LEKKI LIFE

Tuesday 23rd September 2008
4 ½ Months and counting…

I like the sound of that, “Lekki Life”, sounds like something you’d find in an upscale inflight magazine or something you'd find in the FT Weekend Life & Arts section. I’ve just come back from the University of Lagos. I studied there for six years and it took me a whole six years to learn the correct way to chat up young ladies (I was discussing my early learning days with my driver, and it brought back good memories). I used to go up to them and tell them how beautiful they were while my friends sniggered in the background. It actually used to go very well until they caught a glance of my friends sniggering in the background. I got rid of my friends as I improved… It’s still a peaceful environment but plastered with signs warning students not to join cults (gangs). We never had that in our days, only wearing designer clothes (baffs) and chasing young ladies and looking for cars to go to parties in.

Now that the kids are back in school, my commute to/from VI/Lekki has become a many headed monster. Being a rookie (like Obama, as they say) I thought things were not so bad over the school holidays. 5.45am turned to 6am and then even to 6.30am and life was good. Now, try leaving the house at 1min after 6am and the traffic that will meet you outside your door will seem like rush hour in Tokyo (or rush hour in Lagos, as the Japanese would say).

Lagos definitely is not asleep at 6am, no sleepy early morning cock crowing at 6am. The cock was having a bath at 4am and had left the building by 5. One good result about this traffic is that I am forced to look at 4x4’s as a necessity. What with the rains (floods) and the fact that there is a coastal sandy road that can cut your trip from VI to Lekki down from 2hrs to 45mins and the fact that only with a 4x4 can you cross the intersection and run from Lasma or armed robbers or other undesirables, it is essential that I start saving up for my tooled up ML55 and woe betide any green environmentalist that gets in my way as I speed home over those sandy dunes…