Not every time driver did this, conductor did
that. Sometimes, passengers, behave yourselves.
One day, on a bus from Obalende, the conductor was
collecting fares. At some point, he received a one hundred naira note from a
young pregnant female. He asked where she was going and she said Lekki Phase One,
and the conductor said her fare was short of fifty naira. She immediately began
screaming, saying she had only one hundred naira and he could take it or leave
it. The conductor pointed out that he had called out his prices clearly, and so
she shouldn’t have entered if she didn’t want to pay. The girl, still
screaming like a banshee, said, ‘Can’t you see I’m wearing earpiece?! I didn’t
hear you!’
Passengers began piping in: and whose fault is
that, they asked. One woman said that she’d noticed the pregnant girl almost
get hit by a keke a few minutes ago while they were standing at the bus stop; the
pregnant girl hadn’t heard the keke coming because her ears were blocked by the
earpiece. An elderly man said with a solemn voice that he’d witnessed an
earpiece kill a young man once.
The conductor asked the girl to come down from
the bus, but she refused to.
‘I’m not going anywhere!’ she screamed. ‘If you
want to beat me, come and try it!’
When the other passengers tried to talk to her
she turned on them, and soon she started a fight with the man in the passenger
seat in front.
‘I wish you were going to Ajah,’ the man kept
saying. ‘You for reach Ajah, then you go know who I be.’
I wondered who exactly he be.
The driver suddenly decided he’d had enough. He stopped
the bus to remove the pregnant girl bodily. But he stopped
short when his eyes fell on her protruding stomach. He stood silent for a
moment.
‘This one na devil temptation,’ he said finally.
‘Touch am now, she fit die.’
‘Na you be devil brother!’ the girl shot back. ‘And
na you go die. Bastard!’
The driver got back into the bus and drove off. The
pregnant girl carried on, cursing everyone who had spoken to her, and their
grandmother.
#
I was on a bus from Yaba to Obalende. The ride
was uneventful, hardly Danfo Chronicles Material. Until we got to Obalende. As
the bus came down the bridge, with its door open, the driver and conductor
spotted four uniformed policemen, complete with rifles, scanning the
approaching buses with hungry eyes. They were looking for buses that would
begin letting out passengers before they’d reached the bottom of the bridge and
Obalende proper. Both driver and conductor knew what was up, and the conductor
quickly shut the door. The policemen eyed our bus as it passed by.
A few metres
ahead there was a slight build up of traffic and the bus slowed to a stop.
‘No open that door o,’ the driver barked at the
conductor, who nodded.
We were in traffic for a only little while when the
other passengers began to get impatient, urging the conductor to open the door. He refused;
the policemen were watching. Next thing, we looked up and one of the men
sitting in front had opened the passenger side door. He and the passenger next
to him got off the bus and sauntered away, with the driver and conductor yelling insults
at them as they disappeared amongst the bodies.
Before we knew it, the
policemen had swooped in. They commanded all the passengers off the bus, even
as the driver pleaded and we explained that it wasn’t the driver’s fault. But the policemen
weren’t having it. They were settling into the bus and making themselves
comfortable as I walked away.