From Abuja to Khartoum: An expedition
However, my assumptions were rendered void even before I arrived Khartoum. Below is the story of my experience, which at best, describes Nigeria, inspite of her huge resources, as a country that has much to learn from others about the meaning of good leadership instead of being its model. After passing through all the security […]
However, my assumptions were rendered void even before I arrived Khartoum. Below is the story of my experience, which at best, describes Nigeria, inspite of her huge resources, as a country that has much to learn from others about the meaning of good leadership instead of being its model.
After passing through all the security checks in the departure hall of the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja, we waited as usual for about twenty minutes in the lounge before we were called to board the Ethiopian Airline plane. I noticed in the departure hall as well as in the lounge that there was neither a single television set for news and entertainment nor digital television screens to give passengers safety or travelling information. My mind failed to get a convincing reason to explain the non-availability of these electronic facilities at an international airport that supposedly should be of world standard. Even so, my mind told me to appreciate whatever I saw at the Abuja airport because it would be wrong to compare Nigeria with Europe or America where everything that defines development and technology are provided at airports.
While on the queue at the tarmac to board the plane, I noticed a roofed wheel bridge, a modern boarding facility for the use of passengers, standing between the departure hall and the aircraft. It linked the lounge in the departure hall with the aircraft. The wheel bridge is to ensure unhindered boarding of the aircraft by passengers especially under severe or harsh weather conditions. We did not use the bridge to board the plane and my mind for the second time in half an hour could not understand why concerned airport authorities did not ask us to use it. The only plausible thought that came to my mind was that, after all, nothing works in Nigeria.
At 2:00pm (Nigerian time), the Boeing 737 aircraft flight ET 910 was airborne for a journey that lasted five hours. Shortly after take-off, one of the hostesses in the plane appeared and drew the curtain that separates the economy class (where I was sitting) from the business class. My seat was in the first row of the economy class which comes immediately after the last row of seats in the business class. From my seat, I saw through the curtains how passengers in the business class were served courses of light meals, soft drinks and newspapers for their reading delight. This was before the main meal on board was served to all passengers. “The consolation for those in the economy class”, according to a passenger sitting beside me, “is that all passengers in the plane regardless of class are piloted by the same pilot(s) and would therefore arrive at the disembarkation point at the same time”. I quickly reminded him that passengers in the business class deserve greater attention because they paid more money for the same distance of journey.
After about five hours, an announcement woke me up from sleep instructing passengers to fasten their seat belts as the plane was about to land at the Bole International Airport, Addis Ababa. At the Addis airport, we were taken through the wheel bridge from the aircraft in to the arrival hall. This was item number one on the list of differences I noted between a country where things work and another where they do not. Second, there were several flat-screen television sets hanging on the walls in the very big arrival hall, several times bigger than that at the Nnamdi Azikiwe “International” Airport in Abuja, Nigeria. There were also electronic television screens flashing flight schedules and their take off time. While waiting for my connecting flight to Khartoum due after two hours of rest, I had a session during which the things I could only see were those facilities that made Ethiopia, a poor African country, greater than Nigeria; at least when Addis airport is compared to Abuja airport.
There were fleets of aircrafts all around the tarmac with many of them taking off or landing during the two hours I spent at the Addis airport. I wondered at how Nigeria’s economy would have benefitted if government had a national carrier. I sat and watched though amazingly but cheerlessly at how over 400 passengers on our flight were sorted out for their connecting flights. Very many of the passengers were those travelling to India and Egypt with most of them looking sick and in company of their relations; indicating that they were likely travelling there for medical treatment. Wither Nigerian health care delivery system?
The failure of the healthcare system in Nigeria has become a good source of enriching other countries which are only as potentially endowed as Nigeria or even less in the case of India. A large number of the passengers on this flight were to take connecting flights from Addis Ababa to Dubai and Europe. I lamented the huge income Nigeria is losing to foreign airlines because of her deliberate will to kill Nigerian Airways through corruption. If a country like Ethiopia could efficiently manage an airline to the point of making it the backbone of her economy, I still wonder why Nigeria would fail to have and sustain an operational airline.
This is the kind of embarrassment, and in fact, shame to which Nigerian leaders in the past two and half decades have put the country to. Like my prejudice at the onset of this trip, I would not have felt as bad as I did if some of the things I saw at Addis airport were at Heathrow airport in the United Kingdom (UK) or J. F Kennedy airport in the United States of America (USA) because they are in the developed part of the world. Seeing countries smaller than Nigeria making it to where they want to be is, in my opinion, a slap on the face of a nation that calls (or once called herself) “Giant of Africa”.
At about 1:50pm (Nigerian time), passengers travelling to Khartoum were called out to collect their boarding passes. While on the queue waiting to collect mine, I noticed a big transparent box made of glass and positioned at a conspicuous place in the hall. It had an inscription asking for donations from the public to cater for the vulnerable (orphans, physically challenged, widows and the indigent). You could see, through the glass, the entire money donated. If this box were put in any Nigerian airport, it is most likely that the glass box would be broken and contents carted away when no one was watching. Here again, a feeling of reminiscence covered me as I thought of how the traditional Nigerian society has lost core values.
The flight ET 470 safely landed, after cruising in the air for one hour fifty-five minutes, in Khartoum international airport at about 3:30am (Nigerian time). Customs checks and stampings were done without any delays. In the arrival hall here, I saw a donation collection box which is bigger than the one I saw at Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. It was a transparent box as big as a 1,500 liter water tank. What makes this one unique is that, unlike the one in Addis airport, it had no cover. It was an open box. I curiously asked why the box though transparent was left in a public place such as an arrival hall without a cover. The soft-spoken Sudanese Arab, an airport security operative, told me it was to enable donors with high denominations of a currency donate some part and pick their change from the box. It would be impossible to try this in Nigeria at the moment as it would be stolen. It would look mysterious if, in a country where people arm themselves with sophisticated weapons to rob individuals and institutions such as banks, to leave an open transparent box or container full of cash without been stolen.
After daybreak with only about two hours of sleep and rest, I was at the federal ministry of information in Khartoum for accreditation as a journalist. At the ministry, I got accredited but the planned trip to Juba for the independence ceremony of Southern Sudan became a herculean task. The Juba airport, I was informed by the Director of Foreign Journalists and Correspondents Affairs had been closed to commercial flights twenty-four hours earlier. The directive, as explained, was from southern Sudan authorities. However, the Director, Usman Ali Abubakr Muhammad, gave me his phone number with a promise to reach out to see if there could be a way of helping me get to Juba. At about 6:00pm (Sudan local time), I called him for a feedback and he said even the presidency in Khartoum is short of any assistance in my frantic effort to get to Juba.
Still hopeful in my desire to reach Juba to witness the historic event of the newest country in the world scheduled to come up (then) in less than 48 hours, I contacted officials of the Nigerian Embassy in Khartoum who had already moved to Juba five days earlier to beat the deadline given for the closure of Juba airport to commercial flights by southern Sudan. The response was not different from that of the ministry of information. Yet, I refused to give up as I got in touch with the Editor-in-Chief of Media Trust Limited in Abuja for any possible assistance. All efforts from his side, too, were to no avail. The then yet-to-be-inaugurated Presidency of Southern Sudan appeared committed to enforcing the landing restriction it imposed. If anything, it was an indication that there is a new government in southern Sudan.
The following morning, being the eve of the event (Friday July 8 2011), I thought of filing a report on the mood in Khartoum, the capital city of Sudan. As I moved around the city, it was amazing to find all activities to be business as usual. Residents were not in festive moods as if nothing new was happening in the country. When the views of some Northern Sudanese Arabs were sought, they were united in their opinions that the cessation of southern Sudan was not a thing to jubilate about. One of those interviewed explained that it was “natural for northern Sudanese Arabs to be unhappy because”, according to him, “only a fool would celebrate the cessation of his country in to two”.
The next one week in Khartoum was a very busy period of seven days which saw me, in company of my tour guide, through interview trips to Qur’anic schools outside Khartoum, as well as to Hausa communities in the Khartoum districts of Inqaz and Mayo. Of course, I had to go through the pages of at least four newspapers daily whose sizes are twice the size of a standard Nigerian daily. On each day of my sojourn in Khartoum, I had a cause to lament the socio-economic situation in Nigeria. There were always one or more things to report about and to wish and pray that Nigeria and Nigerians were respectively Sudan and Sudanese! The only thing I never wished we learn in Nigeria from Sudan is the harsh weather condition in Khartoum. Coming from Nigeria where daily temperature is averagely 22 and 23 degree Celsius, it was not easy adapting to an average daily temperature of between 38 and 40 degrees in Khartoum city.
Without bothering readers with many details, it is pertinent to take you through a list of those things that, on a daily basis, increasingly demoralized my spirit as a Nigerian. Top on the list is the power sector in Sudan. For the short period I stayed in Khartoum, neither did the electricity from the public power source nor water from the taps went off or dry for a second. I asked a university student when last there was a blackout in Khartoum. He replied that he cannot really remember when last he experienced such. It was amazing to me that pre-paid electricity meters which can only be seen in urban towns and cities in Nigeria are the only source through which consumers could remain connected or disconnected to public power source in the whole of Sudan.
I did not hear the noise of a generator at any place including homes, hotels, banks, markets, hospitals and offices during my stay in Khartoum. It is obvious that any Sudanese businessman who decides to deal in the sale of generator sets or stabilizers would unarguably have his goods unsold for a long period of time. A young secondary school student told me he does not know what a stabilizer is when I asked about how many there are in their house. In Nigeria today, nearly every electrical appliance in our homes including refrigerators, freezers, air conditioners, desktop computers, television sets, etc, require a stabilizer to function efficiently. Unlike most Nigerian cities, towns and villages, I did not see any GSM battery charging centre; a proof of functional power sector.
I was prompted to ask, after six days of my stay in Khartoum, whether there were no ministers who live in Khartoum or if state governors did not pay visits to Khartoum because I did not hear sirens blaring from the convoy of government officials or VIPs. I was informed that only ambulances, the fire service and the President of the Republic use siren in Sudan. What an orderly society! It’s indeed a pity that Nigeria is looking up to learn from those ordinarily assumed to be backward. Still in the transport sector, it was admiring o see that their commercial buses had no attachment seats; a common phenomenon in Nigeria. It was also interesting to find their commercial drivers reading newspapers while waiting for their turn to load at motor-parks; a strange attitude among Nigerian commercial bus drivers. Their roads and streets are devoid of bumps which in Nigeria are used as speed breakers for vehicles and even commercial motorcycles where they are allowed to operate.
In terms of security, Sudan could be a model for Nigeria. You can be sure of your safety as you move around the city even at 2am without the fear of being stopped by an armed robber or bandit. The police are on 24/7 patrol. In situations of distress, you only need to dial “199” and the police will be there in the shortest possible time. Today in Nigeria, we can only hope for such.
The rate of development I saw in Sudan is tremendous. The last time I was there was seventeen years ago, as a postgraduate student. At that time, the poor country was yet to discover and explore oil resources. It was confirmed to me that whatever I noticed of physical development in Sudan took place after 2005 when the country started exporting crude oil. I concluded that oil in Sudan is, unlike in Nigeria, a blessing and not a curse.
From their social life, it is fascinating to know how Sudanese Arabs care for their wives. If a couple have a cause to go out together, the husband carries their little child as he walks behind the wife. The reverse is the case in Nigeria where husbands lead their wives and the latter carry or hold their little child. Nonetheless, I was not too comfortable at seeing nearly everyone including couples eating from the restaurant. This reminds me of their dishes, which mostly go along with bread. You will be served with a basket full off bread if you happen to order for dishes like fool (Sudanese beans), Fasuliyyah, Adath or Zigni.
One other thing that struck my mind in Sudan is the concern for the deaf and dumb in the dissemination of news. There is, for instance, the use of sign language during telecast of news on television; an important aspect that is still missing from the electronic media in Nigeria. Two newscasters feature at a time: the audible and the one that uses sign language, the latter usually an inset image on the television screen.
My trip back to Abuja via Addis Ababa was as safe as the one to Khartoum. However, inspite of all the stories narrated above, some of them amazing, it was unknown to me that there was bolt from the blue awaiting me at the end of the trip. The Boeing 767 Ethiopian aircraft touched ground at the Nnamdi Azikiwe Airport Abuja at mid-day on a Friday. As if concerned authorities knew I lamented the non-use of the wheel bridge on our way out, it was put to use this time around. The first noise I heard while passing through the bridge in to the arrival hall was that of siren. There and then, I knew I was back in Nigeria where it cannot be called traffic if it is devoid of siren noise. The great disappointment in the trip was received when I did not see my only travelling bag tagged in my presence at the Khartoum airport. So, I went home without my bag. Officials of the airline took my phone number and promised to call me after 24 hours to tell me of the position of my bag which they did. I was told the bag was left at the Bole Airport in Addis Ababa. I later got my bag when it was brought to the Abuja airport. It was indeed a remarkable trip.