I thought I heard a double smack on the roof of the danfo bus and swerved into the adjacent lane. It was probably the one-thousandth time I’d done this, with perhaps as many as twenty-five conductors in seven years. They hung by the open door, looking over the roof, serving as my eyes as we commuted passengers through the ever-knotty Lagos traffic.
The problem was, Sunny had only smacked the roof once, an amber signal, cuing me to get ready. But I already turned and jerked the bus forward, right into the door of a gleaming Mercedes Benz SUV with a fine madam sitting in the backseat, reading a newspaper. “Ahhh!” Sunny exclaimed, his voice thick with trained coarseness. “Aremu, you don buy market o.”
Blame the tormentous thoughts in my head. Jemila threatened to leave me for the umpteenth time last night. This time, however, and for the first time too, her things had left their various spots around the house and assembled in her old box and two tied-up bunches. Not sure if it was my pleas, my tears, or the beautiful love story I played back to her—our story at the beginning—but somehow, she unpacked amid tears and promised she’d stay.
Yaba to Victoria Island, we had a busload of talkative passengers this morning, most of them enjoying a good banter with Sunny. I had to switch off the radio when the discussions about Nigeria’s economy got intense with everyone trying to talk over each other. Soon the topic was fuel scarcity, then the End Sars protests. Yet, as I lurched and wove through the openings in the traffic, Jemila was all I could think about. Mostly memories of Ilaro Polytechnic, where she eventually didn’t graduate because she gave me her school fees when I was on the verge of dropping out. Better she than me, she had argued, her main point being that I had better grades. I knew exactly how she felt about that decision these days.
Anyway, here I was. First accident in seven years, but an alarm was already going off in my head, as though the SUV was a person and I had taken its life. Drivers and passengers from other cars already had their heads out of their windows, pointing and cursing. My passengers were all out of the bus, asking for their money back. And not even a mosquito’s singing could be more irritating than Sunny’s incessant nags in my ears.
“Wetin we go do nau, Aremu? Shey make we beg them, abi make we shout for them scatter everything, ehn?”
The woman’s driver was out, a pole of a man, assessing the damage. I pulled the handbrake and, not wanting to cause further damage to the SUV’s door, climbed out of the bus from the passenger’s side. I rounded the bus with the passengers following and buzzing like flies tracking a waste truck. The two vehicles were locked in an awkward kiss, with the bus pushing a dent into the side of the Benz, scraping some of its gleaming black paint off and staining it with some of the bus’s sunflower yellow.
The woman’s driver poked his head into a front window, exchanging words with her. She had not so much as looked at me, much less said anything. Her hands still held up the open newspaper as though nothing had happened. The tightly packed three-lane stretch was now a bottleneck, with vehicles behind the two blocked by the accident squeezing into the third lane. Eyes and mouths from passing vehicles shot darts at me. Yet, the woman stayed calm.
“Aremu, follow this woman talk nau. Your passengers wan collect their money. If you no talk to her, we go tey for here o, and if we tey, I go need to give them their money o…” Sunny’s figure towered over my shoulder, his chest to my back, and his mouth all the way in my face.
You see, if you breathe from Lagos’ atmosphere, there was every chance that you were carrying around some anger. It didn’t matter if you were a newcomer. The moment you took in the smoke, sweat, and dust mixed in our air, you too had drunk from the fountain. Maybe if you rode inside a private car, AC pumping, with cool music from Cool FM, you wouldn’t feel the anger too much. But if you were like me, twisting and turning a danfo bus inside Lagos traffic every day, with a conductor that wanted to fight with everybody, the anger would be closer to you than the clothes on your body. Graduating with good grades only to end up here was what constantly kept me plugged into it. I could taste it in my saliva right now, and I wasn’t even sure why because this accident was not anybody else’s fault.
I beckoned to the driver as he withdrew from the window of the SUV. “How do you do, sir?” I asked, my eyes at a 45-degree angle as I looked up at him, a palm shielding them from the sun. “What did your madam say?”
First, he regarded me as though such clean diction shouldn’t be exiting my mouth. Then he said, “You need to fix the damage.” His breath reeked of groundnut.
“Haba! Help us beg her nau,” Sunny bellowed from behind me. “We are very loyal to her government o. Check out the small scratch nau. E no too much like that. Make Mama just free am for us.”
The driver lifted a side of his mouth and grinned. Vehicles in the slow-moving traffic in the third lane honked loudly, frustration spilling from the stomachs of angry drivers into their car horns. The sun made sure to contribute its quota with vicious ferocity. Someone tapped me from behind. It was one of the passengers, his brows furrowed with visible anger, his face gleaming with sweat. “Give us our money make we dey go nau!” A chorus of agreements punctuated his words from behind.
I turned around to address the passengers, patting my chest down as I urged them to remain calm. Several street vendors had contributed their presence to the growing crowd. Sunny wouldn’t stop hissing and pacing around the bus, kicking at a vendor who tried to sell him gala sausages.
“Driver, I have a job interview o, and I can’t miss it for anything in this world,” a young man with a threadbare briefcase between his legs said. His aged leather shoes reminded me of the years I spent looking for work after graduation, before eventually settling for danfo driving.
“I have a case in court slated for the next one hour,” a lady wearing a black coat and bottle-thick glasses added. Her hair was packed into two full buns atop her head, making me wonder how she would don the brown lawyer wig clutched in her hand.
Protests from the other passengers drowned in a wailing of car horns as vehicles from three lanes behind us tried to squeeze into one. “Make una no worry,” I pleaded after the noise quietened. “We will settle this now and we will be on our way,” Sunny added some hard-voiced persuasions while I turned to the woman’s driver.
“How do we cost the damage?” I asked. “As you might have guessed, I do not have insurance.”
“Forget about insurance,” the driver pulled at his scanty beard, his face neither frowning nor smiling. “We already did the costing. It is one hundred thousand naira.”
The fear and tension I had carried since the accident finally assembled in my stomach, mounting a heavier weight on my legs as my eyes bulged in their sockets. “One hundred thousand naira?”
One of the passengers quipped. “For what?” Sunny wasn’t sure he heard the amount right, so he asked. The passenger’s answer was loud enough for everyone, and all their jeers and murmurs told me they too couldn’t believe the amount. Someone asked if the money was for a new door.
While I was searching for the right words with which to respond to the driver, Sunny, with his red face cap turned back, had walked up to the SUV’s back window, and was rapping his lean knuckles against it. The driver was onto him in two quick steps, shoving him away. I wish I could have warned him that Lagos conductors did not only toughen their voices but their fists too. Sunny staggered backward and made a dash at the driver. Somehow, they crossed the metallic lip-lock of the bus and the SUV, and crashed against the hood of the Benz, denting a huge crater into it. I jumped the lip-lock and grabbed Sunny while some of the passengers grabbed the driver. We were a tussling pack for a lengthy minute before Sunny and the driver finally broke apart. Blood trickled from Sunny’s lip and the neck of the driver’s shirt was stained brown and ripped.
“What the hell is the meaning of all these?”
It was the fine madam. She stood tall in shimmering gold lace that adorned her body like a second skin. Her crafty headgear sat on her head like a crown and the redness of her lips glowed like a danger sign. I’d been so caught up in the fight, I neither saw her alight from the other side of the SUV nor heard her slam the door.
“Madam.” I let go of Sunny and rushed to her. “I’m so sorry about this, ma. I was hoping that we can resolve it amicably so we can let you be on your way.”
Her eyes roamed over me, starting from the midpoint on my head down to my toes, obviously passing judgment on every visible feature that betrayed my inadequacy for her class and affluence. My oversized shirt was missing three buttons, the fly on my trousers did not zip, and my slippers were a mismatch of black and yellow. She looked from the slippers to the danfo, yellow with black stripes running across it from front to back. She shook her hand and transferred her gaze to the huge dent in her car’s bonnet.
“You want me to be on my way with half the car that got me here?” her calculated calmness was in sharp contrast to her fierce words. “With that new dent on the bonnet, your money has now gone up to two hundred thousand naira.” My face contorted in shock, my eyes bulging in their sockets. I clasped my palms beneath my armpits and raised my shoulders in disbelief.
“Aremu, you dey fuck up!” Sunny’s head was in my face, the sickening smell of blood mixing into his odious smell. He hunched his back to match my height, as though he was going to headbutt me. “You go dey follow this people speak English. Oya carry two hundred thousand give them nau.” I looked up at him and shook my head. The sick feeling in my stomach had metamorphosed into roiling anger, and my head threatened to burst open as I struggled to contain it. I turned back to face the woman, but one of the passengers had walked up to her.
“Madam, me I be mechanic,” he said, the grease stains on his blue overalls confirming his statement. “And this damage no reach like that. If you allow me, I go straighten the body and the bonnet.”
“How about the paint scratch?” the driver asked, one hand holding the neck of his cloth together, a small swelling visible beneath his eye.
“Engine oil go clean that one nau,” the passenger responded. Many of the other passengers concurred.
“I’m sorry, that’s not going to work for me,” the woman shook her head. “My car needs to go to the auto shop and this idiot here needs to pay for it. I don’t need a mediocre roadside mechanic making things worse.”
The small crowd around both vehicles erupted into loud noise matching the honks from the cars in the moving lane. Some gasped. Others jeered. Many shook their heads, saying they wouldn’t take the insult if it were them. The mechanic shook his head too but said nothing. Just then, a motorbike pulled to a stop behind the Benz, and a uniformed policeman disembarked from behind it. The woman’s driver approached the policeman with a palm outstretched, the bulge beneath his eyes growing bigger by the minute.
“Where is the culprit?” The policeman asked, shaking hands with the driver who turned his head in my direction.
“See am now, dem don call olopa for us,” Sunny stamped his foot, throwing punches into the air as though fighting an invisible opponent. “Instead make we don scatter this thing since!”
The policeman saluted the fine madam, lifting his shades for a moment. Together with the driver, they conferred for a few minutes while I watched, my eyes set and my interiors boiling. It was bad enough that I returned home to Jemila every evening with excuses and complaints. If by any chance she hadn’t packed up and left by the time I was back home this evening, I would not only be returning without the day’s profits but would most likely need to sell some of my belongings and hers as well. How else was I going to come up with the amount this woman was asking for? If Jemila really was still home when I returned, this was no worthy reward for her steadfastness. I promised her we were going to make it in this Lagos. She had defied her father to come here with me. No, there had to be a way out of this!
Soon the policeman broke off the meeting, took a glance at the collision, then approached me.
“I heard you’ve been told the price,” he said, his prominent Adam’s apple moving in tandem with his mouth. “It’s either you pay up within the next minutes or you’ll have to come with me to our station.” I gave a burdened smile and shook my head. This couldn’t be happening.
“We no dey pay shishi and we no dey go any station,” Sunny’s voice towered above the honking, revving, and multiple engine noises around us.
“Better obey and not let me use force o,” said the policeman, unhooking a pair of gleaming handcuffs from his belt-hole.
My eyes were set on the woman, who showed no sign of being ruffled. Only her words betrayed her irritation. I did not notice when the passenger with the lawyer wig walked up to the policeman. “With all due respect, Officer,” she said, adjusting her glasses as though to see him well. “Unless you’re placing him under arrest, I don’t see why he should follow you anywhere. You have hardly even studied the accident, but you have already accepted the figure they placed on it. You’re a policeman, not an auto-mechanic, and even with that, you neither introduced yourself nor showed anyone your ID.”
Other passengers cheered and clapped, the vendors with their wares too, some punching their fists in the air. I knew the passengers all wanted the situation sorted so they could get to wherever they were going. But if there was anything that united ordinary Nigerians better than football, perhaps, it was standing up against abuses of power, be it in the form of intimidation from a rich and highly placed person, or a belligerent policeman. This was what the End Sars protests last year were all about, the exact topic of passionate discussion among the bus passengers before I pressed into the SUV. The traffic on the moving lane had slowed and the faces looking in our direction all frowned at the policeman.
The woman shot a hard glance at the lawyer lady, the red glow of her lips more vicious, her face finally creasing up with some of Lagos’ innate anger. “I don’t know or care who you think you are, but you cannot talk to an officer of the law that way. Especially not because of these riffraffs who have no regard for money or valuables they cannot afford.”
The honking from the vehicles on the slow-moving lane had started to feel like a competition, but a particularly loud Toyota Avensis was a notable nuisance at that moment. I couldn’t see much of the driver, but he was heavily bearded. He withdrew his hands from the steering wheel, poked his head forward, and pointed, “Don’t I recognise you, Mrs. Durojaiye-Cole?”
I had never seen a person react to their name that way, like it was a stone being hurled at them. The woman flinched and shrunk an inch smaller.
“The former speaker’s wife?” one of the passengers asked.
The bearded man in the Avensis affirmed. So did two other passengers who were now taking closer looks at her. She was already rounding the SUV to get back inside it, stopping briefly by the Avensis to roll her eyes and hiss at its bearded driver.
“Imagine o,” Sunny clapped in disgust. “So na the people wey dey thief our money dey still wan dey extort us for road?”
“Thief!” The job-seeking man with the threadbare briefcase said, his voice laced with conviction. “Just like her husband. Ole!”
The driver squared up to him, daring him to call his madam another bad word, but she had rolled down the SUV window and was calling the driver from inside it, newspaper back in her hand.
The policeman was on the phone. “Are you guys almost here? Just look for bikes, it’s impossible with this traffic to be here on time with the van.”
I asked myself then: If the other party is so brazenly taking undue advantage of an otherwise minor infraction right before my very eyes, why am I just standing here doing nothing? I remembered blaming myself for not making the most of the End Sars protests, despite being at the forefront in Shomolu. I had painted placards with Jemila all night, shared pamphlets from house to house, and volunteered to transport protesters all the way to Lekki Toll Gate for free. I had lost six full days’ work, only for all hopes of any rewards to dim when soldiers showed up and opened fire on protesters. The nation’s youth had marched and cried for change, and a murderous gag had sealed it all right there before the world’s eyes. Jemila’s disappointment had been profound, and now, it was back washing over me. This, perhaps, was an opportunity to get back at these thieving elite, but only, and only if I was able to get it right. I closed my eyes and zoned away from this scene, playing it all back and hatching a plan.
Then, I walked up to Sunny and spoke to him for the first time since the accident.
“Guy, dey calm down. You no angry reach me, but to handle these rich people, and to handle police, anger go only land us for cell. Na sense we go use, no be strength. Just follow my lead, okay?” He didn’t seem convinced, but he nodded anyway, albeit reluctantly. So I reeled the rest of the plan down his ears and watched him walk to the passengers. Then I crossed to the woman’s window, knocking, and gesturing for her to wind it further down.
“Madam,” I said, making sure my mouth was close enough for her to tell that I hadn’t brushed my teeth this morning. “We no dey pay shishi. The mechanic has already volunteered to fix the dent. You either take that or you take nothing.” She had fire in her eyes and a palm covering her nose. “Your husband is under a probe for stealing our money, my money,” I continued, my voice loud enough for her ears alone. “And you have the audacity to try and extort me here?” The fire in her eyes glowed brighter. A vein throbbed on her forehead. “You must probably be afflicted with the spirit of stealing. If you were a common citizen like me, do you know what would have happened to you right now?”
Her eyes gleamed with hardness but begged for the answer. I looked over at the passengers before giving it to her, happy to see a number of phones already pointing their cameras at us. “I would have dragged you down and we would have beaten you here like the common thief that you are,” I said to the woman, my face further into the window. “So that your children can watch on TV to see what a low-down filthy miscreant their mother…”
In a flash, her torso was out of the small space in the window, her fingers clasped around my neck, her hands shaking me vigorously. “Are you mad?” she yelled. “Is it me you’re talking to that way?”
The policeman and her driver were upon me in a second, pulling me away from her grip as several other policemen arrived on motorbikes. The number of cameras had doubled, with several people in the moving lane also holding theirs out. They all focused on our faces, none below the knees, so I gathered all my strength in a raised foot and rammed it against the policeman’s boot, poking out my face for the incoming slap. I knew his colleagues would join in if they saw him hit me, much like zombies who never asked questions. I managed to catch Sunny’s red cap as slaps and punches rained on me. Thinking of Jemila’s sacrifices helped me to drown the pain, and I nodded at Sunny to cue him into the next phase of action.
The single moving lane was soon completely barred with tyres and a bench from inside the danfo. Ahead of us, the road stretched with markings, potholes, and no vehicles at all. The trio of the danfo, the SUV, and Sunny’s makeshift barricade put a lid on the burgeoning, stagnant traffic. Sunny and some of the other passengers were going from vehicle to vehicle, getting people out so they could witness the police assault. “And it’s Mrs. Durojaiye-Cole’s policemen too. The wife of the former speaker…” I could hear Sunny shouting in uncharacteristically good English.
Hunched, I buried my face in my arms, trying to prevent it from any more blows. A cut above my eye already washed my face with blood and reddened my vision. Another bang to the back of my head and I hit the smothering floor, the heat from the asphalt only one of numerous stings coursing through my body. Despite the pain, I smiled when some of the policemen tried to get on their bikes to leave but were stopped by the crowd. Seeing angry faces everywhere made it look like End Sars all over again. The woman’s window was wound up, but I imagined her shrunken in her seat, her hands making a failed attempt to shield her face.
By the time this was over, I would not only have gotten enough money in assault settlement to leave this danfo driver job behind, but the news round would also have bestowed some popularity and fandom upon me. This might not be on the scale of End Sars, but the police would also pay dearly, I was sure of that. A Twitter account and a good manager and I could have a new career as an influencer. Former danfo driver turned successful influencer. Celebrity things! Jemila would be so proud at last.
Another heavy smack and a disorienting daze followed. Then a hot slap finally pulled me out of my daydream.
The woman’s driver towered over me, his eye almost swollen shut. “You see the nonsense you’ve caused, abi?” he growled.
