by Afam Ade-Odiachi

I have always thought Lagos to be remarkable. When most people say remarkable they mean that it’s good, but that isn’t true here. Lagos is remarkable because there’s a moment when you stop and slap yourself because you doubt the things you’re seeing are real.

Yesterday, I was driving to work. It was early; before six in the morning. If I have to dash out of my house before the sun is up in the morning of every working day of my post adult life, then I shall have failed. I’m a creature of the sun. I do not enjoy it when it meets me at work, typing like a pianist on Crystal Meth, doing everything that I can to make the show I’m producing run as smoothly as a particularly watery bout of diarrhoea. It should meet me on my bed.

My route to work is fairly ordinary for Lagos, which means it’s extraordinary by global standards. There’s a bit of sand that isn’t smooth, then there’s a road that’s quite literally a dead end. It leads nowhere. In the absence of an official plan for the road, Lagosians have cooked one up. They’ve broken the end of it, taken over someone’s fenced and gated plot of land and connected it to a proper road. The lawlessness of it is only as stunning as its audacity. In the heat of the recession, they’ve installed a toll to pass through a piece of land that they have no legitimate claim to.

While I was passing through this uneven waste of prime property a policeman appeared in front of me like some sort of demon. Not keen on adding murderer to my many titles I stopped. He walked up to my window, said that I had broken the speed limit, and reached into the car to open the door. I didn’t even have time to think the following.

How can there be a speed limit when you’re driving through private property on terrain that’s off road at best and wartime fabulous at worst?
Who put my destiny in a calabash?
Do I have rich idiot tattooed on my forehead?

The shock of it gave my skinny fingers super human strength. I grabbed his wrist and flung his hand out the window while shouting garbled words that my anger at the time has since erased from memory. My defence of my personal space pressed rather firmly on the hustler’s madness button.

It was a sound I’d only heard in films. I saw him do it, but it was the sound of it that made me freeze. He cocked his pistol and pointed it at me, before pointing it at a tyre. He said, “If you move from here, I’ll finish your tyre.” I was glad that he said the tyre and not me because if I should be killed by a human being, I’d quite like that human being to be me. And if not that then by the people who’ve played some part in keeping me alive.

After that too heated exchange, I wound up, let the air conditioning massage me for a bit and listened to the WJGB podcast. The irony of it is not lost on me. Inside the car I was back in in London getting exeats from school to go to Nigerian parties. But outside it, I was in a shoot ’em up film or life’s rendition of grand theft auto. I came to the conclusion that arguing with a policeman with a cocked gun could only end with me dead or car-less, which is just as good as being dead in Lagos.

I lost my very manly balls, switched my accent from posh boarding school boy of yesterday to I learned how to talk like this from watching all of Nollywood, and begged. I kowtowed like a professional. I talked him up and then I talked him down. When he said the customary, “What can you do for the boys?” My lips quivered, my eyes watered and my voice broke.

Fifteen minutes later, I was in the conference room typing like a mad donkey on crack, waiting for the sun to meet me, and doubting that the events of the morning were real. Too much Lagos will kill you every time.

Afam Ade-Odiachi is a writer and journalist, with a passion for story telling. In addition to working as a junior reporter for CNBC Africa, he runs a little blog called theramblingsofamadman-afam.com. He has also served as a content co-ordinator for Mnet’s Stargist

Op-ed Editor