The Road to Niger

Nigeria is bigger than you think.

I checked my Nysc portal on April 15, and to my surprise, I had been posted to Niger. This was a far cry from the realities I had thought possible.

The next day we were at Otto and Fadeyi to inquire about buses going to Niger, At Otto, we got a price of around ₦15,000, which was from the Niger State Transport Authority (N.S.T.A., a Niger state-owned transport company). One of the first things I learned is that different states in the north own transport companies, and the prices are usually cheaper than the competition and probably safer.

I woke up around 4 am and was probably the first to wake up at home, Was it the anxiety or the stress of packing? I don't know.

We left home around 5:30 am and got to the park around 5:45 or 5:50 a.m. We were expecting the bus to move around 6:00 am, but that day, the bus ended up moving way later. One amusing thing I have seen regularly is the way our mothers just meet themselves somewhere without knowing each other, and there is this instant connection as if they had always known each other. But the most surprising part of this ordeal was that the bus price was now ₦10,000, and we were sitting down three in a row.

Another interesting fact is that in that same park, some were charging up to ₦17,000 and were getting filled up before the cheaper ones, Many reasons influenced this, a list which I will put below and explain

Some people booked beforehand and did not compare and contrast.

The transporters took advantage of many of us because they knew we were corps members and didn't know where we were going or what it was like.

The location of the competition and also some of the transporters were scaring the intended passengers and also used lies and deceptions with things like, those people don't know the way, there is no other transporter in the front, e.t.c

The bus got filled up around 7:12 am, and the journey commenced around 7:30. As usual, they did not fill the bus with petrol till we left the park, so let's say the bus left the park at 7:45 am.

There were 14 people on the bus; 5 of them, including me, were corp members, and 1 was a tertiary student. Although I did not ask (the boy was kind of shy and uninteresting, and he also sat down in the front seat), 2 Nupe women, whom I thought were Hausa for around half the journey, and some other people who weren't so interesting.

Lagos to Ogun State was the shortest part of the journey, and it took around 20 minutes. Ogun to Oyo State was way longer via the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, The first few hours of the journey were pretty bleak, and there was little to say.

Ibadan had something awe-inspiring: a long, continuous stretch of houses uninterrupted by bush, water or emptiness—the longest I have seen in Nigeria.

After that was Osun State, and all this while I was checking the location on Google Maps, Osun State was one of those states that felt empty, and maybe the bus did not pass through the main parts of the city, but their capital, Ogbomoso, looked like a village, and everybody was just selling mango and water. The sale of mangoes was something that recurred throughout the journey, and that was all that was sold and sometimes bread.

From Osun to Kwara, I probably slept on the bus as there was nothing to do, no sights to see, and nothing to buy except mangoes—just long stretches of nothing. The same from Ilorin to Jebbah, in fact, for so many of these places, maybe because we missed it but most likely not. You do not even see a “welcome to a state” billboard.

When we got to Jebbah, the bus stopped for people to refresh, eat, pray and ease themselves. One thing you would first notice is that the place is used to accommodating travellers and that is the business of the place, Jebbah is a traveller’s hub and one of the stops for people going to the north central from the southwest and vice versa.

Our stop at Jebbah.

After Jebbah, we crossed a bridge, which at first I confused with the niger bridge because it also crosses the river niger (I wanted to attach a video of us crossing it but I felt the picture attached would do more justice), and then the Kainji town, which, as deduced from the name, is where the Kainji dam is located.

One thing vastly different about Niger State, and maybe a lot of places in the north look like that too, is that instead of forests, they have land with nothing on it that just goes on and on into the horizon (Osun State has it too). Coming from someone mostly domiciled in Lagos and Ogun State, you don't see that much land without nothing on it, it is the total opposite of Ibadan, which has a very long stretch of uninterrupted buildings and houses.

We did not have any more stops after Jebbah until we got to Minna; the stop was around 1.30 pm, and I think we resumed our journey by 2:30 pm. We got to Minna around 7:40 pm, and due to us not being able to secure transport going to Paiko early, we got to camp around 9:10 pm.

I skipped some information while writing the body text, so I will add some things that stood out to me here.

• The heat In Niger State is much, it got to a point in the journey, where we had to close the window because hot air was entering.

• They sell a lot of mangoes, right from Osun State to Niger; you could probably get around 10 pieces for 500 naira.

• They have this tree with red flowers both in Osun State and some parts of Niger State; you will see it in the videos.

• The 2 Nupe women on the bus did something amusing, one was speaking Nupe and the other was replying in Yoruba, When I discussed this with a friend on the bus, she said maybe that woman did not want the atmosphere to feel weird and was just being considerate.

• I thought Jebba was in Niger State but according to what I saw online, it is in Kwara state

EXTRAS

If the name of the place ends with Gi, then the people that live there are probably from the Gbagi tribe, for example, "Kutigi.”.

My Hausa friends started teaching me Hausa in camp, and the first thing I learned was Inakwana and Ina wuni, meaning good morning and good afternoon, respectively.