Back in Lagos, the continent’s biggest city. This is where the Taxify drivers have the most aggressive business ideas, the mobs of moto-taxi drivers at big intersections jockey hardest for position, and the indomie stands stay open the latest. It is the ultimate place of hustle.
The flights to from Dakar to Lagos arrive before dawn, but by the time you’ve smashed your finger into the print-reader at the Airtel shop enough times to get a SIM card, the sky is turning from black to grey. And once you’re on the bridge to Victoria Island, you can see the boats going out from the impoverished fishing villages that sit directly on the water, in front of the skyscrapers.
This was an interesting time to be in town, right between the federal and state elections, each of which bring the country to a standstill. The federal election, which by number of registered voters was expected to be the biggest in the history of Africa, had seen low turnout rates and a win for the incumbent. And some violence. I was supposed to get out of town on Friday, before Saturday’s state elections.
After a few days of meetings, my counterpart at our client offered to take me out for a night on the town. The club was basically what I expected. The Lebanese owners had made every possible effort to demonstrate that it was expensive. The walls were covered with crowns of different shapes and sizes, the chandeliers seemed to be made of innumerable gold necklaces, and the bar was broken into sections by huge golden statues of horse heads. The drinks were priced to match, but the clientele didn’t mind.
Most of the parties were made up of bankers aggressively buying drinks for dressed-up women affecting a studied indifference, in a dynamic that clearly had more layers than I could understand. As the smoke thickened, the DJ dispensed with foreign music and the dancing quickened, and the beers added up. The crowd sorted itself into three rough categories: the heavy hitters with the reserved private booths, the scrappy independents fighting for space around the bar, and the groups like mine, who by showing up early enough had gained possession of one of the unreserved tables.
Life was hard for those with no table. They were constantly under threat of new rivals trying to dislodge them from their positions. At the same time, as many of the women began to gravitate to the booths, the independents were left with diminishing chances, and upped their spending accordingly.
The music boomed and I could hear nothing that anyone tried to say to me. The sheer energy, the relentless drive of the place, threatened to overwhelm me, but I needed to keep the pace, and shouted back unheard sentences at my client. At some point we decided to leave, and it was back into the Lagos night, and the streets that look like a surreal copy of somewhere in the US, and a bed in a double-locked room in a guarded hotel on a guarded street, and the end of another incomprehensible trip to Nigeria.
The plan was to catch a 10am flight from Lagos to Dakar. By the time I ripped myself out of bed at 8:30, it was already over. Even a highly motivated Taxify driver blasting Magnito could not change the inevitable.
I showed up disheveled and sucking wind at the Air Cote d’Ivoire counter to find a Nigerian crew cleaning the check-in desk, and not a single Ivorian. The next hour was a classic scramble of the truest type that I have come to love.
Begging and pleading with Air Cote d’Ivoire office staff, pulling out every bargaining trick in the book to buy an ASKY flight leaving in an hour (but failing), sprinting to other airline offices, trying to convince the Arik Air staff that I was not a missionary (again, failing), taking out monstrous wads of cash to buy the flight while the ATM line grew rapidly behind me, and finally handing over my wad and receiving a hand-written crumpled blue piece of paper in return.
My magic ticket to Dakar.
Home.