Snapshots … effects of government’s incommunicado

Lagos, land of aquatic splendour and opportunities, will continue to attract attention from local and foreign investors, as well as the Federal and state governments, especially with its fast-rising mega-city status.

Apart from this, its openness to strangers and economy, irrespective of its long history of being a Yoruba city, makes it endearing. Perhaps, it was in recognition of this that the play, Snapshots was presented by Double Crown Troupe to mark Nigeria’s 56th independence anniversary.

Staged at Club One, Lagos, the play opens with a town crier singing for the people of Araromi, a slum area of the city, to wake up from their slumber. With the songs, the town crier urges the people to work hard to achieve their goals in life. He paints horrifying pictures of what would likely befall an indolent person in the town.

Sunup, the landlord of the major house in the slum, Baba Gentle (Akeem Falaye), saunters to the veranda looking worried. He has just lost a fortune and, to add salt to his injury, he hears that his house has been marked for demolition. Information making the rounds has it that the entire slum would be demolished for the new Urban Master Plan of the state government. Baba Gentle and other inhabitants of the community swear the plan would not see the light of the day. They vow to make it go the way others before it had gone.

To save his family house from going down, the landlord goes to his elder brother, Agba (Mark Adewale), a land speculator and an influential figure in Lagos politics, for help. He, however, finds out that his elder brother, too, is as helpless as he and other Araromi inhabitants.

At the said day of the demolition, the inhabitants of slum town, in one accord, abduct and drug the driver of the bulldozer (Dele Adeoti) and as well charge to do more harm to anybody that would touch their houses.

While the confusion drags on, word gets to the people that the Urban Plans has been modified to turn the ghetto into a tourism and cultural destination, with modern facilities to attract tourists across the globe and boost business in the state. By this change, everyone is free to live and carry on his/her economic and social activities as usual.

Armed with this new knowledge, the people realise that they have shot themselves in the foot; they release the driver, who is still suffering from the effects of the drug administered on him and as such could not operate the bulldozer. This puts the project on hold, pending when he would regain consciousness, as no one else within the limited time frame could operate the bulldozer.

Highlighting themes, including unity, perseverance, impunity, civil servants’ high handedness among others, the play shows how communication gap between leaders and the led brings distrust, which to a large extent makes the people to work at cross-purposes with little or no result achieved. This creates a lot of acrimony in the polity, making government believe that the people do not support its policy, and in turn, uses the instruments of coercion to achieve what dialogue should ordinarily have done with ease. It also brings to the fore the question of government being too faraway from the people, which gives some powerful citizens the opportunity to play god.

Written by Bode Sowande, but directed by Nike Ademola, the play also reveals the extent to which the oppressed can go to express their ill feelings when they are pushed to the wall. Inherent in this, is a warning to those in power: they should never think that because they have the machinery of governance in their control, as represented by the seeming helplessness of inhabitants of Araromi, that the people couldn’t rise against them. The people of Araromi are no doubt, a personification of the people’s might. Nigerian government had a feel of this during Jonathan’s oil subsidy removal. Here, it depicts that with one mind, a well-informed citizenry can change government’s policy; no matter the level it has reached. Lastly, the play calls for a need to first understand government’s policy before criticising it.

However, despite its good storyline, Snapshots is long, complex and a bit difficult to understand. This complexity makes it boring, as it jumbles disparate themes and ideas together and therefore cloud comprehension.

Here, lighting would have been most appropriate to explicate some of the sub-plots, particularly in giving expression to the different moods. Also, it would have been proper to use light to flashback some of the emotional scenes, such as where Lady Gaga (Toro Olwusegun) and her girls showed-off their stock-in-trade as streetwalkers while bemoaning their rejection from the community.

Though, the director effectively managed the large cast, he, however, did not adequately depict the status of the various groups with the right costumes. Also, may be because of space, the entrance and exit were not properly marked out, which confused some of the cast, making them to use the exit when they were supposed to use the entrance. This further heightened the complexity of the play.

A melodrama of Nigeria, where the people and government trivialise and politicise serious economic issues, the hilarious comedy deploys a collage of activities to show how the people most times, thwart government’s good intention to develop the country and reasons government should from time to time hold town hall meetings to explain its policies to the people.