The writer on a stressful commute in Nigeria’s largest city on a day of downpours in 2007
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It had been raining all day the way an old goat pees, in fits and starts, with bleats of sunshine in between. This was a weekday in July 2007, the magical year I moved to Lagos, and only a few months into the nine-to-five that lured me over. The excitement of waking up every day at 5am and catching a jam-packed danfo bus for the two-hour commute had since curdled in my wannabe-writer’s heart. I was standing at Obalende bus stop that afternoon after work, with no bus in sight for the past 40 minutes and rumours of a citywide gridlock swirling around, when the rain started again, a sun shower, proof, they say, that a lion is being born.
Fare hikes were expected on days of heavy traffic, but this time the fare had tripled. Outraged howls rent the air
