allAfrica.com: Nigeria: On the Niger Delta (I) (Page 1 of 1)

I travelled to Akassa to conduct interviews with volunteers from the London-based agency: Voluntary Service Overseas, VSO. I had already conducted interviews with those undertaking tasks in the states of Niger, Kano, Cross River and Plateau.

The ride from Obudu in Cross River State to Yenagoa in Bayelsa State was not as thrilling as the ride in a speedboat from Yenagoa to Akassa.

The word "thrilling" held in it an element of subdued terror in that loss of certainty that travelling in a vehicle that is running on solid land holds. For one with severely malnourished capacity for swimming in a body of water, let alone in wide bands of water that rolled and turned around wild clumps of mangrove vegetation with tangled roots that rose in angry snarls from the water, there was a dense cloud of danger all through the rise.

That ride took 45 minutes of nonstop sways and swings along water routes without beckoning landmarks and promises of arrival. The route simply refused to withdraw its rich texture of confusion and perplexity, but forced on me a deep sense of wonder and respect for the talent of the boat pilot who showed no hesitation as to which turn in the labyrinth of waterways and islands of mangrove vegetation to follow. I sensed a hidden power in the secret of being a "son of the creeks" and the ownership of its geography.

We arrived in the middle of that kind of gentle rain drizzle that never seems to exhaust its store that sits up in a dirty-grey sky from horizon to horizon like a rude basket being held over life and living. Two surprises immediately asserted themselves. A carpet of water sat on whatever land surface there was. Here, I would be told, the soil receives so much water that it chokes and takes at least five minutes after rain has stopped falling for all the water to go under.

The second one was the large number of channels of water one has to cross in any distance one walks over. Unlike Nigeria's savannah on which one could close one's eyes and walk in either a straight or meandering line to a given target, here one was under the constant promise of plunging the next step into a water channel. The multitude of water "roads" along which the speedboat had roared was being replicated here in the small cluster of palm-leaf huts and brick walled houses of Akassa.

The rudest first shock was the sight of a man squatting on top of a wooden platform erected above a water channel. He was in a moment of using the water below as a toilet. Since it was raining, he needed a capacity to distance himself from the load he was departing with. Nature can mock social sensibilities and demand new forms of convenient non-seeing. But nature was not as rude to me as what failures in governance threw at me. First was a health clinic run by a nurse who said she had trained at the University Teaching Hospital in Ibadan; and returns for retraining periodically. She was a daughter of Akassa and continued to exist there because no one else lasts long there.

We arrived at her clinic on a small motor-driven canoe; climbing out of which onto dry land was a hazard. One walked on a water-hugged and lightly visible footpath to a building whose wall rose abruptly from the water and grass. There were no out-patients. A woman had delivered her baby the day before and left for home the same day. The nurse smiled gently when I showed and expressed surprise. She saved herself from the effort of speech and merely turned around to lead us to the one ward she looked after.

The ward was empty. All the 20 beds were without mattresses. One had a pillow with old generations of sweat that had turned into a deep soil-brown. Each bed was of metal frame and networks of iron rings, with those along the rims held by a hook in a hole. They were once made and sold by "Vono". The condition of the roof sat silent and knowing. It explained through its brutal silence why the single birth that had happened in that clinic the day before had fled with the baby.

A large portion of it, dark with a record of rain water having soaked through the cardboard, had given way from holding a large body of water that had leaked through the corrugated iron roofing. Its cardboard now hung downwards like the vast ear of a rogue elephant. It was menacing. It dangled with contempt for any notion of citizenship in this border of Nigeria as it met the Atlantic Ocean. The nurse said that the toilets had been bolted because of the terror they held inside them. The woman that had given birth had afterwards walked into the rain to wash away the after-bath under the mangrove bush. Any notion of government provision of healthcare here was a permanent form of invisible brutality.

The white British nurse from Northern Ireland had told me about her excitement at suddenly finding herself being useful. People came to the clinic on the days she was due to visit the clinic because she came with a stock of drugs. She understood the deep frustration of a highly trained local nurse sitting in her house to minimise the frustration of meeting patients without drugs to give to them. There was no point prescribing drugs that could only be bought from places patients were too poor to travel to. But she buzzed with excitement each time the volunteer nurse brought new drugs.

As a confirmation of her feeling useful to a desperately needy people, the nurse told me of often being woken up at 2 or 3 o'clock in the night to attend to a woman with obstructed or prolonged labour pains. A group of women would have lifted the woman into a canoe and paddled along creeks to reach the house rented for her from the Chief of Akassa. Even when there was no moonlight, these women knew their way in pitch darkness along the labyrinth of waterways. No men accompanied them, she complained bitterly. Men would not help in lifting women in labour into and out of canoes. The women had no money to keep torches and lamps for use in such medical emergencies.

At sunset on the second day at Akassa, I walked along a path away from the cluster of houses near the house of the rented house of the Chief. I was soon facing the ocean as its waves rushed with foams laughing onto the shore. My gaze turned onto dark slabs of cement lying below the water on the shoreline. There was a long row of them as far as I could track them. They were a puzzle.

I had seen rock boulders piled off the coast at Dakar in Senegal behind the house of the legendary filmmaker Ousmane Sembene. Against them the rushing waves crashed and swirled out white foams before breaking down into slowed rolls on and across sand and beach. Here, there was clearly no effort at breaking the surge and speed of waves. I would later be told that a group of politicians had won a contract to build a cement wall (probably in imitation of what Hitler's army had tried to build around Europe from the Baltic Sea to the Mediterranean during the Second World War).

They had brought the slabs of cement, laid them on the shoreline, been paid millions of naira (when the naira exchanged for one American dollar), and, as the saying goes, "abandoned the project". Nobody had ever prosecuted them for not fully implementing the contract; and the Akassa community continued to live with the threat of erosion from the ocean.

To be continued

web allafrica.com	Enter your search terms	Submit search form
OR subscribers use AllAfrica's premium search engine


Use our pull-down menus to find more stories

Today's Most Active Stories