Nigeria Journal 2023 10 16: “E” Division
Unfortunately, we had another collision with one of our vehicles. It bears repeating that the greatest safety risk on most missions is traffic accidents. The drivers are part of my organization, and when an accident occurs, I take it as a personal failure if they are at fault — in the first accident that was clearly not the case. But in most accident both drivers contribute, and this looks like one of those.
One of the first impressions I had when I took over as the Tech Log Manager was that my drivers, and I have 11 of them, were terrible behind the wheel. They were aggressive, honking at everybody, passing with the smallest of safety margins — absolute assholes on the road. I suspect that driving a big white NGO-branded Toyota Land Cruiser in the world of 100cc motorbikes and tuktuks might go to your head.
What really upset me was one instance where I was being driven through the middle of Mbawa, one of our IDP camps, and the driver started laying on the horn at kids playing in the — it’s not a road, but a space between flimsy shelters where families live, but wide enough for our vehicle to pass. It’s their front porch and back yard. Where they can relax and play.
One of the first things I did was to call a meeting of all the drivers to tell them that they needed to change. I started the meeting by showing them a video I had made of me driving in Haiti. I wanted them to know that I have driven the same vehicle as them though a similar context of pedestrians, motorbikes, tuktuks, massive trucks, and wheelbarrows. It’s a fun video. They were calling out things like “That looks like the market at Jos!” (a town north of here), when I drove though Cap Haitien, another said “Can this be so close to America? — how rich would we be if we were this close to America!” At the end of the video one of my drivers said “My Lord, Africa is everywhere in this world.”
It’s a little after 7 o’clock on a Thursday night. I’m in my room in my work-out clothes when I get a call from my Logistics Supervisor, the most senior Nigerian national staff on my team. “Robert just called me. He’s been in an accident with a motorcycle. He’s freaking out, the guys on the bike are hurt pretty bad and he’s taking them to the hospital. It’s the teaching hospital at the University, can you meet us there?” “Yes, of course… I’ll be right there.”
I expect this will be a long night. I strip off my gym clothes and throw on my work pants and shirt. I grab US dollars and Nigerian Naira from my stash. Check that I have both phones, battery packs, water, and some bananas. Everything is thrown in my backpack with a change of clothes. As I’m leaving my room the Project Coordinator is running down the stairs, “Joseph, there’s been a traffic accident!” “I know, I’m on my way there!” “I will join you!”…and we set off.
After we leave through the front gate I get a call from the Logistics Supervisor, “I’ve caught up with Robert, but the teaching hospital won’t admit the injured guys, so we are on our way to Bishop Murray hospital.” A doctor had been kidnapped a couple weeks earlier and was still being held, so the local doctors had called a strike for Wednesday-Friday to put pressure on the State government to get him released. We had run into that strike. We divert to Bishop Murray, and see our vehicle as we get inside. It’s backed up to the emergency entrance, the back doors are open. My driver and Logistics Supervisor are standing at the back doors of the Toyota, along with a policewoman. In the back of our Land Cruiser, I find 2 guys laid out on the bench seats, not moving and blood dripping down to the floor. “What’s the hell is going on? Why aren’t they in the emergency room?” The policewoman, with little apparent concern, tells me that they have no staff here either and we need to find a private clinic.
We are off again… to a private clinic. My Supervisor has jumped in the back of the damaged Land Cruiser turned ambulance to keep the guys from rolling off the bench seats when they go around a turn. The policewoman is riding shotgun. Robert is still driving that vehicle, but he shouldn’t be. I was so completely focused on the unconscious guys in the back that I didn’t realize that Robert is also is bleeding from the left side of his head where the motorcycle driver came face first through the window and head butted him. The Supervisor has a driver’s license and should probably be behind the wheel. Or I should be.
When our 2 vehicles arrive at the gates there are police waiting for us. I recognize one of the policewomen that was centrally involved with our previous accident getting off a motorcycle taxi wearing an orange vest. We are on a first name basis. I don’t want to be on a first name basis with a traffic accident policewoman. But this is where I find myself. She blocks our entrance with her arms across her chest shaking her head. “This clinic is too expensive. Take them to the Philadelphia Clinic farther down the road.” And we do.
We arrive at Philadelphia and Robert erratically backs his Land Cruiser up to the entrance, almost knocking motorbikes off the landing. I jump out of the other, where I am coincidentally riding with the driver from our previous accident and the PC. Someone opens the Land Cruiser’s back doors and the receptionist rolls out a wheelchair — they don’t have a gurney. And then everyone stands around turned away from the open doors. It’s not in their job description. Not the police, not the PC or the Supervisor, not my Driver.
Eventually, someone from the Clinic comes out. He grabs each patient under the shoulders, and I take them at the knees. The motorcycle driver is unconscious. His face is a mess, puffy and lacerated, the back of his head is dripping blood. The motorcycle passenger (it was a taxi ride) is now conscious with no visible injuries, but his face is twisted and groaning with pain when we sit him down into the wheelchair.
With the critical patients finally getting medical care I belatedly recognize that Robert needs attention. I get The Supervisor to drive him to the medical facility of his choice. One that is fully staffed and doesn’t have to pay kickbacks to the traffic police to get admissions. Things settle into the Emergency Room wait. The PC volunteers to pay the clinic admission fees since the injured have no family present. We wait outside under a moon lit sky. I make small talk with our driver. The PC is surveying the crops in the adjacent fields and thinks they will flood. Time has almost stopped. I wander into the clinic every so often the gauge the mood. I realize no one will die tonight. The motorcycle driver is sitting up and talking to the police as he is being bandaged.
The policewoman sees me. “My Oga, welcome!, So wonderful to see you again!” The last thing I want to do is see her again, but this is an interaction that will repeat over and over during the next hours, days, and weeks. With everyone in the traffic accident investigations unit. With the shady money dealers holding court under the tree outside the police station. And even with the police chief himself. I am welcomed as an old friend.
When I paid my final visit to “E” Division after the last accident I was waiting for the police report in small hot room with the typist as she hunt and pecked her way through the couple of paragraphs. There are no computers. It sounds like it is the first time she has used the machine. When she makes a mistake she curses, removes the page, and goes down the hall to get another sheet of paper. While she is working on the next draft another woman enters the room. She stands in front of me gesticulating and speaking loud Pigeon English I don’t understand. One thing I’ve learned to be in the police implacably stoic.
I come here regularly week after week. Why am I here? Sometimes I don’t really understand, but I feel I need to respond to the summonses amicably. They have temporarily released our Land Cruiser so that we can use it for our humanitarian activities, but the trade is that I need to report on a regular basis on the resolution of the negotiations over damages. There are periods of calm when I am hanging out with the investigators when they chit chat and often seem to forget I’m there. But as soon as another accident-involved civilian shows up the theatrics explode. Insults, condemnation, threats are yelled… but always the direction turns to the need to pay money to make things right.
Back with the typist… the volume of the woman in front of me ratchets higher and higher. I just sit there completely disengaged like she’s on a movie screen. I assume my passivity enrages her because soon she is crazed and screaming — a couple of staff come in from the hallway to see about the commotion and drag her from the room. As her yells grow softer down the hall I have a strange surreal feeling. Did that just happen? I’m not sure my gaze ever left the flowery bushes and wrecked vehicles I was contemplating through the window before she charged in. Just as before the dominant sound in the room are those same tentative typewriter strokes adding each letter to my one-page document.
In a quiet moment near the start of this new traffic police epic the investigator turns to me, “Do you remember that woman last time you were here? She wanted to fight me. I mean really fight with me!” He chuckles and shakes his head. “She doesn’t give out paper for no money.”
Over the next few weeks I realize I’ve become a legend or punchline of sorts. The white man who came in with a crazy expensive vehicle yet refuses to pay a single Naira for normal services because he is on some strange anti-corruption crusade and requires a receipt for even the smallest payment.
During my first meeting that included the police and the family of the motorcycle driver the investigator went through a theatrical request for money to me. I was initially surprised because I thought that his understanding of our payment policy was long behind us. But then I understood when he turned to the family and asked for payment. The brother pulled out some small bills from his pockets and reached out to the investigator. The investigator pantominingly recoiled, pulled his hands back, said something quickly I didn’t catch but included the word “corruption”. He slowly turned my way, the brother’s attention followed. I placed my hands over my ears, the old brass monkey “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” came to my mind. They both laughed and the small notes were collected.
At a later meeting one of the money men from yard stuck his head through the window, “Welcome Oga, welcome.” I respond “Good afternoon”. “How is your work, Oga?” “Very fine, how is yours?” Ritual greetings frame every interaction. I spend so much time every morning asking and answering, “How was your night?” But the money man is looking for a quick punch line, “We need your cash outside, Oga.” I’ll play along, “I thought you recognized me from my last visit?” He bursts out laughing, and I can hear him call out “I don’t carry receipts!” as he walks away.
Another time as I walk down the corridor towards the office of the police chief a woman sticks her head out of an office as I am passing. “Whenever you are here everyone stops thinking about their work and is laughing, do you bring laughing gas when you visit?” Obviously, I get a pass on things nobody else gets a pass on. As the investigator says to his boss, the DPO, when he calls him on the phone, “The white man from that, um, organization is here.”
On this visit I’m just trying to get the police report — or technically the police “extract”. The “report” requires input from the Vehicle Inspection Officer, and I’m on the VIO’s shit list after the last accident. The extract just gives the basic facts and can be drafted inside “E” Division. It just states the identity of those involved, the types of vehicles and their registration information, where and when the accident occurred; but it doesn’t draw any conclusions about who is at fault.
With the previous accident I was on the path to getting the “Report” when I ran into the VIO. Our insurance company told me they required the report, presumably so that they could press the guy who ran into the back of our Land Cruiser for reimbursement for our repair costs. I arrived at the VIO office with my driver and a police officer with me thinking it was going to be a quick in-and-out where he looked at the damage to our Land Cruiser and used that to calculate the speed of the collision. At least that is what I was led to believe.
He invites us into his office after we make the drive to the North Bank. I don’t want to give you the false impression that he is some moneyed bigwig who is profiting off his power. His office is a trailer and the furniture he invites us to sit on are once cushy living room recliners propped up on cinder blocks, upholstery torn and stuffing so far gone in places that one butt cheek hangs in the air precariously over a presumable spring. My spine is being tested… in more ways than one.
He gives a very long-winded greeting, introduction, and speech about the importance of the Vehicle Inspection bureaucracy. He is leading up, of course, to asking for money. We made this appointment to see the VIO with the police about a week before. It’s worth noting that there are two things imposing themselves into my brain as I sit in this office. The first is that I am very stressed about the deteriorating conditions 30 km up the road in the in the IDP camps, and every minute I waste my time listening to this sell job is making my blood boil. The second is that I got an email this morning laying out the fact that our Abuja office had not made our insurance payment on time and the insurance company has declared that our policy was lapsed during the accident — we have no coverage, and his official report does me no good.
The VIO tells me the inspection itself costs 10,000 Naira, “But to perform the inspection I also require a 5,000 Naira logistics fee in case I am called to testify in court. I am not provided a means to travel and otherwise it comes out of my own pocket.” Looking at the condition of his office I am a little sympathetic. But my emotions are anchored in the camps a short drive north — and I’m about to lose my temper.
I give him the standard spiel. Our organization is forbidden from making cash payments without a receipt to document what we are paying for. He starts back in at the beginning of his canned pitch, with a couple modifications. He will provide a receipt for the inspection, but no receipt is possible for the “logistics fee”. And without the logistics fee, the inspection will not be done. I believe I just go back though our policy at that point, and he responds, “I don’t think you are hearing me”. “I am hearing every single word very clearly”. We go back and forth for a bit and while I’ve already expressed that our financial regulations are inflexible and in the support of “good governance”, at some point I throw out the C-word. “Undocumented payments are an indication of Corruption.” By this time things have gotten tense in the room. I’m no longer sitting back in my seat, I’m squared up with him across his desk. The policewoman has gotten up, paced a bit, and lingers just outside the door within earshot. My driver and mechanic keep trying to interrupt me and suggest we should talk outside. But I want to push this to its conclusion.
“I will not pay a logistics fee, will you perform the inspection?” When he answers goes back to the beginning of his spiel, I turn and walk out, pulling the others with me.
It’s a silly bit of theater, almost nothing is at stake. But my frustrations have turned me into something I don’t recognize. Am I the anti-corruption evangelist, the rude naïve foreigner? As we pull out of the VIO compound the wheels are turning in my head. We picked the policewoman up at “E” Division as a curtesy and took her with us to the VIO. I instruct the driver to drop her off out front. She insists I come in to brief the DPO. I tell my mechanic to wait until we have gone inside and then drop the crippled vehicle at the body shop to start the repair. The last leverage they have over us is to confiscate the Land Cruiser and I’m not sure if I have burned that bridge. I tell them to turn off their phones when they leave.
Back to this accident and sitting in all the too familiar room at “E” Division is the investigation team, me and my driver, and the brother of the injured motorcycle driver. The driver is not here because his arm is in a splint and coming here on the back of a motorbike is painful. His worst injury turns out to be the broken lower arm. After a few days the swelling has gone down and he has no apparent long-term damage to his head and face. We pay his medical bills until he checks out of the clinic to receive traditional medicine for his arm in his village. The motorcycle passenger can walk to the police station a few days later. He was on his way back from his church when the accident occurred, asks for no compensation, and provides an unbiased perspective on the accident.
The next step is the police “extract”, and an awkward discussion ensues about getting the extract printed. For some reason I volunteer “If you need to print the extract for me I’ll provide some paper.” The place explodes with excitement — the word spreads. A woman runs in from the hall “You will give us a ream of paper!”, “No, I didn’t say that, not a whole ream!”.
When I come to pick up the extract I bring a stack of crisp white printer paper about 3/8 of an inch high that I steal from the printer on the way out the door.
I am an instant hero at “E” Division.
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