Where Conscience Goes to Die

Last week, my buddy and I took a trip up north on a fact-finding mission. Our journey was, as you may imagine, very educative and filled with immersive experiences of beautiful landscapes littered across plains, open fields, hills and valleys apparently characteristic of North-Central Nigeria. It was an opportunity to interact with more cultures, see the beautiful towns and villages of this region, and meet our fellow Nigerians. I’d personally do all that again a hundred times over.

Part of the experience was getting to share car rides with other travelers, as is usually the case in the Nigerian setting when one is travelling inter-state through public commercial vehicles. I have often found that such shared rides afford one different perspectives, given the plethora of discussions likely to fill the silence on those lonely highways. Personally, I enjoy those conversations more than anything else. It is my held belief, after all, that there is no better way to know a person than to learn the content of such a person’s mind as revealed in bits and pieces, by conversations over value, whether socially or economically. It was therefore quite the lesson when my friend and I, and our co-travelers, encountered an event that quickly unravelled lots of unique perspectives.

On this bright and sunny day, as we made our way back to Jos, Plateau State, I couldn’t help but make a mental note of the particular make-up of commuters in this vehicle. It was a blue minivan, with a nice enough driver. The car had three rows of seats with the driver in front, and two elderly men sharing the passenger seat beside him. If I were to guess, I would say they were within the range of mid-sixties to early seventies. The next row had my friend and me beside each other, and another gentleman who appeared to be within our age range of mid to late twenties. Behind us were four other people: a man seemingly in his late forties with a greying beard; a woman who looked to be in her early sixties, holding on dearly to a bag of delicate personal effects and her grandchild, which couldn’t have been more than four years old; and a younger woman seemingly in her late thirties. Together we made quite a colourful bunch, I imagine.

For the most part, conversations were either non-existent or sparse — words said between friends, or the much older folks who seemed to enjoy talking about the way other cars were driven. This was the case up until we came to this checkpoint.

Now, for the benefit of those who aren’t familiar with Nigerian roads, it is customary to come across multiple checkpoints for every five-kilometre stretch. There are police, military, Drug Enforcement Agency, Immigration, Customs, VIO and Road Safety officials, each setting up checkpoints of their own, or sometimes manning one jointly. This isn’t to say you would come across all of these checkpoints on each trip, but it wouldn’t be out of place when you come across a few or all of them as you navigate from one state to the other.

At this particular checkpoint, there was a mix of police and military officers. Again, not unusual. Just past the checkpoint, a little down the road, we could see a group of Road Safety officers as well. This collaboration is done deliberately, to ensure that drivers who come through the police and military checkpoint do not just ignore the Road Safety workers, as is often the case. We made our way through the maze of make-shift roadblocks, to the point where vehicles would stop to have the police officers speak to the driver, conduct a brief survey of the vehicle — usually by peering in at the passengers and their luggage — before giving the go-ahead to either “carry on” or “park over there”. This would have been uneventful, like all the other checkpoints we had already come across on this journey. But things didn’t quite pan out that way.

I should have known there would be trouble when the first thing the police officer asked was, “Where is it?”

You may wonder if that is a greeting in these parts. I assure you it isn’t. If you have already guessed that it was a preposition for a “handshake”, which we have all come to know as “road tax”, then how right you are. To this preposition, our driver responded by keeping mute. The officer, sensing non-compliance, then asked where we were headed, to which the driver responded by saying, “Jos.” Under normal circumstances, this exchange should have ended with the officer giving the carry-on sign and off we would have gone. But as the events of the next hour would prove, there was nothing normal about any of this.

The officer instead chose to ask the driver to park somewhere ahead. The driver responded by trying to plead with the officer to reconsider, knowing full well that, one, a bribe was the crux of this issue and hence could be better handled, and two, that having us park was just a way officers manning these checkpoints across the country used to extract said bribe by delaying travelers as a tool of coercion. This was a well-known play by both parties, and it was also well known that the power there belonged entirely to those wearing the badge. Everyone in that vehicle knew how this was going to end.

Or so we thought. No one anticipated that the driver would hiss, step on the gas and drive off.

That was quite the curveball. I sat up in my seat at that point. This was like a movie playing right before my eyes. You certainly don’t see this often. As we sped down that broken-up road and towards the Road Safety officers, they gave way, but not without first signalling to the driver that the officer behind was asking us to stop. All pleas by those Road Safety officers, unfortunately, were not heeded.

Not a word was said in the moving vehicle for a short while. When that silence was broken, it was by one of the elderly men seated up front, asking the driver if he was sure he wouldn’t be followed. The driver, clearly incensed by the whole drama, retorted that they wouldn’t do that — but even if they did, he didn’t care, because the level of extortion going on was simply unbearable.

We must have driven down that winding, broken-up, pot-hole-ridden road for about seven minutes when I noticed the driver stiffen in his seat and begin taking quick glances at his side mirror. A kind of dread befell me, and something tells me I wasn’t alone in that feeling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a Hilux truck speed past our car, drive down the road and come to a complete stop in front of us. In a flash of boots, disturbed dust dancing in the tense air and the sound of an AK-47 rifle being cocked, there before us was one of those police officers from before, pointing his rifle at our car whilst walking towards it and saying, in no uncertain terms, “Turn back!”

At this point everyone became acutely aware that we had found ourselves in a pickle that could easily become a tragic event.

I remember thinking to myself: what would become of the four-year-old girl sitting behind me if the driver stuck to his nerve, the officer got trigger-happy, and all of us became cannon fodder in a war predicated wholly on a bribe?

Thankfully, none of that happened. The driver turned the car around without further incident and we went back to the checkpoint. The soldier who drove the Hilux after us, alongside the policeman, were in tow. They asked all of us down, and right then we knew that our journey — which could have been over in about five hours absent any interruptions — had just become an unknown. How long we were going to be held up here was very uncertain. However, we cooperated, waited, and went through the requests the officers made of us.

Shortly after we were asked to find somewhere to wait while they dealt with the driver, a senior military officer materialised. He was briefed on the situation and, like a bad movie, we witnessed and heard the facts of the case change and take a more twisted narrative. Apparently the officers who asked us to park in the first instance did so because they suspected that our vehicle was transporting stolen items, guns or drugs. Upon asking to search the vehicle to cross out those concerns, they said, our driver sped off, thereby confirming their suspicions. To that allegation, on the merit of those “outstanding” officers, the senior military officer declared that the vehicle would have been shot upon and “nothing would happen” in terms of accountability or even repercussions.

Whilst all of this was unfolding, conversations were being had among the passengers. The four-year-old girl asked her grandmother if this place was their destination. Her grandmother responded in the negative, and went further to ask her to keep quiet as “grandma wants to go and roll on the ground and beg those men to let us go”. The two elderly men said they were going to speak to the officers and plead. My friend and I wondered out loud to each other at the level of impunity we had just witnessed.

Then there it was — the statement that caught me off guard. It was the young man sitting beside me, who before now and for the better part of the journey had kept to himself, using a wired earpiece to entertain himself, lost in his own world.

“The driver chose to be stubborn,” he said. “All he had to do was give that officer some money, and we would not be in this situation.”

The driver did eventually part with a significant sum of money, and shortly after that exchange we were asked to be on our way. We all spoke of how wicked and vile the system was, and how it had no oversight to keep erring officers like those in check, or how there was no respite for the downtrodden and poor of our country just trying to make an honest living. We spoke of all that and more. But it was that comment made by my neighbour sitting next to me that occupied my mind for the rest of the journey.

To most people, the conventional wisdom would be to just give the bribe and move on. In fact, one could argue that it is a normal thing, or that the driver isn’t unaccustomed to giving those same bribes to others, whether or not they demand it. Some would even justify all that transpired by suggesting that there was no vocal, initial request made for a bribe in the first instance, and therefore the driver should have just done the lawful thing by parking as he was being asked to do. Others yet would try to rationalise the situation by deferring to the wisdom learnt from such cases, which are quite rampant in our societies: that one must comply with an officer, no matter how ridiculous the request, for the simple reason that he or she is holding a gun. I make no case for or against any of these positions. I contend that I perfectly understand the logic, and I may even agree with one or two of them, for the simple fact that I too, as a product of a broken system, am broken myself.

The thought I cannot shake off, however, is that in the statement my neighbour made, the problem wasn’t necessarily in suggesting that bribes ought to be paid in order to rightfully avoid undue discomfort. No — the problem was the casual acceptance that law enforcers could solicit bribes and, as though we were discussing the natural order of the rotation of the earth, that those at the other end of such solicitations should pay without protest because “these things happen”, and “this is Nigeria”. You know, like it is the most normal thing in the world.

I contemplated that in my mind and thought to myself: what are the possible wrongs I have done, or am in the process of doing, which stand against my values and principles, against the law and natural justice, that now seem normal? At what point do we realise the demise of our conscience? Is there a chance we never even realise it?

If you read me on here, then you may already be aware that I think the whole justice system — from the legislation, to the enforcement, to the courts — must be overhauled. I strongly believe that a fresh start is imperative if we must have a sane, civilised society. That is to say, there is no injustice that is new to me anymore. I, like millions of other Nigerians, have learnt to sit with the dysfunction — not for the love of it, but for the dire hopelessness of seeing any meaningful change being done.

However, in that minivan, in the heat of the northern sun, as we sped through narrow roads, past beautiful valleys and tall mountains, as we made our way through small towns and I caught glimpses of beautiful people going about their business — right there, after a near-death experience, sitting beside this stranger whose seemingly innocent but carefree comment would send me into deep self-reflection — it dawned on me that the system is indeed the product of the people.

What good is it to legislate what constitutes justice, when the people to whom this justice is owed are either indifferent towards it, or have simply forgotten what it looks like, and would therefore have no need for it when it is being served?

It seems to me that far ahead of legislation, enforcement, and the overhauling of institutions, it is the people for whom these systems exist that must first change — not in grand gestures, but in the quiet, daily refusal to call normal what we know is not. My neighbour was not a villain. He was the outcome of a thousand small surrenders, each one sensible, each one survivable, each one indistinguishable from the last. The driver, whatever his flaws, did something harder: he refused. He paid for it, yes. We all paid for it. But in that refusal, even briefly, something was preserved that the officer’s rifle could not touch.

That, I think, is where conscience chooses not to die — not in legislation, not in revolutions, but in the stubborn, inconvenient, occasionally dangerous decision to call a bribe what it is.