Personal experience in my years of using public transport in
Nigeria can only be described with one word ‘pathetic’. Is it the constantly
over packed danfo? Or the fact that,
in a taxi cab, nearly all the time I’m sharing the front seat with someone
else? Or sharing one of the back seats with 1 or 2 overweight women (this always happens to me)? It is just
impossible to look dignified in any of those vehicles. In fact, there was a
time that the danfo bus I was sitting
at the back of was leaking from the ceiling, and rain was battering me from inside the bus. All these things
automatically made me dislike the taxi drivers, and it no longer makes me feel
that they are worth my 100 bucks. Many of the taxi drivers have a really nasty
attitude to work and feel like they are doing you a favor for your money. There
was a case where one of them was raining insults at me, my offence? Because I
didn’t want to seat in the middle of the backseats, so I stood up and let the
new passenger go inside. It’s insane (absurd!).
But one day I met a taxi driver who actually apologized to me for going to the petrol
station and wasting my time and even asked me if he could do it. However, when
we got to the petrol station, he left his engine on and was filling the tank
(which got me so freaked out; I had to step off the vehicle so it won’t explode
when I was inside). When I asked him why he did it he said “I don’t know if my
engine will turn on again if I switch it off.” I tipped him 100 bucks and it
was because of him I was inspired to investigate the rough untold life of taxi
drivers. Maybe I judged them too soon?
So I grabbed my trusty backpack, my camera, my phone, my
jotter and my shorts (although I hid my phone in my bag for obvious reasons)
and went out to find out how life really is for our notorious taxi men. I met a
few of them in a short while and I asked if they could answer a few questions,
to my surprise, all of them were scared to answer me. I even offered to pay one
a few bucks if he just told me a few things and if he also agreed to let me
take his picture but he said “I can’t know where my face will appear if I
answer your questions.” Then and there, I knew that it was either there was
some very shady things going on in taxi business, or taxi men are scared of
cameras.
I left my vibe-killing taxi drivers in Eliozu junction and
walked about 1000m to Artillery where I pretended to be a passenger going to
Air Force junction. Only then did I get the juicy details of the life of taxi
drivers. I thought to myself how funny it was that when I approached formally,
they were so scared but as their passenger it was like I grew up in their
village compound.
It turns out that taxi men are being taxed by 2 ‘agencies’;
one is the City Local Government who
issues them a ticket of N250 which licenses them to pick passengers in that
area for 24 hours (according to one source) and the other is the Junction Chairman (LMAO) who is kind of
like the chief of agberos in that bus stop/junction. For all you ajebutter (unexposed) children reading
this post: an agbero is a person that
is responsible for collecting commissions for the Junction Chairman and also enforcing the laws of their chairman in
that land. Think of it as a disheveled mafia of a sort.
So taxi men pay a legal fee and an illegal fee. Most of
these drivers don’t particularly have a problem paying these fees. The only issue
is that there is a chance that after paying the local government and paying the
Junction Chairman another agbero from the same chairman can come
and claim that they have not paid anything. Some of you might think that ‘Oh,
why don’t they just drive away?’ Well has your car seat ever been seized
before? Or your car battery ended up in a police station? (I guess not). Or you
can just watch this Area video for another consequence (PG advised) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgrbCxqjR7E .
But yes, Junction Chairmen are very
influential - some in close affiliation with police, most generating about
200naira every 5 minutes (#BillGatesthings). I once heard some women
talking about one near Eleme Junction that was so fat his chest looked like female
breasts.
With most of their revenue sapped away you can understand
why taxi drivers are so grumpy and most of them really don’t have anything to
lose when they scratch your car; they don’t bother maintaining theirs because
they can’t, as long as the engine is running that is more than enough.
Honestly, the worst thing on the road is a driver that doesn’t have anything to
lose.
Technically, Keke na Pepe (motorized tricycles) drivers may
be making more profit than our taxi men.
I once spoke with the proprietress of a school in New Layout
and she told me that “We have graduates among them, you know? And once they enter into that job it changes
them, they just transform.”
WHAT IS THE SOLUTION?
I decided to meet a legal expert on this matter for a
solution to all these madness. I gave a phone call to Cyrus Egbe (Esq.). Here’s
what he has to say:
“If we are talking
about the system of those taxi drivers, they don’t have an organized taxi system.
Just like for example in the US they have, in New York they have the Yellow Cab
and they have a kind of private firm having partnership with the government
ruling out this taxi scheme. The firms will post cabs on different areas of the
city. So if anyone needs a cab they can call the cab company and give them
their location, so the taxis around that axis will go there and pick the person.
“Now most of the taxis
in Rivers State are not registered, we don’t know the number of taxis in River
state flying our roads. That is why one can just come here and bring one taxi
and put it on the road with no monitoring at all, no control. The Private firms
will be controlling taxi drivers, that way it will be very easy, and when it
comes to so many countries that is what is applicable. That is why you see most
of our cabs; lots of cabs in Port Harcourt the cab itself don’t have a good
shape. The Ministry of Transport has a whole lot to do. There are private
companies in Port Harcourt that do hire cabs, you may be somewhere in Port
Harcourt and you being able to call and they’ll come and pick you. But then the
moment they say ‘ok, you know what? Let’s try and control the system’, if they
have a monopoly, the government figures will want to have something in return.
Corruption is the major problem.
“Truth is a lot of
people in Nigeria have brilliant ideas. Transport in Nigeria is a failed
system. So you see? Look at the Monorail for example, in Port Harcourt, ending
at Lagos Bus Stop. The government has invested a whole lot, about 200 million
naira. What do we have? Uncompleted project abandoned. So that is how the system
is.”
Anyhow, I agree with Cyrus, that is how the system is. The question
now is how do we change the system?
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