{"id":763,"date":"2010-10-16T20:00:31","date_gmt":"2010-10-16T16:00:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=763"},"modified":"2010-10-16T20:21:08","modified_gmt":"2010-10-16T16:21:08","slug":"from-your-correspondent-in-lagos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/763\/","title":{"rendered":"From your Correspondent in Lagos"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had occasion not to be polite about British Airways in the past: the last time<\/a> I flew with them was in July 2008 between Moscow and London, and the cabin looked as though it had been involved in evacuating refugees from an African civil war.\u00a0 So it is only fair that I praise them for the service they provided me on the way to Nigeria.\u00a0 They’d allocated me a seat in the lower cabin (this being a 747) on a row which appeared to be otherwise empty according to the self check-in screen at Heathrow.\u00a0 However, when I went into the lounge there was a large Nigerian lady in front of me accompanied by a small baby and a toddler.\u00a0 As they went through and I handed over my boarding pass, the lady manning the lounge reception looked at my pass and said “Oh, they’ll be your neighbours.”\u00a0 One of the joys of flying business is that usually there are no kids nearby (unless you are flying with wealthy Arabs, who pack their whelps into first and business class without batting an eyelid at the twenty grand which has just left their wallet), and I really didn’t fancy a flight with a baby and toddler beside me.\u00a0 Not that I have anything against children.\u00a0 Actually, I do.\u00a0 I don’t like to be near them, or see them, or hear them.\u00a0 Besides that, I have no objection in principle to their existence.\u00a0 Anyway, I pulled a face.\u00a0 The lady at the counter then helpfully looked on her system and relocated me to the upstairs cabin where there were free seats and any children were stowed away in the overhead locker for the duration of the flight.\u00a0 I wasn’t even aware the girls at the lounge counter could change a seat and reissue a boarding pass, so I was mighty glad that she had the sense of service to offer it.\u00a0 That she was Indian and not British may or may not be significant.<\/p>\n

British Airways have a peculiar seating arrangement in business class, or at least in the upstairs cabin of their 747s.\u00a0 In each pair of seats, one faces forwards and the other backwards, so you are looking at each other diagonally (a screen between you can be pulled up if your neighbour looks like Cherie Blair).\u00a0 This has the advantage of the passenger on the window side being able to leave his seat without having to clamber over his neighbour in mid-snooze.\u00a0 The disadvantage, which I am told is why other airlines don’t do it, is that some people don’t like flying backwards.\u00a0 Me, I thought it was okay.\u00a0 During the safety brief we were shown the brace positions.\u00a0 Those of us in the backward seats are supposed to adopt a position you would when being interviewed for a job.\u00a0 Those in the normal seats are expected to fellate themselves.\u00a0 At least I’ll go out looking dignified.\u00a0 Besides, after a while you kind of forget you’re going backwards.\u00a0 It’s not like there’s anything out the window to give you a clue.\u00a0 Coming into land 6 hours later was a bit confusing as I kept thinking the plane was climbing, having forgotten I was looking towards the tail.\u00a0 But other than that, I couldn’t really tell the difference.<\/p>\n

The approach from the north into Lagos gave me the first glimpse of the city which will be my home for the next 3 years.\u00a0 From the air it had the size and sprawl of Moscow, only there was barely a paved road to be seen.\u00a0 The streets were the orange pastel colour of the native earth, dotted with huge puddles which identified Lagos as both tropical and lacking proper drainage.\u00a0 A few huge highways came into view, jammed solid with traffic, half of which were vehicles painted bright yellow as if the Association of American Schoolbus Drivers annual jamboree had gone wrong and they’d somehow ended up in West Africa.\u00a0 We touched down in an airport surrounded by tropical vegetation and more of the orange, sandy earth which is everywhere in the city.\u00a0 The walk between the plane and the immigration counter was through an untidy corridor which could have used a lick of paint.\u00a0 They could also have done with moving the metal seats out of the way, thus doubling the width of the corridor.\u00a0 And I hope whoever thought it was a good idea to put a mobile phone charging station in a place you are not supposed to stop is not promoted any time soon.\u00a0 I was greeted by one of the surest signs that you are no longer in the western world: people standing about everywhere, seemingly – and sometimes pretty obviously – doing nothing in particular.\u00a0 The value we place on our time in the west is not shared by the rest of the world, hence a popular pastime in a lot of places is loafing about.\u00a0 Quite often this is also considered to be work.<\/p>\n

The airport wasn’t half as bad as I expected it to be.\u00a0 Having carried visions of an enormous rugby scrum at the immigration counter, I was pleasantly surprised to find a queue no less orderly than that found at Heathrow and processed with twice the speed and efficiency as that of Kuwait airport.\u00a0 True, they employed an extra person to first check your passport and visa before handing it to somebody else who, erm, also checked your passport and visa before stamping it but in some countries this would involve four people and take ten minutes.\u00a0 Being one of the first off the aircraft (now the boot is on the other foot I now agree with the practice of rudely pulling a curtain across the nose of the foremost economy class passenger and telling him to wait his turn) I was fourth in the queue and was through in under ten minutes.\u00a0 The baggage collection hall was no worse, and in many cases a whole lot better, than those I saw in the former Soviet Union and I was met by a grinning Nigerian in a loud shirt who didn’t know who I was but somehow guessed I was not from around here.\u00a0 Fortunately, he was the very chap I was supposed to meet and he’d clearly had some training in recognising greehorn palefaces in the employ of oil companies.\u00a0 But my name wasn’t on the list.\u00a0 In some countries, this would mean a lengthy wait and phone calls.\u00a0 In Nigeria, this means writing your name on the list.\u00a0 The baggage took a while to come, but no longer than you sometimes find in any other airport.\u00a0 At least it did come, and it didn’t look as though anyone had jumped on it or seen if it could float.\u00a0 Then the Nigerian, who was joined by various others, loaded my bags onto a trolley and wheeled it through customs with no more than a hand wave to the officials standing nearby.\u00a0 I was expecting my bags to be ripped open, grundies and suit trousers to be flung in every direction, and a price in US dollars assigned to every item in each bag which must be paid in order to proceed.\u00a0 No such thing.\u00a0 Apparently Port Harcourt is a bit like that, but all the customs officers in Lagos were interested in was my yellow fever certificate.\u00a0 I’m beginning to wonder if there is anywhere in the world which is as bad as people say it is.\u00a0 Chayvo being the exception, of course: that really is as bad as people say.<\/p>\n

Leaving the airport we (by now I’d met somebody else working in the same company) were not accosted by a gazillion taxi drivers or kidnappers or indeed anyone else.\u00a0 There were a lot of people stood about who could probably have turned into taxi drivers – or kidnappers – if you’d asked them to, but generally they just stayed about in the general chaos – and it was chaotic, but of a very non-threatening kind – and allowed us to follow the chap with our bags to the waiting minibus, a route which would ideally have required the luggage trolley to have off-road capabilities.\u00a0 We crossed a potholed strip of tarmac, down a small road, across a bigger road wedged solid with traffic, through a small crowd of about a thousand people, up the kerb, across a patch of dirt where some girl tried to sell me a phone card and a bloke was running a bureau de change out of his trouser pocket, then down another kerb onto a potholed carpark where our minibus stood.\u00a0 A big policeman was to accompany us in the bus, armed with an AK-47 which looked as though it had been left on the side of the road for a few weeks and then a truck painting double-yellow lines had come along.\u00a0 As a weapon for causing mass casualties in a crowd of unarmed people, it looked perfect.<\/p>\n

It was dark by this stage, so I couldn’t get a really decent look at Lagos on the drive from the airport.\u00a0 What I knew about Lagos before I arrived could be written on a stamp.\u00a0 I am too lazy to read up on a place I am about to visit, plus it allows me to pretentiously say that you cannot truly learn anything from reading, one must experience it for oneself.\u00a0 Which is bollocks, of course.\u00a0 Having been here three days, what I know about Lagos can still be written on a stamp, albeit one of the large issue ones you get at Christmas time.\u00a0 The first thing I noticed was that in the airport anyone with a uniform was carrying artillery, of almost identical type and condition as that of our escort, who was now sat beside our driver wearing a blue kevlar helmet which looked as though somebody had attacked it for twenty minutes with an entrenching tool.\u00a0 Maybe it came from the head of some Danish reservist who had been sent to be UN canon-fodder in a nearby civil war, killed with crude farm implements by a baying mob but happy in the knowledge that he had overwhelming moral right on his side courtesy of the bright blue – and ever so unhelpful in a dark green jungle – UN helmet on his head.\u00a0 Anyway, everyone was tooled up with battered Soviet assault rifles.\u00a0 I commented on this to the chap I’d met at the airport, and he told me it was a status symbol more than anything else, which I can well believe.\u00a0 He told me he’d never heard one fired, which I can also well believe.\u00a0 Half of them were missing the foresight meaning they are good for little other than hosing down a crowd or doing drive-by slayings.\u00a0 And there aren’t enough gangsta rappers in Nigeria for that.\u00a0 And one of them had a stock which looked homemade, a crudely welded metal device resembling a potato masher, and would do as much damage to the shoulder of anyone who fired it than the projectile would to anyone unlucky enough to have been the person not aimed at.<\/p>\n

The traffic from the airport was pretty bad.\u00a0 The are no rules on Nigerian roads, and I mean none.\u00a0 You can drive wherever you want whenever you want in any direction or manner that suits, and people do just that.\u00a0 The only thing you cannot do is speed, which is not only forbidden but also impossible due to everything being at a permanent standstill.\u00a0 But we were the lucky ones.\u00a0 The unlucky ones were those taking the road from the city (or rather, from the part of the city where people can afford to fly) to the airport, which was completely gridlocked.\u00a0 At certain times of day, which I believe is pretty much all of them, the 20km trip can take up to 5 hours, and sometimes more.\u00a0 The shuttle buses leave the hotels at the crack of dawn to catch afternoon flights.\u00a0 But we were headed in the opposite direction, so our journey took a mere hour.\u00a0 The bright yellow vehicles I saw from the plane turned out to be taxis, mostly Mk II VW Golfs which look – like most cars in Lagos – as if they’d been rescued from a stock car racing circuit.\u00a0 Only a madman would get into one of them, which means half the city should be certified insane because they were being driven around in these things with no concern whatsoever for the maximum capacity as recommended by the engineers in Wolfsburg.\u00a0 Between the cracks in the vehicles, pedestrians and motorcyclists weaved their way, either trying to go somewhere, flog something, or merely just stand around in the middle of a traffic jam.\u00a0 The motorcyles looked to have been bought second hand from Thailand, but every rider to a man wore a helmet.\u00a0 True, some of them looked to have the structural integrity of an Easter egg, but nobody was going about bareheaded.\u00a0 So maybe they weren’t all nuts after all.\u00a0 Not only was the roadway itself a busy place but so too was the strip of land which ran alongside it.\u00a0 Sometimes paved, but more often a strip of the orange soil and some stubborn vegetation, these areas were packed full of people either selling something, doing something, or doing nothing in particular.\u00a0 There was a small fire every five metres or so, and cars and motorbikes parked haphazardly among them and the crowds.\u00a0 Lagos has a population of about 15m (plus or minus 5m), and there seems to be a shortage of places to stand.<\/p>\n

I was somewhat surprised to find out en route from the airport that part of Lagos – including what passes for a CBD – is made up of islands, with one of the main ones being Victoria Island, named after David Beckham’s wife.\u00a0 Any one of three bridges gets you from what is called the mainland to Victoria Island, which is where the company offices and my hotel are located.\u00a0 The minibus took us first to the main office then onto the hotel.\u00a0 It wasn’t quite as simple as that, in fact it was a whole lot more complicated, but the upshot is I checked into my hotel room.\u00a0 Apparently it was refurbished in 2005, which makes me glad I wasn’t sent here in 2004.\u00a0 I think the bedding was used for dust sheets during the works, with the towels for sandpaper.\u00a0 Or maybe I’m being too fussy.\u00a0 I have probably been a spoiled brat when it comes to hotel rooms ever since my December 2005 trip to Korea <\/a>where I spent 5 weeks in the superb Somerset Palace Hotel (which was, I learned, a pretty standard Korean hotel costing about $100 per night).\u00a0 Anyway, Somerset Palace this ain’t, or any other kind of palace for that matter.\u00a0 But it’ll do.\u00a0 It’ll have to do.\u00a0 There is no company apartment available yet so I might be here as long as 2 months (the pessimists) or be out next week (the optimists).\u00a0 I have no idea which company apartment will be assigned to me, or indeed even where it will be located.\u00a0 The accommodation compounds, like the offices, seem to have been airdropped over the city by parachute retardation from a heavy bomber.\u00a0 Getting from one office to another is a pain.\u00a0 For starters, the drainage in some places is non-existent (perhaps Nigeria’s civil engineers had studied in Russia) and a large lake of black water with floating garbage in it has formed right between the place where I work and the place where I am supposed to go for my lunch.\u00a0 Getting to the other offices requires cadging a lift off somebody and sitting in traffic for twenty minutes making sure the doors are locked and trying to avoid eye contact with the blokes hawking stuff in the traffic queues.\u00a0 But I could not help but look with some surprise at the bloke who was selling National Geographic on the central reservation, nor the ability of the Nigerian women to carry unfeasible objects on their heads whilst stepping on and off crumbling kerbs and dodging traffic.\u00a0 I saw one young lady dishing out a huge bollocking to a reckless motorcyclist who’d nearly run her over, all the while balancing a huge tub of what looked to be fermented cabbage on her head without using her hands.\u00a0 Another lady had a massive basket of fruit on her head and was accompanied by three fit young men who had their hands in their pockets.\u00a0 A section of Nigerian menfolk seem to be as bone idle as their Thai counterparts, content to let the women literally do all the heavy lifting.<\/p>\n

I’m not sure when Lagos was built and by whom, and I am far too idle to go and look it up, but I’m guessing it enjoyed a boom sometime in the 1970s.\u00a0 The office buildings seem to date from then, and the infrastructure looks to have been crumbling for at least 30 years.\u00a0 Commerce is everywhere.\u00a0 You can’t look out of the car window without seeing something for sale or an advertisement for something.\u00a0 Specialisation of labour doesn’t seem to apply here. I saw a sign on a wall at a busy junction saying “Rubber Stamps \/ Company Seals \/ Printing” and in small letters underneath “& Housepainting”.\u00a0 One place advertised as a “business centre” and housing the Lagos headquarters of the Nigerian Teachers’ Union was a courtyard surrounded by a whitewashed breezeblock wall containing the type of corrogated tin shacks you see in the slums of any poor country.\u00a0 But trade is taking place, of that there is no doubt, and the place does not feel poverty stricken.\u00a0 It does not feel wealthy either, but it is not a despairing place like parts of Russia where hope left a long time ago on a train which helped itself to the tracks as it went.\u00a0 The people are very lively and pretty friendly to boot, and the crowds are not threatening.<\/p>\n

During the safety brief I had yesterday I was told that – in contrast to Port Harcourt – the main risk to us here is from the same general criminality you would find in any big city, Manchester included.\u00a0 The average Nigerian is not out to bash your head in or murder you for your watch, but opportunists abound and you have to go about your business carefully and sensibly.\u00a0 There are areas of the city which require you to have an armed escort, but these are the rough parts of town you’d normally have no business being in anyway, and there are other areas where you should be escorted at night.\u00a0 Keeping a low profile appears to be the key, which is great news for somebody who is lily-white and well over six feet tall.\u00a0 I should avoid walking around wearing fancy jewelry or clothes (which will be remarkably easy for me) but I am advised to always keep plenty of money on me, about $200 worth.\u00a0 Robbers are less likely to shoot you if you have a decent sum of money to please them with.\u00a0 Nigeria is an all-cash society, and apparently you’d have to be insane to use a credit card.\u00a0 Corrupt officials in the airport have been known to flog passport copies and signatures to people who use them to convince your bank at home to start sending money out of your account.\u00a0 There is a mechanism of getting part of your salary paid in local currency here, and if you must use a cash machine choose one in a hotel and not in a normal street where six hundred pairs of eyes just saw an oilman walk in with his visa card.\u00a0 There doesn’t appear to be any political violence here, and even when that happens it is not foreigners who are the targets.\u00a0 So long as you stay indoors you should be fine, which might be worth knowing when the elections come around next year.<\/p>\n

This is the first time since June 2003 that I have gone to live in a place on my own where I don’t know anybody.\u00a0 It is an odd feeling, similar to that of being lost.\u00a0 I am spending the weekend in the hotel with nothing to do but read books (my supply of which might run dangerously low), surf the internet, and go to the gym.\u00a0 It is pretty lonely in fact, and part of me is wondering where I would be if I had not chosen the route that I did.\u00a0 I have no doubt that will pass, I can make friends pretty quickly anywhere, and I am certain that in a short few weeks I will be neck-deep in work and enjoying myself a lot more.\u00a0 But this short period right now…well, I’m not used to it and I don’t like it.\u00a0 I miss Sakhalin, and I miss Thailand.\u00a0 But I’m now in Nigeria, and I need to deal with it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve had occasion not to be polite about British Airways in the past: the last time I flew with them was in July 2008 between Moscow and London, and the cabin looked as though it had been involved in evacuating … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[64],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":766,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763\/revisions\/766"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}