

“I’ve had to sleep on a tiny mattress with my sister in a room I share with our cousins. But over here, I have my room, and I sleep on a big bed,” she said.

For Abdulrasaq Aleru, Zainab’s father and patriarch of the family, the 2012 flood was an equally jarring experience. 

“There had never been an incidence of flood or anything like that since I moved here. So when the flood started, we didn’t bother because we didn’t think it would affect us.”

Born and raised in Lokoja, Abdulrasaq has lived most of his life in the town and only elsewhere during his degree and postgraduate days. He found the land upon which he built his home while supervising his older brother’s building project in 2002. He paid for the land in 2003 and completed his house in 2006. Because of the land’s relative proximity to the River Niger, he complied with the regulations of the National Inland Waterways Authority (NIWA) regulations to not build within 200 meters of the river bank.

“I built my house 500 meters away.”

Recovering from the flood has never been easy. The devastating aftermath bores a large hole in his finances. After each flood, Abdulrasaq has had to mend a broken fence, repaint a significant portion of the house, and fix leakages created by water pressure. Combining these expenses with putting four children through education has been daunting.

“I’m a local government worker. We’re placed on percentage payment, so there’s not much available to do all these things every time it floods. Only 40% was paid last month, and they still owe us some arrears.”

With the ASUU strike called off and his two oldest children scheduled to return to school, it’s not clear to Abdulrasaq how to combine the financial demands of school requirements and home repairs. 

“Primary schools resumed in September, secondary schools resumed in September, the universities have just opened, and now the flood is here. How do I take care of these while collecting only a 40% salary?” 

“We have to consider the historical context,” Promise Emmanuel, Chief Press Secretary to the Kogi State Deputy Governor, told me. “Lokoja is an ancient town with a lot of history. Some people living in flood-prone areas have lived there for many generations. Most of them don’t want to move.”

According to Emmanuel, in response to the 2012 floods, the Kogi State government built the Wada Estate to relocate some affected people. After they took possession of their new homes, some lived there for a while, sold the property, and moved back to the floodplains they share ancestral ties.

“Many tribes that make up Lokoja moved here to get closer to the water. For example, the Bassa and Oworo people are commonly fishermen, and their livelihood is directly tied to these rivers. So it’s hard to explain that they cannot build homes in certain places they consider ancestral lands.”

Since his appointment in 2018, Emmanuel has witnessed the government’s efforts to mitigate the effects of the flood. However, he admitted that it is not in the state’s power to prevent it.

“It’s bigger than one state. You know about the Lagdo and Shiroro dams. We don’t control rainfall either. We can only try to shield our people from the severity of the consequences.”

Every year, the federal government, through the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET), informs the state governments of impending floods. The state government creates awareness about the flood through the State Emergency Management Agency, warning people living in risk areas, and opening up IDP camps. The agency manages flooding emergencies and supports affected people. 

“People don’t like relocating to the IDP camps because of the stigma of being perceived as a refugee,” he said. 

The state also depends on donations from individuals and corporations.

About the preventive measures by the state government, he spoke about the embankment project the state government carried out on the River Niger strip opposite the Old Market at Kabawa. “The embankment keeps the water from intruding into the road, but there's just little it can do in the face of massive flooding like the one we have now.”

He challenged the federal government to declare the state an ecological disaster zone. “Kogi is the zero point of any flooding disaster in the country. Both major rivers pass through here, and that's why we are most affected. So we need special attention.”

It's been ten years since my first flood. After we moved out of our home, we nested at an uncle's home for a few days before we finally got a place at Fentolu, a neighbourhood adjacent to our old street at New Layout. Most people whose stay at New Layout was temporary have yet to return. The ones who had built their own homes there couldn’t afford to move elsewhere. I made new friends in Fentolu, and after a couple of years, my family moved to a permanent address at Lokogoma.

Last month at the flood's peak, my father, pushed by curiosity, took a canoe ride to our old house at New Layout. 

“Only the roof of the house was visible outside the water,” he said over the phone. “Like a cap floating on water.”

Aboh and Lami have decided not to live on the family land anymore. Instead, they will look for a one-room apartment to rent after they get out of the IDP camp. When I asked Aboh how much he thinks the rent will cost him, he said around ₦30,000 per year. He doesn't know where he’ll get that kind of money. 

Ayatu hopes to buy land elsewhere and build something there. He doesn’t know when he’ll be able to raise the funds needed. He doesn’t know what he’ll do after the flood recedes. 

“I don’t know many things,” he told me, “but I know I don’t want to be moving my properties from my place every year.”

When I asked Mr Aleru what alternative plans he had to shield his family from the nightmare of next year’s flood, he sighed and shook his head. “I’m 54, and I have only six years till retirement. I’m a senior civil servant who has had all his children and built his dream home. I have reached the end of my productive years, and I’m supposed to be settled now. There’s no starting over for me anywhere.”

We were in front of his house, where the family were all engaged in chores. He was using a broom to dust dry sand off a bed frame. His daughters were washing the dishes while his oldest son was scrubbing the tiles on the balcony.

“So you’re just waiting until the next flood gets here?” I asked him.

“Yes,” he said. “What would you have me do?

Notes

Fu’ad here. As usual, it took a village to bring this story to life and, for the first time, a new author:

1. First, it was the idea. I was interested in exploring stories on the ground about the flood as it was unfolding, but I couldn’t travel. So I asked Akinyemi, and he recommended someone; Victor.

2. One conversation later, Victor was already planning to take a trip to Lokoja to begin developing the story – he took full ownership of making this come alive.

   
   Now, it really was supposed to be just a text-based story, then things escalated quickly.
   

3. Stories are great, but they need to be nourished with research and beat into shape with editing. Ify took the lead on research.

4. Ope of edited the story from when it was just an outline till it became a finished story after four drafts. But then, she wanted it to travel; and took ownership of making sure this story travels. So if you found this post anywhere outside your inbox, it’s most likely because Ope made a choice that made you see it. In any format. (You also make it travel when you share it. Share it.) Samson and Ruka proofread.

5. There were illustrations on the internet that we could have used, but none of them felt good enough. We wanted something that felt good. So we made our own. And that’s where Yinka came in to drive design. Mariam made a new wordmark and logomark for Vistanium.

6. We still had photos and some footage we didn’t know what to do with; Kayode showed up to make sense of them. He made the videos we spread across the internet. Kemi’s voice carried the video, while Opeyemi’s engineering amplified her voice. Oh, and Ope wrote the script too. A roving general.

7. It took a little over a month to make, and it would probably have taken two weeks max if everyone wasn’t nine-to-fiving.

8. It wasn’t cheap, trying to cover travel and other stuff, but the bulk of those costs was covered by two people – Hassan and Sonia. After I told them casually about the story, they offered to cover the expenses.

9. I’m grateful for all of them, for all of you.

He looked like a groomsman at a wedding with his white satin bùbá and ṣòkòtò. But that day in 1992, he wasn’t dressed for a wedding. Instead, it was for the mechanic – he was having one of those “I’m not leaving here until you fix this car” days after too many “the carburettor done spoil” ones. 

He’d been lying down long enough for everyone to think he was sleeping when a man came to the shed.

“Who owns this white Pajero,” the man, likely in his late fifties or early sixties, asked in Yoruba. 

“It’s that man lying down there,” the mechanic replied. 

“That one?”

“Ehn.”

“Ah,” the man sighed, “God, please make my son too successful like this boy o.”

Funmi smiled and thought, “Look at this man praying for his son to be like me, without even knowing what I do for a living.” The first time I heard this story from Uncle Funmi, someone had just said something about a small aspiration I can’t even remember.

It was a funny story then and still is because at the time he was in that white bùbá and ṣòkòtò and drove that white Pajero, he was 28. He was also a full-fledged, bank-bursting, car-snatching, gun-wielding armed robber. 

—

But at the time I heard this particular story, ahhing and laughing, almost a decade had passed since that day at the mechanic’s, and he’d become my lesson teacher. 

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Uncle Funmi was dark and tall but hunched a little, with a thick build. On many weekday evenings in ‘99 and 2000, he was either teaching me maths tricks or helping my brother navigate Accounting and Economics. But his lessons didn’t end with school subjects. He was also my teacher for the little things. 

“Lekan, write on the line,” he’d say about my handwriting, “and don’t let your words fly up to the line on top of it. Instead, let them stay on the ground with the lower line.”

The first time I wrote in a straight line, I was eight, and he was there. We celebrated with Sprint chewing gum and Coke. He also showed me how to make a blackboard gone white with use, black again. 

“Grind the charcoal and pour in small water,” he explained, “then make it thick like you’re making pap. Use small foam as your brush, and then use it to paint the board.”

As for chalk, we never bought those; we just picked them from the ground outside, white or pink. When the diggers didn’t know what to do with the chalk-filled earth they’d excavated while digging our well in 1998, they just levelled our compound with it.

“Just pick the dry ones,” he’d say, “but not too dry, so it doesn’t make that scratching sound on the board.”

He spoke well, was funny, and every quiet sigh was a sign that a gang life story was coming, so we paid attention. He ended every story with, “But make sure you listen to your mother, no matter what,” or he’d say “ka ṣaà ma ṣe daada,” let’s just continue to do good. 

His primary audience was my brother, who was almost twenty, an aunt about that age too, and whichever cousin was staying over at our house. I was hardly ever in the room when he told these stories, but nothing misses a curious ear in a small two-bedroom apartment. I could hear a conversation happening in the bedroom while I did the dishes in the kitchen. And if I sat on the chair closest to the living room window in the evenings, I could hear him outside telling my dad stories over Rothmans or Benson and Hedges. 

His gang had no leader; every operation was led by whoever brought a lead forward and had a plan. Uncle Funmi preferred operations that started and ended fast, like highway robberies. On the other side of the gang was Owo – we’ll call him Owo because I can’t remember his name. Owo was a short man who loved to make big statements. 

One time, they robbed an office building and were leaving with a lot of cash. “We needed an extra vehicle,” Uncle Funmi said, “So I went to the road, stopped a car and asked the man to come out,” but the man panicked. “Come down o, this person coming is a mad person!” Owo just walked up to the car and shot the driver in the face. They all drove away in the car with bits of the former driver’s brain still splattered across the seats.

Another time while robbing another office, Owo demanded that a man hand him the keys to wherever it was they kept the money. The man, too panicked and confused, kept pleading for his life. Owo walked up to the man, grabbed his head with one arm, and slit his throat with a knife in his other hand.

This streak made Uncle Funmi uneasy about their last operation together. “My spirit didn’t go with it,” he said, “I thought it was too dangerous, but he didn’t listen.” And so, Uncle Funmi didn’t go.

In September 1992, a policeman argued with a driver at a checkpoint on an island exit of the Third Mainland Bridge. The argument ended when the policeman’s rifle coughed seven times and the driver lay dead on the road. The driver was army colonel Ezra Dindam Rimdan. 

For fear of reprisal attacks from the army, police officers across Lagos withdrew from all checkpoints. As a result, armed robbers around Lagos had all the lee-way to pull off the kinds of attacks Owo was leading. This crime wave led to the creation of the Special Anti Robbery Squad, SARS, in November 1992. 

It took a little over a year, but that squad of police vigilantes eventually caught up with Uncle Funmi’s gang – it also happened to be the operation he didn’t go on. At their head was Owo. 

At first, Funmi wanted to lie low and hoped none of them would snitch, but the police came looking for him eventually. When the police come and they don’t find you, they tend to take someone back with them as leverage. And for Funmi, they took his frail mother. 

He surrendered himself to the police shortly after. 

In court, they were all found guilty and sentenced to death – all of them except Funmi. Despite the torture, he pled not guilty because he was never really caught robbing. 

Owo and the rest of the gang were sentenced to die, but although Funmi’s lie kept him alive, he was held in Ikoyi Prison while awaiting trial. 

—

When Ikoyi Prison was first built in 1955, it was designed as a federal medium-security facility designed to hold 800 inmates. But when Funmi showed up at its gate as an inmate awaiting trial, he was one more body sardined into a yard with over two times more people than the original capacity. Getting into Ikoyi Prison in the mid-nineties, he’d have been sharing the yard with all kinds of people; rapists, murderers, other armed robbers, politicians, activists or moguls guilty of fraud or incurring Abacha’s wrath. 

But in spite of the suffocating conditions of prison life, there was newfound hope for Funmi. A relentless lie had earned him a second chance at life. The first thing he rediscovered was faith. Then, he picked up education where he’d left it – preparing for his senior WAEC exams. An NGO, The Good Shephard Community, covered the costs, and it paid off – while in prison, he enrolled to write his WAEC, and he aced it. He did so well that it played a pivotal role in the next thing he was seeking; freedom.

Over half of his fellow inmates were awaiting trial, some of them for up to a decade. Too many things must align for an inmate awaiting trial to get a day in court. First, you’ll need a lawyer, most likely working pro bono; a means of transport to the prison, most likely provided by an NGO or church; a court not on strike, and a proactive prison officer willing to organise these people around the problem. 

The prison officer in charge of Funmi’s case was my mum. 

I spent a lot of my holidays in primary school and early secondary years following her to work at the prison. It’s where I also encountered some of the most interesting characters in my life. There was Lanre, the soft-spoken armed robber who spent all his free time in prison wearing boxing gloves and sparring with anyone interested. There was a man who, when I asked him what he was replied, “I’m a banker.” When I asked my mum why he was there, “Fraud,” was her answer. There was Brown, who worked at a restaurant until he punched a person at a party and ended up in prison because the person on the receiving end died shortly after the knockout. 

The outcome of her work meant many things to me as a child in all kinds of ways; big, small or just random.

It was being stuck in traffic, a random agbero coming out of nowhere and clearing traffic for her to drive through. He was calling her mama, giving her the twale and a thank you, while refusing the tip she offered him. 

“Where do you know him from?”

“I don’t know,” she’d say, “he was probably in Ikoyi Prison at some point.”

It was visiting a brothel on Stadium Road, Surulere because my mum had to meet with the girlfriend of an inmate whose release she was trying to facilitate. It was someone coming to visit us at the house a second time, with a cardboard model of our home as a thank you gift – he learned the layout of our house by simply going to pee during his earlier visit. I asked him how he did it, and he said, “I’m an architect.” After he’d left, I asked my mum how she knew him. “He was in Ikoyi Prison for drug trafficking.” 

One day, a “thank you ma” visitor came in a deadbeat Skoda that should have been navy blue, but for the rust on many parts of the car. 

That visitor was Uncle Funmi. It was the first day I remember him ever coming to our house. Out of the car also came his wife and their two daughters; the older one was about my age – he’d had them before going to prison.

Almost four years after he first got into prison, Uncle Funmi became a free man again shortly after General Abdulsalam Abubakar, Nigeria’s last military dictator, got into office in 1998. He talked a lot about the people he had to thank the most; The Good Shephard Community and my mum. And because of how indebted, he came around a lot, looking for how to help out or be helpful, till he eventually felt like family.

It’s why, for example, he was teaching me maths, and my brother maths, economics, and accounting. Nigeria is not kind to the conventionally qualified, and it’s even more unforgiving to the previously incarcerated – especially when you’re poor and powerless. But here was Uncle Funmi, trying to build a new life on the straight.

He was teaching evening lessons at ₦50 a class, but it wasn’t enough to make a living. So he was making other plans too. One weekend, he showed up at our house with a Faragon Danfo he’d charmed an owner into leasing to him. He was saving everything he could for his next big plan. 

Later that year, Uncle Funmi showed up with good news; he’d gained admission to study Economics at the Olabisi Onabanjo University in Ogun State. But because he still had a family to care for, he knew he still had to make a living. 

He wanted to raise enough money to start a small business near the campus. 

When he showed up one weekend in 2001, it was the last time I saw him with the Danfo. Driving the danfo for a few days and returning to Ogun State for school wasn’t working out, so he handed the keys back to the owner. But that day, a large photocopier was at the back of the bus; he’d bought it with money he saved up driving the bus, teaching, and the generous hundred nairas here and there. 

“It’s a student environment, so everyone is going to need to do photocopy,” he said. However, he had nowhere to keep it, so he just kept it under our bed. “There’s no space in our self-con to keep this,” he said. He’d pace a lot whenever he talked about his plans with feverish excitement and nervousness.

He dreamed about the standing fan he would buy and the kiosk he would rent. Ahh, a generator; he was going to need a generator. 

Things were looking up, and they did for a while until they didn’t.

One Thursday in 2002, my parents returned from work to an empty home. Someone didn’t lock the door, and a bowl of garri was sitting on the centre table in the living room. My brother, who they were sure was the one who left the bowl on a table in the living room, was nowhere to be found. The first time I asked my brother about that night and the bowl of garri, he laughed – it’s funny now.

“It was the day after my ATS II exam for ICAN,” my brother said; no one was home. “I just said I should soak garri o.” So the garri got in the bowl, followed by the sugar with groundnuts. And just as the water was about to go in, there was a knock at the gate.

“By the time I was going to open the door,” he said, “they already opened the gate. The first person I saw was Uncle Funmi’s wife.” Two plain-clothed men behind her, armed with rifles, marched into the house, pushing him out of the way. 

Before he could greet her at the door, she pushed past him at the door. Behind her were two men in plain clothes. She walked through the living room and straight to the bedroom. Then she pointed to the photocopier under the bed, “Funmi lo ni photocopy machine yìí.” No one knows why to date, but evidence of his property in our home was all the justification the police needed. 

No one said a word to him, they just grabbed him, and took him to the waiting bus outside. It was in the bus he realised that they were in fact, policemen attached to SARS. 

“It was SARS,” my brother recalled, “and you know how they are. No one said anything to me, but I could tell it was about Uncle Funmi. And as long as it was about that, mummy was going to fix it.” 

A few hours later, he was in a police station in Ijebu Ode, stripped to his under shorts. “They put me in dark cell,” he said, “but I could make out someone else in the cell, it was Uncle Solo, remember him? The one that used to come with him sometimes?” I did remember him, but before I could even respond, he said, “the one that used to come to the house with Uncle Funmi when they had danfo? I met him in the cell. He was begging me to beg the police officers not to kill him.” 

Every night for the next two nights, they’d take Solo out of the cell, torture him, and return him after a few hours. When they took him on the third night, he was never returned. 

After my brother’s first night at the police station, my mum and dad showed up to secure his release, but they didn’t succeed. And so it was that he spent two more nights, while they called everyone they could. By Monday morning, they were going to release him, but on one condition; they were going to swap him with my mum.

My mum spent one night in detention, and the DPO was gracious enough to convert his office to her holding room; she was his ranked superior. Detention is demeaning, but for his gesture, she was grateful. She spent one night. 

I returned home from boarding school two Wednesdays later, a midterm holiday. On Thursday night, my mum was seated in the corner of our living room after the Isha prayer, the TV was on. And as the news came on, my dad increased the volume.  

The AIT news anchor talked about an incident in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State. The news cut from the studio to a road. The anchor broadcaster was talking over footage of bodies lying on the road; the Police in Ijebu Ode had killed armed robbers after a shootout in Ijebu-Ode. I counted two bodies. Everyone knew what was coming. 

We were huddled in front of our TV, my mum, off the mat now, and beside me. 

My brother was back in the living room when my mum called out to him. Next came an aunt who’d come to stay with us for a few days.

My brother was the first to see his body in the news; he looked like he’d died of beating instead of actual bullets. “Ah, see Uncle Solo.”

“One suspect is still wanted,” the reporter continued, “Funmi Ajayi, a 300-level student of Economics at Olabisi Onabanjo University.”

—

Two things meant a lot to my mum; her personal relationships and work. Everyone says she carried both of them really well. But as a child, it wasn’t always easy to tell them apart; what or who was work, and who was familial? So many nights, we’d be watching TV after dinner while also sorting out paperwork. 

“What are these papers for,” I asked once.

“Amnesty,” she replied, “sometimes, governors want to grant amnesty, and part of my job is sorting out the paperwork for inmates and making sure that their case is strong enough for them to be released.” The repentant, the promising, the overstretched awaiting trial inmate, the sick. The first time I saw HIV on paper was for an inmate who was well-behaved and needed to be closer to better care on the outside. 

“Just put one paper here,” she pointed to a stack, “then put another one here,” and then another, “this one is for the governor’s office, this one is for the ministry of justice, this one is for the Controller’s office.”

Work remained a constant presence in her life, and my childhood felt like a part of both. So I’d be catching up with my classmates about what we were up to at home, and they’d be saying they went to the beach, and there was me saying, “Last holiday, I saw Clifford Orji the Cannibal.” My classmates were divided into people who said, “did he try to bite you,” and “why you too dey lie?”

I learned to play chess with pieces hand-carved by a condemned criminal, made in the carpentry workshop, one of the vocational workshops inside Ikoyi Prison. My mum bragged about my primary school grades, so he made me a chess set as a gift. 

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—

After that April in 2002, just as Uncle Funmi had remained wanted, he disappeared from our household, not just in presence but in chatter. After that, we hardly spoke of him. On the few occasions his name came up, it was because someone claimed they’d spotted him somewhere. 

“Someone said they saw Funmi in traffic on Ikorodu Road,” my mum said one day. 

“Do you think it’s him?” I asked. 

“I don’t know.”

Fast forward a few years later; Independence Day, 2006. 

My mum was in the kitchen making breakfast. A +44 number was calling her, and she stared curiously, trying to figure out what country the call was coming from. 

“Hello, ma,” the voice on the other end said. 

“Hello?”

“Emi ni, aunty mi,” the voice said. The person on the other end was a year older than my mum, but he called her aunty mi when he was in prison, and even as a free man. 

“Funmi!” 

Weak at the knees, “I just sat on the floor of the kitchen,” she told me. He was calling from Europe. There was anger and a long rant. Finally, she hushed as though speaking out loud would endanger anyone nearby. 

Over the phone, and after all his sorries, he told her his story of what happened.

Ago-Iwoye is an ancient town with many young people, mostly Olabisi Onabanjo University students or people pretending to be students. It’s part of the old Ijebu Kingdom and a thirty-minute drive from the seat of the Ijebu throne in Ijebu Ode. 

Word had reached some powerful people in Ijebu Ode that he’d crossed in his robbery days that the notorious Funmi was out of prison and at Ago-Iwoye. The first group they set loose on him was the OPC, a Yoruba-interest group that’s everything from a political organisation to a vigilante group, depending on the stick you draw. Funmi drew a bad stick. Then SARS came next. 

In just a few days of word spreading, the new life he’d been trying to build fell apart. 

The first people the police picked were his friends, some old acquaintances from his prison days. One was Solo, whose body we’d seen in the news. And then, slowly, he felt the walls closing around him, with a few hiding places and even fewer people to trust. 

His final straw came one day, a few weeks after the AIT news broadcast we all watched while he was hiding away in his friend’s house. On a pure gut feeling, he stood up to leave, and as usual, he had no plans to go through the front door. Just as he was scaling the fence in the backyard, he heard the voices of the OPC men entering the compound. 

“I didn’t know what to do again,” he said.

I imagined he probably sat by himself and stewed in it all. His old life as an armed robber, almost dying as violently as he’d been living. About how prison, despite its many inadequacies, had shown a path to redemption for him. About leaving prison and trying to start a life. I imagined that he thought about how he just couldn’t catch a break. About a marriage that was doomed from the beginning, and the two kids he had as a young man, the ones would come into an existential awareness of him while he was in prison. I imagined him feeling like he knew he could be better, that he was capable of doing better. 

Then the moment he realised that to completely set himself free forever, he had to make one last run, just like in the movies. He went back to do the one thing he was great at besides maths; robbing. “They’ve kuku said I’m an armed robber already, so nothing spoil,” he told my mum.  

Getting a weapon was easy; the hard part was robbing alone. Still, he did a few robberies, raised enough money, and fled the country. He tried to start a new life in Europe. 

His call was to apologise for everything she’d gone through. Reaching out sooner, he felt, would put her at risk further. 

“I’ll never return to Nigeria,” he said, not till further notice at least. 

But people who work in security and defence hear things and know things. And so one day in the late 2000s, my mum got a call – this one came from someone at the Department of State Services. I was sitting right beside her when it came in. 

I saw her face wrinkle in worry, her tone filled with concern. 

“They found Funmi again,” she said right after the call. 

“As in, they found someone that looks like him?”

“No, they found him this time,” she sighed. He’d come back to Nigeria to get better papers and somehow triggered a red flag at the embassy. His name came up on a wanted list, so they handed him to security forces. 

“They’ll hand him to SARS, but he’s never going to make it to court,” she said, “wọ́n ma paá, because he’s already put them through too much trouble.” I’ve heard stories about people who end up with SARS and never make it out of their compound. 

My mum was sure that he was already dead.

-

Despite everything, my mum, dad, brother, and I retained a collective fondness for him. My brother, an investment banker, considers him one of the most intelligent men he has ever met.

“He saved my life once,” my brother said. 

Early in 2000, my brother had just stepped out of the JAMB office with Uncle Funmi by his side. Uncle Funmi passed his exams. My brother didn’t. 

There are few things worse than getting stuck in limbo with Nigerian parents because you can’t get into university. 

“That day,” my brother said, “I just kept walking, thinking about all the things I would hear when I got home. I didn’t even know I’d walked into the middle of the road. Na Uncle Funmi pull me commot just as car be wan jam me. He said, ah, don’t let this delay make you kill yourself.

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Sometimes, I think about how the person Uncle Funmi was in his stories was a criminal with a conscience; Mr. Ethics. The robber who didn’t kill and even tried to protect innocent people from his gang. The man who only went back to robbing because he had no choice. He probably wasn’t lying because he didn’t lie about other things, but he also probably never spoke the whole truth, and I’ve made peace with that. It’s like it was important to him how we perceived him; I understand it. 

I don’t know anything about his childhood, where he grew up, and the circumstances that led to his choices. I think about action and consequence, rehabilitation and relapse. About what could have been and never will.

I remember him as an armed robber who put the fear of the dark and lonely roads in people’s hearts, and his legacy will live on in people’s PTSDs. But I also remember him as my maths teacher, our storyteller, the kind of uncle you could tell a secret, and who didn’t make you feel small. 

And so, even when all good reason says he’s dead, a small part of me still believes he’s alive and made some sort of great escape. These days, that tiny speck will come alive when I see a little child hunched over a notebook and grabbing a pencil or a pen. I’ll get closer and look at what they’re writing – it’ll be ruled paper and their words will be flying up. 

I’ll squat beside them, hold their hand steady, and say, “write on the line.”

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This story was dragged to the finish line by a small village:

1. Ruka, who gave the first draft all the disdain it deserved. She never fully recovered from that first draft.

2. Ope, who copy-edited part of an early draft. Dami caught a typo in a final draft. Hassan and Toheeb caught one thousand final-er draft.

3. Samson, who gave it the first sleeves-up treatment, top to bottom.

4. Then SI, who copy-edited the hell out of it.

5. And Anita, who came with some last-minute critical feedback where I just told her to eat shit that I’m thankful for.

6. The illustrated portrait of the masked man in front of a blackboard was made by the art-rendering AI at Midjourney. I shared my prompt with Justin, and after a few iterations he made to my prompt, we landed on this portrait.

7. All the remaining illustrations were made by Penzu.

8. Most importantly, this story became a thing I wanted to explore because of this thread:

9. I always thought it was Germany that he fled to – that’s what’s in the Twitter thread – but my dad insists it was London. Thanks to that man for answering my silly questions like, “what cigarette did Uncle Funmi smoke?” My brother too, for his patience when I was constantly asking him, “what were you feeling when they came to carry you,” and him saying, “I actually wasn’t scared” over and over.

10. And of course, my mum – bless her soul – for being such a great role model for selfless service and work-life balance. Ha.

It’s a few minutes past noon, and this is when shit starts to get real. We’re in an office with a bench for a seat. – four of us are seated on it – Jesuloba, Chris, Mansur and me. To our left and right are two wooden windows – when they swing, the hinges cry gently.

A man is seated behind a table facing us, and I can’t tell if he’s smiling or his face just looks like that. Let’s call him Mr Smiley. 

There are two people behind us.

“That’s why I brought them here,” one of them says. He has just explained everything that's happened in the thirty minutes leading up to this moment. Mr Smiley thanks him and dismisses him. He shuts the door behind us. 

The other man behind me is quiet, uncomfortably – Mr Quiet. 

“Who’s the leader of this group?” Mr Quiet asks. 

“I am,” I say. 

On New Year’s Eve of 2016, I told my Editor-in-Chief at Pulse about my strongest itch. “I want to travel around Nigeria in one stretch, every state.” He thought I was mad, but he was just as mad, so he told me to come up with a plan. Two weeks later, I presented him with an itinerary outlining everything I’d be doing on the road for three months. 

“Fantastic,” he said, “we’re doing it.”

I worked at Pulse, a newsroom in a media company with a little less than 200 people. For the next few months, I tried to get every unit to buy into the project by selling them their benefits. Sales could get sponsors. Editorial could get content. The first day I was supposed to travel was in March – it got cancelled. While I was dealing with not travelling, I wandered into an exhibition on one of my night gallivants. Fati Abubakar, a photographer from Borno State, was exhibiting photos from everything she’d seen back home. 

It’s while I was telling her about the road trip I wanted to go on that someone overheard me and went, “I want to come! Abeg.” He was wearing a scally cap and had a camera in hand. 

He talked about a trip he’d just finished with photographers, where they travelled across some parts of Nigeria by train, taking photos everywhere they went. I told him I’d be travelling for work, but he promised he’d never get in the way of any decisions I was making for work — the more, the merrier. 

“I’ll keep you posted,” I said after we exchanged numbers.  

When the office finally approved the travel date, about one month before departure, they also added that I’d be travelling with someone else – Chris, from the video team. 

We’d barely interacted before the trip. All I knew of him was his first name, where he sat, and the videos he edited. 

When we eventually left, it was a Saturday, July 2, six months after I first pitched it. Beyond the things we were making and dispatching back to Lagos, our only link to the office was a WhatsApp group with our support team back at the office. 

“What is your mission here?” Mr Smiley hits me with the follow-up. 

“We’re journalists,” I explain. “We’ve been travelling around Nigeria for the past twenty-seven days, and this is our current stop.”

He pauses, then asks again, “What is your mission here?” 

I repeat my answer. He asks again, and as I begin to answer, I’m a little irritated. “We’re journalists – Jesuloba, Chris, and me. Mansur is our friend here in this town. We’re travelling across Nigeria, and this is our Biu stop.”

Mr Smiley is in mufti, but he’s a soldier, and we’re sitting in the Intelligence Office of the Biu Military Cantonment, Borno State, the front lines of Nigeria’s war against Boko Haram.

“Hmm. Journalists,” he looks at us as if expecting to spot journalism in our eyes. 

At the time of leaving Lagos, I’d worked in a newsroom for over two years, but this trip is the first time I identify as a journalist. I’ve covered beats from celebrity reporting to tech and even metro stories. Of course, I’m talking man-kills-neighbour-over-piece of yam metro. 

Because I spent most of that time sitting in an office, curating stories, monitoring trends and writing about them, it felt less like journalism and more like regular content creation. Something to make a person stop scrolling, click, and read. But on this trip, I’ve worn journalism like a badge, but mainly as a shield. Like when a truckload of police officers crossed us in Benin, we could either be cultists or journalists. Or, when we reached checkpoints in border towns, we could either be illegal immigrants or journalists. I’ve called myself a journalist so much on this trip that I’ve started to feel like one. 

He asks again. At this point, I’m not sure if it’s the fourth time or the umpteenth, but I outline our itinerary. 

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A month earlier, we left Lagos from Oshodi on a Sunday at dawn while one megaphone threatened Hell to everyone in weaves. Another was calling people for morning prayers, and a third was telling women squeezing through the parked buses not to break the side mirrors with their breasts. 

Our first stop was Ijebu Ode, where we went to the tomb of a dead queen, which living women aren’t allowed to enter – only men. Then Idanre Hills, where we climbed 682 steps and instead of Heaven, we found the remnants of an ancient people who lived on the hills for 800 years but descended a century ago because of colonialism. 

When we reached Benin, our first stop was the Oba’s palace, where even though we couldn’t see the king, we got to hang out with the virgin boys who dedicate their lives to the service of their kingdom. Waiting for us outside the palace was Jesuloba, carrying a backpack and holding a camera – it’s where his trip with us began. 

In Asaba, we met a septuagenarian who escaped the Asaba massacre of ‘67 but still suffers survivor’s guilt. Onitsha is where we saw the new Nollywood – it’s also where we saw the first glimpses of Nnamdi Kanu’s Biafra. 

We didn’t meet Kanu himself until five stops later, where he was living a walking distance from the Governor of Abia State and surrounded by believers. When Kanu stepped out of his house, a woman in crutches burst into tears at the sight of him. She’d come from Asaba. Another man brought a ram as a gift and asked him to bless it. Finally, at six pm, the Biafran flag in the compound, the only flag, was lowered to mark the end of the day. 

Our next stops were Calabar, Uyo, down to the rice marshes in Ebonyi, then up the old coal mines in Enugu. Next was Makurdi, then Jalingo, and up we went to one of Nigeria’s highest towns, Gembu. When we descended, we were off to Jimeta-Yola, and after Yola, we began to see what a country at war looked like. In Mubi, we found entire sections of buildings chewed away and blackened by Boko Haram’s firepower. On our road to Maiduguri, we passed Chibok and the school that brought Boko Haram global infamy. 

“So, why did you choose to come to Biu?” Mr Smiley cuts in before I can reach the part about how we got to Biu from Maiduguri. 

“Instagram,” I say, trying to remember the specific message amidst the hundreds I’d received in the past month. “You can even follow everywhere we’ve passed through from Instagram.”

“What?”

Let’s start from the day before we came to Biu.

Thursday, August 3, 2017. 

We’re at the park, waiting for a bus headed for Potiskum in Yobe State when someone sends a DM on Instagram.

“If you’re still in Borno, you should go to Biu. Our people are so brave; Boko Haram has never conquered them.” It had my attention. 

The sender is Nafisah. I have no idea who she is. But I also did not know who Sugar in Abakaliki was, Abubakar in Kakari, or Ebuka in Oguta. So paranoia didn’t bring us this far.  

“Chris, I think we should go to Biu,” I say.

Chris thinks it’s a bad idea. “But it’s not on our itinerary na,” he says. Chris’ first instinct has always been to say no to anything that puts our safety to question. He had concerns about visiting a dissident’s home and problems with getting help from strangers everywhere. Chris is a reasonable man, but we didn’t end up here by saying no.  

“Gembu wasn’t on our itinerary,” I say, “but we went there, and we didn’t regret it.” A biker we met in Port Harcourt said, “if you must go around the country, then make sure you go to Gembu.” So we went. Gembu was breathtaking for the scenery with greenery for as far as the eyes can see, and its below-fifteen-degree temperatures. 

The biker is Inyang, who once rode across every border state in Nigeria in one stretch. Another time, he rode from Lagos to Austria in less than 40 days – he ferried his bike into Spain at a port in Morocco. 

Chris is throwing reasons why we shouldn’t go; I’m countering with reasons why we should until I suggest that we leave it to chance. 

“I asked her if she can give us someone’s phone number there,” I say, “if she doesn’t send it in 20 minutes, we’ll go to Potiskum.”

The number came in 12 minutes. It’s her uncle’s, and he’s a member of the Civilian Joint Task Force, CJTF, a coalition of civilians – hunters, vigilantes, and people tired of sitting around, waiting for providence to save them from Boko Haram. 

The road to Biu is cratered and treacherous, but the military checkpoints are the main event. First, you have to step out of the vehicle, then walkthrough with your hands up, while the driver has to step out and push his car through. 

My old friend Musa, in whose Teaching Hospital dorm we stayed while we were in Maiduguri, told me about his first time at one of these checkpoints. 

“I was walking through a checkpoint just outside Maiduguri when someone called me. As I dropped my hand to grab the phone, two soldiers screamed and almost opened fire.”

Phones are an ingenious way to trigger bombs remotely, and the sight of one at a checkpoint always triggers soldiers.

We reach Biu about five hours later, but it’s not her uncle waiting for us; it’s her baby brother, Mansur. He’s tall, dark, and it’s not hard to tell he’s a teenager. His uncle joins us minutes later – he’s small and frail, and for a moment, you forget that this man has taken up the duty to hunt down Boko Haram fighters.

He shows us to a hotel just on the outskirts of town, opposite a military checkpoint, and tells us that by morning when he returns; he’ll be taking us to the leader of the CJTF in Biu. 

“Tomorrow is going to be lit,” I tell Chris and Jesuloba. Chris just nods. 

Our good morning at Biu on Friday is at the makeshift office of the CJTF – it’s an old school with two blocks that haven’t seen a student since the holidays began, but that’s not our first stop. First, we need permission to speak to the CJTF from the Local Government chairman, whose office is right beside the school, looking equally dilapidated.

“He’s not at the office,” Mansur’s uncle says, “let’s go to his house.” It’s only a few minutes from the office, and when we reach there, there’s a man supervising people pouring sand and gravel on the eroded part of his residence.

He’s displeased that we’ve walked from his office to his house at past ten in the morning. So he yells at us to wait for him at his office or the CJTF office until he’s ready to work. It’s ten in the morning. 

We head back to the CJTF office. About a dozen men are sitting in the room. They look like regular people – traders, or farmers, or vigilantes. Everyone in this room is here because they signed up to protect their people from Boko Haram. At any cost. 

Sometime in 2014, the CJTF patrolled this town with impaled heads of dozens of Boko Haram fighters. When you’re in a room like this, you keep an unassuming face while thinking, who did the killing, who did the beheading? Which of these hands impaled those heads?

The only way I learn who the leader is is the one everyone is looking at to speak. 

We’re about to get into the introductions when another man steps in. He’s no less than 6”2, with a scruffy beard covering his sunken cheeks. 

“Why are you people here,” he says, half-yelling. 

“We –” 

“This is not how to do things!”

“But tha –”

 “You cannor just come here and just be going anywhere you like. Who are you? Come outside!”

Everyone in the room starts heading out as he storms out, many of their faces confused, so we follow. Outside, there’s a white Hilux. A guy in the front seat is trying to record on a tab secretly. His lack of discretion is so tacky that I flash a smile and wave at his camera.

I don’t know when I stop hearing what Mr Six Plus is saying, but the yelling is getting irritating. I know men like him – the one who isn’t in charge but feels the need to assert himself over the group and its actual leader. 

Mansur’s uncle tries to pacify him while the leader of the group watches silently. Finally, Six Plus’ yelling ends with, “let’s go to the barracks.”

When we reach the Intelligence office, and Mr Smiley tells him he can leave, I’m relieved to no longer be sharing a space with him again. 

“Why didn’t you take permission before coming to Biu?” Mr Quiet, the man, sitting at the back, asks. 

“As I said earlier,” I begin to explain, “this entire road trip is about learning what it means to be Nigerian in Nigeria today. So, for example, we didn’t realise we had to take permission before coming to this town, or any Nigerian town for that matter.” 

“Have you taken any photos since you came here?” Mr Smiley asks. 

“No, we haven’t; we haven’t even had time to go anywhere. Mansur’s uncle has followed us everywhere.”

Mr Smiley is not convinced. 

“I need you to understand that you’re not under arrest,” Mr Smiley says, “we just need to confirm that you’re who you say you are, not a spy for another country or a Boko Haram.”

A spy? Flattering. 

“What’s in your bag?” Mr Smiley asks. In less than 5 minutes, the table in front of him has all our gear and phones. A lady steps into the office when Mr Smiley calls her and starts checking through all the photos on our memory stick, looking for traces of Biu or whatever else she’s looking for. 

Mr Smiley is looking through my phone. There are at least 500 photos there taken from the past month alone. 

“Are these not Ogbunike Caves?” he asks.

“Ah, yes.”

“That’s in...Anambra State. It’s less than 100 kilometres from Onitsha,” he adds. 

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We do this Geography Trivia as he looks through all the photos, mapping out over a dozen landmarks and places. The man knows his geography by kilometre.

“I need you to understand that you’re not under arrest,” Mr Smiley says again. More light is flooding the room through the left window as the sun begins its descent. 

It’s past four. 

When they’ve looked through all the photos to their satisfaction, he tells me the whys—something about security and intel, and how the people of Biu must be safe. 

“I need to make a video,” Mr Smiley says as he whips out his phone, “did we harm you or torture you?”

I laugh nervously, “no, you didn’t.”

“Did we take any of your belongings?”

“No.”

“That is all. You can grab your things,” Mr Smiley says, and his smile is patronising. We’re leaving when Mr Quiet says he also has to take a photo. 

All four of us line up in a straight file, mugshot style, in front of a wall outside. 

“Are you still staying at Biu or –”

“No, thank you,” ‘Loba, Chris and I say together. “We’re going to Gombe.” 

“Let me drop you off at the park,” Mr Quiet offers, but it’s not a suggestion. “Mansur can go home from there.”

The last cab for Gombe leaves at a few minutes past six. Chris and I squeeze into the car’s front seat – I’m seated between him and the driver. Jesuloba is at the back with three other people. Google Maps say we’ll be there cramped up like sardines for only three hours. 

The first time I open my eyes from sleep, it’s dark. Chris is sleeping too. The driver’s eyes, like our headlights, are piercing into the darkness. Jesuloba is sleeping, but one of the other three people at the back are awake. 

The second time I wake up, we’re at a military checkpoint—the driver parks on the side of the road. The next few moments happen fast. The first assault comes from the torchlights in my eyes and Chris’. 

“Come out!”

But they don’t even wait for us to come out before they drag Chris and me out. 

“Sit down there!” One of them orders. 

“Oya, stretch your leg!” Another one says. 

At a military checkpoint, I’m sitting on the ground at night, exhausted, half-awake, confused, on a highway between Biu and Gombe. It’s a wrong place to be when you haven’t had a good haircut, your beard is scruffy, and your name is Fu’ad. I’m thinking about how my mum used to call me Muhammadul Fu’ad, and I hate that thought so much. 

I’m almost dizzy with the sound of my own pounding heart. I look up to see Chris is wearing his tracksuit. He has a gold chain on his neck. It’s night, but I know Jesuloba’s tattoo is still on his neck. Oh, Christopher. Oh, Jesuloba, Jesus is King. The Christianity in their names and the Igbo in Chris’ blood comforts me. 

They order us off the roadside and to the front of a building, walking in a single file. More soldiers are standing in the dark, over us. One of them is looking at his phone and then back at us, one face at a time. I’m thinking about my name and about how I just heard one of the officers say something that sounded like Yoruba. 

“Barracks la ti n bo,” I say, a little desperate to identify, by any means necessary, that I am, in fact, a Fu’ad from a faraway place. 

Two soldiers shut me up simultaneously – a third shut up is a dirty slap on my right cheek from behind. I’ve had a long life of many slaps, so it didn’t hurt, but in that brief moment, that dark highway in the middle of nowhere is bright as day. 

“Where’s the fourth person?”

They know who we are; they know the vehicle we left Biu in – it takes a few seconds before I realise what’s happening. It’s Mr Quiet’s photo and free ride – after all, he didn’t leave the park until after we’d moved. I feel betrayed. 

“The person that sent you the photo from Biu forgot to mention that the fourth person is actually from Biu, so he’s not travelling with us. We’re from the Barracks, and that’s what I was trying to say earlier.”

My tone is slap worthy going by the last one, but I don’t care. 

The officer whose phone everyone has gathered around and the most senior looks at me, quiet. Finally, he tells us to get up before pulling me to the side. 

“I’m sorry for what that soldier did,” he says, “sometimes, our men can get overzealous. I need you to understand that you’re not under arrest; we’re just waiting for further instructions from Biu.”

He introduces himself as a lieutenant; I introduce myself as a journalist. 

He walks away for a few moments while I rejoin Chris and Jesuloba. I bring them up to speed about nothing. 

The lieutenant returns a few minutes later. 

“The C.O. wants you back at Biu,” he says. “We have to leave now. Do you want to collect your change from the driver?”

When I get to the driver, he’s too scared to say anything, so he just stutters. Being the driver of a vehicle carrying potential Boko Haram members is bad for his life expectancy. I tell the lieutenant not to worry about my change. 

“Let’s go.”

I fall right asleep as the back of my head touches the headrest in the Hilux. When I wake up, we’re at another checkpoint, and this time, we’re getting handed over to another Hilux. 

“They’ll take you back to Biu,” the lieutenant tells me. 

Chris, Jesuloba and I squeeze into the back; our escort is another lieutenant who’s riding shotgun. 

He introduces himself and tells us we do not need to worry. 

“I hope you don’t mind,” he says as he plugs in his aux cable. It’s Wizkid philosophising about Ojuelegba on the road to Biu. I fall asleep again. 

When I wake up, it’s to walk into the Officer’s Mess. We’re tired and hungry. The bar is closed. A TV is on, and a soldier is talking to the press about how they have forty days to capture Shekau, dead or alive. 

I rest my head on a couch at the bar, and when I open my eyes again, it’s morning. 

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Saturday, August 5, 2017.

The first person I see that isn’t Chris or Jesuloba is the lieutenant from last night. He has one of those faces that look familiar, like he’s a friend from a time past. The part of the barracks where we’re at is so quiet it almost feels empty. 

“Hope you slept well,” he asks, or something like that. I’m hungover from stress, but I try to make small talk. 

“You know, there’s a version of things where I could have been in your uniform too,” as we get talking. 

“Eh ehn, how?”

“That time when we were in secondary,” I start explaining, “Nigerian Navy Secondary School – we wanted to go to ND –”

“Ojo or Abeokuta?”

“Abeokuta,” I say.

“Ahh, I went to Nigerian Navy Primary School.”

I throw some names at him; old classmates I know serving are in the army. I ask about one of them; “ah, he’s with the Special Ops.” I ask about another, “ah, na 54th Artillery hin dey.” I throw out a few more names, some stick, and others don’t. 

“I have a friend too, serving here in Borno,” Chris says, “he told me that he’s mostly at checkpoints.”

Eventually, we get to the “why are we still here” part. It’s not hard to tell that he knows something he’s not allowed to say to us, but he reassures us. Then, finally, he leaves, but when he returns less than an hour later, we know it’s time to move. 

“I hope you’ve packed,” the lieutenant asks. But, of course, we didn’t even unpack.

We walk to the nearest road within the barracks, and I see the doorway first, then the wall. The building on the other side of the road is where we were held for six hours the day before. 

“Good morning,” an officer says, walking towards us, but it looks like he’s marching. Everyone around him is at attention, so it’s not hard to tell that he’s the Commanding Officer. 

“Who’s the leader of this team,” he asks. 

I raise my hand. When I drop it, it’s for a handshake. His grip is firm, but his face is reassuring; he’s a Colonel. 

“We’re going to Damaturu, and you’ll ride with me in this vehicle,” he says to me, and before I can even respond, he says, “the rest of your team will go in the other vehicle.”

I see the Hilux from the night before in its true camo colours. Inside it, there’s one officer riding shotgun; the other one is behind the wheels. 

The Colonel is already tucked into his seat by the time I get around the truck to sit behind the driver. 

Between us is an armrest. On the floor between our feet is a bulletproof vest and a helmet held up by a rifle. 

As we’re driving out, I see the one person I wasn’t expecting to see – Mansur. 

“My superiors have asked that we bring you for questioning,” the Colonel begins to explain, “it’s nothing serious. Everyone just likes to double-check here.”

“Damaturu? That’s Yobe State.”

“Yes, yes,” he says, “I need you to understand that you’re not under arrest; they’re just trying to be thorough.”

I’ve heard that before. 

We’re driving out of Biu now, a convoy of two. What was only an open road the last time we passed, it was different this time. 

There’s a large crowd everywhere in front, large enough that the two trucks have to stop – on the roadside, on the main road. It’s also a thunderous crowd, and as we go closer, it appears that the crowd is shouting in unison. They can’t be less than a thousand or maybe even three. Some of them are on foot. Others are hanging from the back of jalopies — men and women of all ages. 

“You read what people say about the army and the work we do,” the Colonel says, “and you’re sad.”

The crowd is chanting one word. 

“But when you see the people, the people you’re fighting for,” the Colonel sighs before he continues, “everything becomes worth it.”

“Dole! Dole! Dole!” the crowd chants. 

Biu people are a farming people, and every farm day, the Colonel explains, soldiers in collaboration with the CJTF escort people to their farms, protect them all day, then return with them. 

“Dole! Dole! Dole!”

A few minutes later, we make our way past the crowd and begin on our way to Damaturu. Every time we pass a small settlement, people would run out to wave. Fathers with their kids on their shoulders. Shouting dole. Dole means force, but its popular use is in the official name of the counter-terrorism operation by the armed forces, Lafiya Dole; Peace By Force. 

In between, the Colonel and I are in conversation, hopping from topic to topic. We talk about everywhere we’ve been for work. We talk about the relationship between the media and the military. 

“You media people just write all kinds of things,” he says. 

“That’s because the military refuses to speak to the media,” I explain, “and what happens is that people take the little information they have and try to piece it together.”

“But some of the information might be sensitive,” the Colonel says. 

“The media won’t know what is sensitive or not if you’re not even talking to them at all.”

He talks about herders and how we have the most herdsmen related insecurity, even when we don’t have the most cattle in Africa. Ethiopia does. He talks about how he doesn’t believe that open grazing is a thing that should still be happening. 

We talk about the NYSC, and he talks about how he prefers the Egyptian system of National Service – conscription into the military. Not strange, coming from a man on the front lines who understands the importance of reserves.

I lose track of how long we’ve been moving or all the things we’ve talked about, but eventually, we reach a checkpoint and park beside the highway we’ve been travelling on. There’s a checkpoint there, and it’s low growth on either side of the road. A few houses adorn the landscape.  

He meets another soldier halfway – the soldier is also with a two-truck convoy. When the Colonel returns, it’s to say his goodbyes. 

“I have to hand you and your team over to these people,” he says, “this is where my jurisdiction ends, and I have to return to Biu. They’ll take you to Damaturu.” We’re at the boundary between Yobe and Borno State. 

When I see Chris and Jesuloba, it’s like we haven’t seen each other in years. Mansur looks hearty, but I suspect he might be scared. 

“Why did they tell you to join us na?” I ask. 

“It’s that man from yesterday,” he’s talking about Mr Quiet. “He came to the house this morning and told my mum that I’m going to come back today. He promised.”

“I’m so sorry, man.”

“No problem, sir.”

Chris is talking to one of the soldiers when his face goes cold. The soldier tells Chris in Igbo, “forget all these guns you’re seeing; you see this road we’re about to pass? Just pray.”

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This time, I’m sitting in the back seat of my truck alone. The leader of this party is riding shotgun in the Hilux I’m in. He turns around, looks at me and says, “do not step out of this vehicle under any circumstance.”

“Oya,” he says to the pilot, who starts driving. 

We haven’t driven for up to thirty minutes when we reach a small town – it’s scanty with buildings, left and right. When I was a child, I believed towns like this only existed along the highway, with no life behind them. 

To our left, a sign reads something-something Buni-Yadi. This place sounds familiar. 

“This is the school that Boko Haram attacked in 2014,” the soldier in front of me says to me. In February 2014, Boko Haram visited the Federal Government College while the students slept. 

A dorm room in a Federal Government college will have bunks line each side of the rooms, close to the windows. The windows are designed for cross ventilation; they’re also great if you’re Boko Haram and need to inflict terror. It started with the grenades getting thrown into the rooms from the windows. Then came the indiscriminate gunfire towards the windows, picking out boys trying to jump out. The students who didn’t meet bullets met knives, slitting their throats. 

When morning came, the count said fifty-nine boys didn’t make it through the night. 

Not too long after we pass Buni Yadi, our trucks come to a sharp halt. We’re about 50 metres from what is stopping us – cows crossing in their dozens. Soldiers sitting in the back of the Hilux jump down and flank each side of our truck, arms at a ready and crouching. 

It’s quiet, so fucking quiet.

“E be like na Oga cows,” and I see the soldiers ease up and hop onto the back of the trucks again. 

“See these cows,” the leader explains, “sometimes Boko Haram push them onto the road and use them in an ambush.”

There’s no way any Hilux runs over cows with bones that will crush fenders and knock engines. 

Our driver enters gently when we reach potholes, like a toddler trying to make it down the stairs. When you drive into potholes, you curse the government. But here, you enter potholes with your heart in your mouth and come out of them with gratitude because “Boko Haram puts IEDs inside the potholes, and it can just go gbao.”

A lot of the potholes are, in fact, bomb craters. 

We reach another point where we start hearing gunfire ahead of us. To my right is a vast savannah. There’s no sign of enemy life as far as my eyes can see. I look at my chances and know I have none, so it’s me and the truck, no matter the circumstance. 

A few minutes later, we learn it’s soldiers on a drill. 

“Ah, e go be this new Captain make their morale dey high.”

They’re talking about a new officer who’s been transferred to the unit with the gunfire. The soldier, it appears, gets moved around to new units where morale is low so that he can fire the fighters up. 

It should have been a two and a half hour trip to Damaturu from Biu, but we eventually reach our destination after almost four hours. 

The trucks finally come to a halt at the Divisional Headquarters of the war against Boko Haram. The last thing I hear before heading into the office where someone wants us is a soldier talking about his child back home. 

The first office I’m called into is not an office – it’s something else. The walls are covered with maps like wallpaper. I’m fighting the urge to trace places out on them, but I’m also trying not to send the wrong signal. Two men are sitting behind a table. Just before I settle into a chair in front of them, I spot a CCTV in the corner of the room. 

“So, why are you here?” 

From top to bottom, I do the whole narration again, how we left Lagos, and how we ended up here. About how I didn’t think we needed permission to travel across Nigeria. When I step out of the room, they ask me to call Chris. When Chris comes out, Mansur goes in, then Jesuloba. Everyone gets the same questions. 

Then, we wait. We sit around and wait at the shed meant for packing. The empty spot is a makeshift mussalla for the Muslim soldiers. It’s also where we’re asked to wait. Jesuloba pulls out a cigarette for his nerves. Chris and I pull out our phones for Whatsapp. 

Chris sends updates to the Whatsapp group about what the soldiers are up to this time. We’ve been sending updates daily to a Whatsapp group with people back at the office – Osagie, my Editor in Chief; Ani, Chris’ boss, and Head of Video; Tunde, the head of this travel Project: Pulse36. 

As Chris is texting, I’m also texting my friends, and everyone is asking one thing: what the hell is happening? 

“We’re fine,” I say in the Whatsapp group. 

“No, we’re not fine o,” Chris says, “these people are still holding us.”

One of our interrogators has come out for a smoke break, and he’s telling us that we’re good to go, and they’ll soon sign our release papers. Jesuloba supplies a lighter. 

Release papers, and we aren’t under arrest. Right. 

Our interrogator is telling us about what life is like on the frontlines. About how he’s interrogated over 100 Boko Haram suspects, and many of them can’t recite Fatiha, an essential prayer in Muslim canon. 

From him, I hear for the first time that Boko Haram is, in fact, in factions: the Shekau faction and the Al-Barnawi faction. Al-Barnawi is the son of Boko Haram’s founder, Mohammed Yusuf. 

“If you go now,” our interrogator says, “Shekau can give you ten million naira cash inside Sambisa.”

He talks about how they have a sense of where Shekau is but can’t reach him because of the human casualties. It’s not just the Chibok girls in harm’s way; it’s thousands of other people kidnapped at different points since their campaign of terror began. 

One other soldier joins us for a smoke. He’s itching to speak, and when he opens his mouth, his superior, our interrogator, shuts him up. 

“What’s happening,” my friend texts on Whatsapp. 

“We’re waiting for them to bring our release papers,” I say. 

My friend wants to tweet about our predicament, and I’m saying it’s not that serious. Twitter, I believe, can over-escalate things. Ha. 

“They have their usefulness. Imagine if you were really detained. The tweets would create enough attention; they’d have to release you.”

To everyone on Whatsapp, the only thing more stressful than being held is how unbothered I am. Panic is hopeless and torturous, so I just sit and try to talk. 

“Can I use your phone to call my mum,” Mansur asks me and a few moments later, he’s talking to her over the phone, telling her not to worry. 

“They’ll soon allow us to go,” he says to her. 

Not long after Mansur’s call, one of our interrogators tells us that our release papers are now ready and will need to be signed at another office. All four of us squeeze into the backseat of the truck; a military policeman is riding shotgun. There’s not enough room at the back, so I have to lap the helmet and bulletproof vest. 

The first thing I notice about our next stop when we get there a few minutes later is the fence – it’s abnormally high. The security guard at the entrance is in a black polo shirt, brandishing a rifle, but it’s not a conventional rifle we’ve seen anywhere in the past few days. 

“That gun looks like an Israeli issue,” I whisper to Jesuloba. 

“Ehn?” he leans in to hear what I’m saying, but so does the military policeman in the front seat. 

“Nothing.”

I know the rifle; I just can’t remember where I’ve seen it. 

The military policeman steps out to speak to the security. While we’re waiting in the backseat, I’m looking at the helmet and vest on my lap and having war correspondent fantasies. A few days ago, Jesuloba saw a soldier on the treacherous Damboa Road. A handwritten inscription at the back of his helmet reads, “KILL THEM ALL. CHECK BACK.” I wonder what I’d write on my helmet to make it truly mine. 

I place the vest on my chest and wear the helmet, then I take a picture, just to see what it looks like.

I’m beaming when the gates swing open, and our driver goes in. 

“I’m coming; let me go to the office,” the policeman says, paper in hand before he walks away. 

“You people are journalists ehn,” the driver asks. 

“Yes,” then we go on to tell him how we ended up here. 

It’s his turn to talk now. 

Sometimes,” he begins, “I see what soldiers are going through whenever I go inside the bush, and I cry.” They spend days, even weeks, living there. Cooking there. Arguing about football. Fighting and dying, losing morale or gaining ground. 

He talks about Abuja – not the capital city 100 kilometres from where we are – but the one outside Damaturu. This Abuja is a ditch. 

“We go just carry those Boko Haram,” he explains, “tell them say we dey carry them go Abuja. And once we reach the Abuja like this, you go just use one leg push them inside the hole, use bullet follow them – pa-pa! pa-pa!”

He’s about to start talking about family life when the military policeman returns, this time with another man in the black polo shirt, holding the type of rifle we saw earlier. They ask us to come along with them to the building, with our bags too. 

I remember the gun now. It’s a Tavor – TAR51—Israeli-made assault rifle. I remember where I’ve seen it in the past. In Owerri, Imo State, right outside a building. The building had a small security post like the one we’ve just seen too. 

At the reception, a man is waiting. He can’t be less than 6”4, and when he walks, he does so as if the ground is trembling under his feet. 

The 6”4 man looks at us, and I can’t tell whether he’s tired or irritated, but he says, “off your cap, off your belt, off your shoes. Drop your bag here.”

I look up, and there it is. There’s a picture of President Buhari and another of the Yobe State Governor. The third photo has a man whose designation says that he’s the Head of the DSS in Yobe State. 

Tavors are mostly used by officers of the Department of State Security (DSS). 

I laugh, but it’s a laugh of utter defeat. We’ve been interrogated twice, snatched from a car in the middle of nowhere, transported across states, and now, we’re about to be detained. I am crushed. 

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The time is now past six in the evening, and as I’m handing in my phone, Mansur’s mum calls. Six Foot Plus takes the phone from my hand gently, squeezes the button on the side till the call ends, and the phone goes off. Then, he instructs me to write down everything I’ve submitted at the counter.

“Go there,” Six Foot Plus points to a room opposite the reception. Inside it, there are two windows to the left, with two single-seater couches. To the right, there’s a longer couch. At the far left of the room is a door that leads to a small toilet.  

My legs can’t hold, so I sit down. Chris is taking off his belt. He’s wearing the same jacket he was wearing at the park in Maiduguri – the same day we were choosing between Biu and Potiskum. He’s asked to take that off too. He’s walking towards me when Six Foot calls him back and tells him to take off his chain and wrap it in a piece of paper. 

Chris is right. Biu is a wrong turn. I let him down. I let Jesuloba down. Now, I’ve pulled Mansur into this, separated him from his mum, and now she’ll be growing sick with worry. 

“I’m sorry, Chris,” I say to him as he walks into the room and takes a seat beside me. He pauses for a moment, bites his nails before he says, “it’s fine.”

I apologise to Jesuloba and Mansur as they come in too. 

Six Foot Plus steps into the room, takes a peek at the toilet as if to check if it still works and begins to walk out again, not saying a word. 

“Are you going to leave us here,” Jesuloba protests. All of us are sitting on the edge of our seats now. 

Six Foot Plus pauses at the entrance, looks slowly at Jesuloba and says, “do you want to sleep in the cell?”

Everyone leans back into the chair. No one says a word after, but I’m the first to fall asleep. 

When I wake up, it’s another man at the door, and he’s instructing us to get up and follow him. I’m holding my jeans with one hand to prevent them from falling, and as we walk past the reception, the clock says the time is past ten. 

We enter a large, empty room. It looks like it should be an office, but there are no chairs nor tables. He throws in some pillows and tells us that’s where we’ll be sleeping for the night. 

Everyone just throws their pillows on the ground, buries their cheeks in them, and fall right back to sleep. 

Sunday, August 6, 2017

It’s hard to tell what time it is, the clock at the reception is not within view. We have no watches. The thing about being held against your will is that the enemy is time. You have so much of it but so little to do with it. You try patience, but what is patience when you have no precise way of measuring the passing of time? 

We start our day back in the room with the couches. Everyone is restless, pacing. The man from the night before who showed us our sleeping places returns again. This time, it’s with toothpaste and toothbrushes. 

We tell him we don’t need brushes, “we need answers.”

He shows up later with a giant tray with plates of food. It's the answers we want, not food. But this man, this caretaker, he’s calm every time. 

When the waiting starts to eat you up, your brain spits out funny thoughts. Chris is the first to speak. 

“What if they take us to Abuja?”

“Well, then when we get there, we’ll –” it’s mid-sentence that I realise that he’s talking about Abuja the ditch. 

“They can’t try it,” I say, and for a moment, I’m wondering what’d have happened if my friend had, infact, gone on Twitter for insurance. 

Mansur speaks next. It’s about his mum and how he’s worried about her blood pressure. There’s not much I can say to soothe a boy who’s scared about losing his mother, but I can distract him. I can distract all of us. 

“Have you decided what you want to study in Uni,” I ask Mansur a few moments later when everyone has gone quiet again.  

“Computer Science,” he says. But, then, he talks about his school choices. He could go to Lagos to be with his father and sisters or to the newly commissioned Military-run university in Biu. 

It’s the conflict between wanting to see a bigger world in Lagos or staying home in the furthest town. 

I give a small speech, throw in some advice, so do Chris and ‘Loba. We share stories about school life, ideas and extracurricular activities. 

Silence.

I start talking about love. Mansur has a crush on an old classmate. We tease a little, then silence again. 

“What if they tell us to cancel this road trip,” Chris asks. 

“They’d have to tie me down, so I don’t leave Lagos again,” I’m livid at the thought of it, “but the moment they ship us to Lagos, I’m taking the next vehicle to Gombe and continuing.”

Silence. The Caretaker comes to check that we’ve eaten – he sees that we haven’t touched it. He leaves with the tray in hand without saying a word. 

I suggest a game or two. We play Concentration. We play riddles. We crack jokes and laugh. Silence. 

The sun outside looks scorching from the single window in the room, but there are no shadows – it has to be noon. 

It’s also around this time another man comes to our holding room.

“You’re the people they brought from Biu,” I can’t tell if he’s asking or stating a fact he already knows. We respond to the affirmative, just as he’s settling into the chair closest to the door. 

“I’m not happy,” he says, “I’m not happy at all o!” 

Everyone is confused. 

“Why haven’t you eaten? Food is your fundamental human right!”

We’re more confused, but one thing we’re sure of is that he’s the most superior person we’ve spoken to since we stepped into this building. He’s wearing glasses, has very little hair on his head, and looks like he’s in his early sixties. 

He reminds me of an old uncle; I just don’t know which one. 

“I want you to know that there’s no problem,” he says, “it’s just the process, and everyone is just checking on their end.” He tells us he’ll be seeing us in a few minutes. 

The next person we see a few minutes later is not Grand Uncle; it’s Six Foot Plus. 

“Oya, follow me,” he says and walks off, his potbelly leading the way. The next room we enter looks like a classroom. There’s a large board, tables and benches for sitting. 

Grand Uncle is seated in front, and another man is beside him. He’s wearing a Bama cap and looks like he doesn’t talk much. 

They make us sit at different ends of the room, hand us sheets of A4 and pens, and tell us to write everything about how we ended up here. 

I don’t know how long we write for, but we finish around the same time. We sit in our chairs quietly as grand uncle skims through the pages. Then he starts his speech. It’s nothing we haven’t heard about the way Nigeria is today about taking permission. About how nowhere is safe. 

I try not to interrupt, though I have a lot of things to say. 

“Even the Biu that you say has never been attacked,” that’s not what I said, “it has been attacked, and people died!”

Just after dawn on January 14, 2015, Boko Haram fired their first shots in Biu. A few hours of intense fighting later, the insurgents were repelled, a few killed, and five captured alive. Things quickly returned to normal as shops reopened. 

“But I need you to know that – ”

“We’re not under arrest,” I finish it for him. 

When we return to our room, a fresh tray is waiting. It’s the first meal we’ve had in about 24 hours. 

A few hours later, we’re sober again. I’ve heard it before that food will lead to my inevitable demise, and this is all the proof I need. No one has spoken to us since we ate. 

When Bama Cap finally shows up, it’s to tell us that our release papers are getting filed but that we’d inevitably be spending one more night. 

The rule of thumb with Nigerian detention: if you get held on a Friday, there’s no way you’re getting out until Monday. 

Monday, August 7, 2017

The first papers arrive for signing in the morning with Mr Bama Caps. It’s the standard info; personal details, occupation, and the likes. 

As he collects our papers together, I catch a glimpse of the stack he’s adding them to. I notice a name, or half of it: Abdul-something-something. Occupation: Boko Haram Fighter. 

It’s the first time since all of this began that I properly consider how close we’ve been to things going completely south – I just didn’t care much before. I’m thinking now about the CJTF office and how things might have turned out. South at the barracks. South at the checkpoint. South on the way here. South, right here. 

I wonder who’s in the cell and how long they’ve spent there. DSS cells, I’ve heard, are the absence of light and hope. 

“We’ve invited a surety to sign off on your release papers,” Bama Cap says. 

Our surety, when he eventually shows up, is a Yobe-based journalist with a National newspaper. Even he is a little nervous. He doesn’t know us personally and understands that if we are anything they might have at some point suspected us of being, he’s in trouble too. But he takes the chance, signs for us, and makes all the difference. 

“I can’t believe you’ll do this for us,” Chris tells our Surety, “You don’t even know us, but you’re helping us.” I’m thinking about the conflict Chris is having and what it means for him to navigate life with paranoia. 

The evening is arriving, and so are the senior officers of the DSS – they’re primarily dressed in kaftans and donning Bama caps. Our bags have resurfaced, and we have to check everything we’ve logged in to make sure all our belongings are complete. 

“I can’t find my chain,” Chris says a few moments later. 

“Did you leave it here? Are you sure?” one of the officers asks. 

“Yes!”

“Then why is it not here?” another one asks. 

“I dunno, but I kept it here.” Chris is already angry. 

“Nobody is leaving here until we find that chain,” one officer says. “Nobody has ever come here and lost anything.”

I saw his chain. I saw him wrap it in a small piece of paper and drop it on the counter, where Six Foot Plus instructed. It could have ended up in the trash because someone thought the paper belonged there or could have ended up with someone. I don’t know, but I walk up to Chris. 

“Chris, are you sure?” I ask as I place my hands on his shoulders. 

“Yes now!” 

“Are you sure that maybe it didn’t fall on that highway on Friday night?” I asked again. 

“Guy, I’m su –”

“Try to remember,” I ask again, squeezing his shoulder even tighter, “maybe it’s not here.” 

He pauses, and looks at me.

“It’s not here,” he says. His shoulder loosens, and his head falls in resignation. A necklace is not going to be the reason we spend another night here. 

The state head of the DSS secures a hotel for us, and it’s where we spend the night. It’s an offer we can’t refuse, not because it’s too good, but because gestures like this aren’t a choice. 

Tuesday, August 7, 2017. 

We reach the park before most people in Damaturu reach their places of work. We want to be in the first car leaving Damaturu. Mansur will be on his way home to his mum, who’ll most likely be waiting by her door till he’s in her arms. 

For the time she couldn’t reach her son, her mouth didn’t touch any food. Everyone has heard stories of boys and young men picked up by security forces and never returning home because they were suspected of being Boko Haram. Whether or not they were found guilty in a court of law didn’t always matter, there’s a ditch named Abuja, and they must feed it.

By pure luck, we run into one of the soldiers we’d encountered on Saturday – he’s the one his superior won’t allow speaking to us during the smoke break. 

I know he has stories when he says, “the things wey my eye done see,” so we prod him for a few while we wait for the car we’re going in to fill up with passengers. 

He’s Igbo, lives in Lagos when he’s not on the frontlines, and loves his girlfriend deeply. “She love me, but her love no reach make she follow me come this place,” he says. 

He drinks beer with one of Lagos’ infamous gangsters when he’s on leave, but his life on the frontlines is even more thrilling. 

He’s a bomb disarmer, he says, and he’s “disarmed so many bombs that they use at the training school in Makurdi, that they’ve stopped collecting new bombs.” So instead, they just make them destroy the bombs. 

There’s a scar on the inner part of his arm, and he got it once while they were out on assignment. There was a bomb, and his team had been dispatched to disarm it. Just while he was getting into it, Boko Haram came out guns blazing, it’s an ambush, and when they shot him to kill, the bullet grazed his upper arm. 

He has more stories, but our car is now ready to go. 

“Thank you, chairman,” I say. We pay for his bus without him asking and head out. 

I don’t know how long I’ve been sleeping but when I wake up, it’s because we’re at a police checkpoint. The policeman is wearing a black t-shirt and slippers. Another officer is at a corner, sitting down. It’s the first checkpoint I’ve seen anyone sitting by the road since we entered the northeast. 

I roll my eyes before I catch myself. A policeman is a sign that whatever is in front of us is better than whatever it is we’ve left behind. It’s the first time we’ve seen a policeman in over a week, and for the first time, the sight of a police checkpoint brings with it a sigh of relief. 

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Thank you:
- SI, Ope, Mariam and Afolabi for the edits. Ruka for the strong-armed editing, and Jyte for hounding me for three years to write an anthology – manage this one like that.

- Thank you, Chris, Jesuloba (and Koko) for the trip of a lifetime.