It is that time of the year again…
It is that time of the year, the rains are back and Lagosians may be swimming soon. Sometimes, this comes with days of drying wires in some areas — although this is improving, for some, you can calculate the number of days without power based on the length and depth of winds, the sounds of many claps of thunder and the torrent of rain.
But that is not even the crux of my thought today.
As I took a walk around a part of Lagos a few days back, a lot of sights stung me with every passing step. I wondered why some parts of the drainages were filled to the brim with materials they were not designed to handle — wastes of different kinds, some packaged in sacks, others in nylons and then the worst, those that litter the gutters without any effort to not even make it less horrible.
Why?
Leaving trash for LAWMA is affordable and becoming more accessible, so why does it come easy for people to litter the environment? What level of thinking would you be operating on to think that is okay to litter everywhere with dirt in reckless abandon? Is it something they think about or it just comes easy? I mean, you finish eating and instead of you to find the next dustbin, the wrapper or nylon takes the first flight out of your hands to the ground. No checks, no nothing, just nonsense vibes.
I literally couldn’t take that route back home.
I think the thought pattern that leads to this kind of living experience is cascaded across other areas of the fabric of this nation. People really do not care about what happens to the next person so far it does not affect them. Sometimes, you can have people walk past a pile of improperly disposed waste in their compound to their properly arranged room, without seeing the disconnect.
“E no concern me”, their minds most likely retort.
It is the same thing that intrinsically affects our disposition to corruption in little spaces — so far I can get my extra or have my way, I really do not care how others live or feel. That I get some extra in a way that means the other person gets nothing, means nothing to them. Sadly, at the moment, it looks as if nothing can be done.
We are beginning to normalize the abnormal so much that the expected normal is becoming a misnomer. Maybe the hack is to find a community of people who think like you or even better, because it is not only the floods that may drown you, the thoughts and giving in, could likely do too.
Anyway, it looks like that time of the year again, when cars swim and men roll up trousers as shoes designed to walk on waters have their filled day. It may be the poorly designed road without drainage or built in a way that does not allow water to drain, or that person that decides to be a thief in the night, and steal the waterways, with the dirt they leave hanging.
If you can, as you should, in the words of the street philosopher, Olamide, “Leave trash for LAWMA”.
Moving past the things that hold us back in the country would need some massive form of massive mental “reverse and take another route” if we have to move forward. But I am worried, a lot of Nigerians are poor, do they have the bandwidth to think whether these things are right or wrong, or they just see things in a different way?
