Amazing Hair

On Friday (election shenanigans permitting) Becky's travelling to the far south of Nigeria for a wedding.  We're all going to a wedding in Jos on Easter Monday but there's no way I'd spend four hours at the hairdresser's like she did although the result was amazing.

This is the scene from the bottom of our garden on Saturday as people waited to cast their votes. From 7am there was a constant hubbub and crowd of would-be voters - very different from the half empty, near silence of British polling stations I've experienced.

All seemed to go well here, although Becky told me many people in her area hadn't received their voting cards, thus being disenfranchised. Today it's like the calm before the storm. The roads are empty, many shops are closed as we all wait for the results to be announced late this afternoon or tomorrow. There are many IDPs (Internally Displaced People) around Jos, Christian and Muslim, all of them going through grief and trauma, many of them young men in the angry and feeling powerless stage. The real verdict on how these elections have gone will be reached according to the reactions when the results are known.

Electioneering

Elections in Nigeria are different from those in the UK in so many ways.
Yesterday an enterprising politician gathered lots of kekes, stuck his poster over their rear windows (which are never used anyway) and got them to drive in procession making enthusiastic and piercing noises. Quite an entertaining sight unless you're wanting to go the same way. However, there often seem to be just aas many kekes going the way I want to go without being organised.

Living in Nigeria is often not easy. Things we take for granted in Britain like constant electricity, reliable water, supermarkets, cars always on the expected side of the road, potholes no deeper than a couple of centimetres, noise pollution laws, online document renewal which doesn't involve trips to the bank and fruitless hours spent waiting, people from different backgrounds not attacking and killing each other; these things are hard to find in Nigeria and that sometimes takes a large toll and you wonder how on earth anything can change here,
I was feeling this way when I came into Jos this morning. If I hadn't arranged to meet someone I'd probably have gone back home after the school drop at 7:45. First along came Ponsah brimming with enthusiasm over how Inreach is making Christians think and change the way they behave and how he wants study philosophy to help his countrymen ask the right questions to find the right answers.
I went to the BRICC office (www.briccjos.com) where Sadiq was preparing to host a reconciliation workshop for Jos Vigilantes who were fighting amongst themselves. He'd suggested they bring their differences to BRICC, the peacebuilder, to find a solution which would allow them to concentrate on keeping peace in their neighbourhoods. The Zonal Commander was there and the whole workshop seemed to be successful. Most of them went away with BRICC's "Note before you vote" posters too.
Finally Coach Musa and Baba Otu arrived, helped me with my Hausa and talked about Baba's forthcoming trip to Wembley for a football seminar (he used to be one of the best players in Africa). They always cheer me up.
This is how things will change in Nigeria, when individuals take the initiative and work for the common good.

Driving licence renewal

It's been two and a half years so must be time to renew my Nigerian driving licence. How I do look forward to all my encounters with the efficient machine that is Nigerian bureaucracy.
Things began fairly promisingly. I was able to start the renewal application online, print out my form then go off to the bank to pay the fee and get the all important bank slip proving I'd done it. Next I called in at the licensing office. For some reason, even for a renewal, applicants' fingerprints and biometric data have to be rerecorded as of course these things could have changed in the intervening years. This is where the bottleneck occurs. There is one unreliable data capture machine, unreliable internet access and extremely unreliable electricity, not to mention a decidedly limited supply of official cards - all making a recipe for disaster.
I was encouraged to find no queue at the office when I arrived on Wednesday afternoon. This looked as if it was going to be surprisingly easy. I showed the officer my documents; he said they only used their machine in the mornings and told me to return on Tuesday at 7:30am. Was this my personal appointment? I asked. No, everyone was given the same time and would be taken in turn. Could he guarantee the machine would be working? Of course.
This morning, after a night of little sleep, avoiding my usual breakfast coffee in anticipation of a long wait, I left the house at 7am, hoping that African time would mean that few people would actually be there at 7:30.
I walked through to the licensing office, passing lots of people sitting outside, apparently waiting for their tax id numbers, and was glad to see only three others before me in the queue for driving licences. Together we waited quietly.
At 7:30 a tsunami of people crashed into the narrow corridor. "We have numbers," they cried as they surged up to the office door. Twenty or so angry people in an enclosed space, together with a line of others already waiting there does not make for a comfortable situation. "We will not let anyone in before us. We have numbers. We will not move."
These were the people from outside. Their given time had been 6:30am. They'd been told to wait and been allocated numbers; no one had said anything to the 7:30ers and it wasn't surprising that after an hour's wait they were angry at the thought of losing their place.
The officials only turned up at 7:30. Why had these people been given a time that no one intended to honour? Why were so many people told to come at once when we were told only the first twenty would get their details captured - there were more than that in the first batch alone and others kept arriving?
I gave up and left. By 8:15 no one had been seen, the machine not even started up. I wasn't the only one. Several Nigerians left too, lamenting the state of affairs. One lady had paid her fee in January and tried several times to complete the process to no avail. So many live hand to mouth, many have jobs and cannot keep taking days off to wait in vain for the driving licence office to get its act together. There is no organisation, little communication, no redress for most people, and it isn't hard to see how the reactions swing from disheartened endurance or giving up to the ready potential for violence.