Was Nigeria this ‘bad’ in 1970?

Veteran column readers will remember that I told many of these stories for the benefit of our youngsters back in 2010 when we marked 50 years of Nigeria’s independence. Since Nigeria produces new youngsters at the rate of 3% a year, let me retell some of them as we mark 57 years of Nigeria’s independence for the benefit of those that came of age since 2010.

Youngsters in this country are sold on the notion [created by the newspapers] that Nigeria has been going downhill with respect to all socio-economic, infrastructural, political, public service, security, ethical and cultural value indices since independence. The only disagreement is whether this slide has been rapid or geometric. A young fellow told me in 2010 that “Nigeria is worse in all respects than it was 30 years ago.” Trouble is, the guy was less than 30 years old so it’s not like he had a personal knowledge of how things were 30 years previously. He said “our roads are bad, not like before.”

Before when? In 1967 when General Yakubu Gowon divided Nigeria into 12 states, my family left Ilorin for Jega in our father’s Holden car. We left Ilorin at 7am on Saturday and only got to Koko, still 45 miles short of Jega, at 4 pm the following day after driving non-stop all day and night. There was not an inch of tarred road between Ilorin and Sokoto. Crossing the Jebba bridge alone took seven hours because it was single lane and hundreds of trucks and trailers were lined up on both sides of the bridge.

Up until 1974, the trip from Jega to Sokoto through Tambuwal and Shagari, which takes about 75 minutes today, took a whole day. That was until Gowon tarred the road in 1974. Birnin Kebbi is only 32 kilometres away from Jega but in 1970, it took a whole day to make the trip. There were three major landmarks, the bridges at Ruwan Kanwa, Basaura and Langido. It took hours to get to the first one, which I was amazed to discover in later life is only three kilometres away from Jega. These days motorists cover the Jega to Birnin Kebbi distance in 20 minutes.

In 1970, a football match was organised between our primary school and Kimba primary school. I was selected among those to go and we set out at dawn, marched through farmlands and bushes, crossed what looked like a mighty river and got to Kimba late in the afternoon. Some years ago the chairman of Jega Local Government took me in his car to see a project at Kimba, my first return there since 1970. I settled down in his car for what I thought would be a long drive. We drove along a tarred road for a few minutes, drove across a culvert over a narrow stream, and he pulled up and said we were at Kimba. I couldn’t believe it.

In 1970 there was only one taxi cab in Sokoto, driven by a Yoruba man who inscribed on its door the motto Be Patience [sic]. The only other intra-city commercial vehicle, which plied the route from Kasuwa Yar’dole to Farfaru, was a small bus driven by a man called Alallaba. It was so slow that children could run on foot and overtake it. If you rode on Alallaba’s bus and didn’t want to pay the three pence fare, all you had to do was to wait until it was approaching your destination. You then complained loudly that the bus was too slow! Alallaba will quickly stop and ask you to go down, and you walked away without paying.

These days, our youngsters are always complaining about poor GSM service and “network problem.” It reminds me of my effort to get a NITEL telephone land line in 2001. I first applied to NITEL in January, secured the help of several touts and went to NITEL’s Kaduna office at least 50 times in the next one year. I only got a number assigned to me in April, after which I paid the N50,000 fee. Three months later, I was told that even though I had paid for the phone box and the cable, NITEL had none in its store so I bought them from the market. The cable was finally connected to my house in September but there was no dialling tone. It took another two months and the intervention of a General Manager at NITEL headquarters in Abuja before I got the dialling tone in November. When I left the area a month later, NITEL said the line was not transferable.

In the 1970s it was better to just post a letter. My late brother Ibrahim regularly sent letters to me from Zaria, which arrived in Sokoto within a week. If the message was urgent, then you must send someone. I was once sent from Sokoto to Kaduna to announce a birth, something you do these days with a text message. Sometimes the Post Office misfired. A letter was sent to my brother Abbas at “Koko Secondary School, Koko,” and it went to the coastal town of Koko in Midwestern State. Abbas received it six months later because one thoughtful postal clerk wrote on it with a red biro, “Try Koko in the North.”

In those days, a really urgent message was sent by Police radio signal. Even that was not failsafe. In August 1979 the Etsu Nupe sent a message to the Sultan of Sokoto by police radio saying the Ramadan moon had been sighted in Bidda. The message arrived in Sokoto at noon the next day. A Ministry of Information Land Rover then went round the town telling people to “catch their mouth” because the Ramadan fast began that morning.

Many people say the security situation in Nigeria these days “is worse than before.” Before when? My late father once told me a story, that when he entered Kaduna College in 1944, it was not easy to go to the Friday market at Kawo. They first went to Unguwar Sarki and joined an ayari of several dozen people. This ayari was then escorted to Kawo market by armed vigilantes because the area presently occupied by Badarawa and General Hassan Katsina House was thickly forested and robbers regularly attacked market goers. Today, you make the trip by bus in five minutes.

Most Nigerians say the same thing about our health services. In 1971 when we were in primary school, at least one third of the pupils had smelly open sores during the morning assembly. Some were so smelly that one had to cover his nose with a handkerchief in the class. All of them were assembled each morning and marched off to the town’s Dispensary. Jega Dispensary had neither a doctor nor a nurse in 1971, only a dispenser, the very hardworking Malam Umaru Dispensa. That man attended to all the patients and dressed all the sores. He dispensed either analgesic tablets or the extremely bitter syrup kuni (quinine). The dosage for all the patients was the same. As he dispensed it Malam Umaru said, “Two in the morning, two in the afternoon, two in the evening. Drink a lot of water. May Allah bring relief.”

Even with respect to peace on the streets, Nigeria has come a long way. In 1970, soldiers returning from the Civil War had no barracks and they lived with other tenants in face-me-I-face-you compounds. This made for a lot of fights. Usually it started at the water tap, where a soldier’s wife will quarrel with another person in the struggle to fill pails of water. The soldier’s wife will run home and call her husband, who will arrive with a belt or a whip and severely beat up the civilian. This phenomenon only ended when soldiers got barracks all over the country.

Therefore, anyone who still thinks that Nigerian roads are too bad, its communications too slow, its hospitals too bare and its markets too insecure should please go back to 1970.

This article first appeared in Daily Trust