A bit of transnational gossip
by Armel Grant Cousine *
Trade goods stand before the security check at Murtala Muhammed Airport, queuing for the owners who lounge watchfully in nearby chairs. Crates of beer, corned beef, sardines; big cardboard cartons labelled Sony and National Panasonic; Omo, Tide, Lux; toothpaste and toilet soap. Just before the flight is called there is a silent, ferocious rush for position, then a dash for seats. The plane is packed. A girl slides into the seat next to me. ‘Hello, Grant,’ she says. ‘I’m Gladys. I meet you in Fela house when Jimmy Cliff was there.’ She heaves a crate of Long Life into position and puts her feet on it. At that moment a fat lady struggles past carrying many things. Without a word she adds a jeroboam of Vat 69 to the beer. I put my feet on it. People are stuffing things into the overhead luggage bins. There is Omo on the floor. With a faint cry, a professor from Abidjan vanishes under a shower of sardine tins. Ghana Airways’ Friday evening Lagos-Accra flight is getting itself together.
Packed to the roof with people and things, the plane takes six miles to reach takeoff. As the vast glittering sprawl of evening Lagos revolves round the port wingtip, Gladys gives a moan of terror and clutches my arm. We agree to share a taxi into Accra from the airport. I fill in her landing card (all except the signature, which she gets another man to do). At Accra, I wait an hour and a half for Gladys to pass through customs. The problem is not Gladys but a colossal pile of consumer goods and basic necessities which she has stashed in the luggage compartment. Eventually she emerges, like a nineteenth-century explorer, leading a long file of porters.
The problem repeats itself at the taxi rank, where Gladys’s property fills three cars (there are only two left by this time). I begin to regret my acquaintanceship with her when the army enters the picture. ‘Thirty cedis,’ the soldiers are saying. Gladys makes a long speech, the essential word of which is ‘twenty’. After prolonged negotiations, Gladys, the vital supplies, four soldiers, two porters, my suitcase and I are rushed to a remote suburb of Accra in an army truck for C22, looking like some kind of CIA special operation.
Like the naira, the cedi started life as ten bob. Now it is worth either 50 kobo or under 20 kobo – depending on how you get your cedis. Whether that C22, and prices in Accra in general, seem a lot or a little depends on your point of view. At the official rate of exchange C22 is worth about N12, on the black market about N4. Either way, taxi fares are very low compared with Lagos, partly because of the excellent road system. But all food, consumer durables and necessities like soap are very expensive – in cedis. A labourer can earn as little as C4 a day. When, a few weeks ago, the price of kenkey (a sourdough dumpling, a staple dish in parts of Ghana) approached 50 pesewas a ball, the poorest strata of the working population in the cities faced not hardship but actual crisis. A heavy-handed government move to enforce a controlled price for kenkey drove the sellers off the streets for a week. The problem was the scarcity, and consequent high price, of the maize from which kenkey is made.
The government blames the traders for the price inflation, accusing them of hoarding and exacting unreasonable profits. The traders blame the government, accusing it of not doing enough to ensure essential supplies and promote long-term growth. Both sides have a point. But it is well known that traders charge what the market will bear. Price controls only work if supplies are adequate. If distribution is carried out through traders, it simply stops when the traders can no longer make an adequate profit. Gladys – and all the pretty, civil, hard-working Gladyses, Bessies and Comforts of this charming city – are realists. They do not expect overnight fortunes; trading is a living and a way of life. It is simply that airline excess baggage is not a cheap way of transporting low-price commodities. This fact is reflected in the marketplace, to the dismay of Ghanaians whose salaries are very low by Nigerian standards.
Ghana’s real problem, of course, is its vulnerability to the effects of world inflation, resulting in part from the heavy foreign debt left by the government’s predecessors. The present government’s Operation Feed Yourself scheme – or farming projects connected with it – has achieved more (in a rather longer period) than Nigeria’s Operation Feed the Nation. Agricultural production has improved and Ghana is now self-sufficient in rice. But maize is another matter and during this year’s May, June and July – always lean months for food – prices began their familiar spiral. In this context, the government’s ban on food imports began to seem premature as city workers faced starvation in the long-suffering manner characteristic of Ghanaians. Kenkey is now back down to 30 pesewas a ball – three times what people are used to paying, but less than it was. The government recently denied rumours that 20,000 tons of Canadian maize given as aid and intended as poultry food had been sold to kenkey makers at a low price. So the price reduction has been achieved in some other, unspecified way. Kenkey seems to taste grittier than it used to, but at least its colour is normal again, having lost the lurid yellow tinge of last month.
Just before leaving Lagos I noticed that the hideous and dangerous concrete fence posts down the middle of the widened Ikorodu Road were being joined up by what looked like twenty strands of heavy barbed wire to a height of twelve feet. Doubtless this is intended to hamper pedestrian traffic and ease the flow of vehicles. But has anyone considered what would happen to a motorcyclist unlucky enough to be thrown into this fence? Instant suiya. Are people so anxious to rehabilitate the slum that they don’t mind turning it into a concentration camp?
When you’re in it, Lagos seems a nightmare: grim, noisy and garish but with a curious dream-like quality induced by the incessant delays and failures resulting from congested roads and malfunctioning telephones. When you’ve been away for a week – when the ringing has died out of your ears and your giant mosquito bites have begun to fade – it starts to beckon like a glittering dream of energy, of something happening in Africa. ‘Just come from Lagos? Then you must appreciate us,’ said an Accra acquaintance with a smile. But young Ghanaians brave endless bureaucracy and hassling to get passports, visas and foreign exchange vouchers to come there, even buying black market nairas at C6 each, not just to trade, but to come and see the legendary place, to live there and acquire its dubious skills. ‘There’s money there,’ they say. But that isn’t the whole story. People go to great cities simply because they are there, to see if what they’ve heard is true.
We all want Lagos to be cleaned up. Or do we? Perhaps its vast unconcerned squalor is a crucial part of its particular piquancy. It is difficult to visualise a clean, efficient, well-finished Lagos. Like the pepper in its food, perhaps we can only enjoy the place as it does us some sort of minor but permanent harm.
12 August 1977 (other publication details unknown)
* Published pseudonymously
John Howe: Bricolage: Essays, Journalism and Improvisations 