Kissing dust on Benin-Sapele-Warri Road

Benin-Sapele-Warri Road – or, better, if you so prefer it, Benin-Sapele-Warri Highway – is a bad road, a bad high-road, that will remain bad. Let me repeat it: Benin-Sapele-Warri Road is a bad road, a bad high-road that will remain bad. Why my insistence? Why my repetition? I will answer in this manner: the facts of the construction or of the re-construction of the road time after time over the years are the facts of history – the facts of ceaseless work on the road that is ceaselessly bad after money upon money is wasted on its revamping by its different revampers at different times. Let us not name names. It should be noted and very well understood, however, that the spirit of the history of the facts of the revamping is that of irony.

In general, it is no surprise that the millions, no, billions, that have been spent on the high-road were billions spent with the understanding, the full understanding and full seriousness, that the approved monies were approved with some hidden uncertainty about the efficacy and a just lapse of its duration.

This explains or accounts for why a determined commitment to upholding the moral standard of the high-road cannot adequately be followed or is never adequately followed. In other words, because all those who in one way or the other were involved in giving us a healthy and a structurally sound road – morally-speaking – were themselves patriotically unhealthy, there was/is no way that the road could be morally and healthily strong to withstand the vagaries of the elements.

Perhaps it may be worth the while of my readers to pause for a moment to consider the precise or the exact quality of the high-road, at least since the last time it was revamped. Were the materials used for the road the standard ones? Our moral and healthy patriotism cannot but give us the answer that is the answer.

I have written a number of times on the very shape or state of the high-road in times past. I don’t wish to go back to my past essays on the subject. But I can recall with romantic nostalgia that I called the Benin-Sapele-Warri Road Ouagadougou when it was almost impossible to pass the road especially from its Benin by-pass stretch. Then it could take more than ten hours to cross that stretch to get to Sapele and thence to Warri.

My christening the road above was a very sober thing and event that I was deeply committed to very soberly. Of course, the Ologbo stretch of the high-road was another kettle of fish that joined Ouagadougou in mortal combat to the consternation of motorists who plied (and still ply) it day by day. Arguably, it is definitely one of the busiest routes from Lagos via Ore to the Niger Delta up to Port Harcourt and beyond. My romantic nostalgia projects to the fore now that the image of the high-road then – in the times I drew it – was that of an outrageously outrageous one that the rains in the season of rains majestically divided into contours and gutters of sticky mud to discourage motorists physically and psychologically from plying it.

How we suffered on the road! But let’s not deliberate on our fatal experience and experiences at that time of our common pain as Niger Deltans always cheated for whatever reason or power as minorities that we are – minorities who collectively moan the moans of pain but perfectly predictable as a disunited people who never speak in and with one voice.

The season of rains upon rains have since come and gone – although it will soon return. In the dry season that we still are dancing in, nothing tangibly tangible has been done on the road from Benin to Warri. There is no portion of the road whose definitive geographical contours have not gone recalcitrantly recalcitrant. They are so refractory to the extent that we always remember the civilians who awarded the contract for the revamping, and whose dubiety cannot but ring constantly in the respective imaginations of motorists who ply the road.

I have travelled from Lagos to Benin to Warri via Sapele not fewer than three times since this past December. On each occasion there were lines, horrible queues, of stand-still vehicles as a result of the severity of the more than many failed portions of the road that is now note-worthy for its obvious dust whose performance defies all rules of safe-driving. As a matter of fact, on each occasion I kissed the dust on the high-road.

Other motorists who have been traversing the Benin-Sapele-Warri Road will lend credence to my tale. If this dry season is as bad as it presently is on the dry, dusty, awkward road, you better join me to imagine what the high-road will look like or turn out to be in the rainy season that will soon visit us. Of course, there is no hope that the road will be tarred permanently (or even temporarily) before the rains pound it again.

Now I should ask Mr. David Umahi, the Minister of Works: What has become of your perfect promise to us? Or did yours truly misunderstand you when you made your democratic promise to us as a democratic patriot? In any case, I wish you safe journey if and whenever you travel on the road without your fellows of siren before the rains hurrying nigh.

May the dust kiss you or may you kiss the dust on the high-road with or without your face mask in your fully air-conditioned posh car as you talk posh to us – on the Benin-Sapele-Warri Road that will remain bad – until you mean to not make it bad. May you, the genteel democratic patriots, be attracted to the democratic destiny of all of us small ones kissing the dust on our high-way!

Afejuku can be reached via 08055213059.