Demystifying Lagos – Lagos State Land Lords – Owo da

“owo da” is a question in the yoruba language, asking “Wheres the money”.

Moving around Lagos state, keeping your head above your shoulders, you would definitely hear ‘owo da’ from right and left, you’ll be asked ‘owo da’, if you enter Lagos buses or Okadas, and you better know how to ask ‘owo da’ when it comes to money matters.

A days journey:
The first mention of “owo da” is from the bus-conductor, once the 14-seater bus fills up and is about to move out of the make-shift ‘car park’ used commercially by the you-know-whos: the owners of Lagos state. So I hand over my bus fare, which is NGN40.00 (fourty naira). If i’m early enough and can make it to the park/bus-stop by 7am or 7:30am, the fare is NGN30.00(thirty naira). By 9a.m, the fare becomes 50-naira. ‘Owo da’ also rings out again and again as the bus-conductor collects fares from other passengers.

The most interesting sounds of ‘Owo da’, which has been bugging my skull emanate from the mouths, bordered by hard-crusted lips of the real Land-Lords of Lagos-state: the Agberos, the Police-Agberos, the Area/Arial boys, the Yellow-fever boys and the Lastma boys.

The area boy, Area, is not your run of the mill motor park tout. He is “special assistant” to the special assistant of the local government chairman… , more here

‘Police-Agberos’: pls note: not all Police uniform clad men and women you see in Lagos state are actually Policemen/women. The majority of these are Agberos who are wearing the Uniform. They neither perform Police duties, neither are they full-time Agberos. Lets say they are somewhere in the middle. They are the resident – evils Lagosians cope with.All the above are the real owners of Lagos state. Its only people with guts like theirs that could stand in the middle of a street, on the main road holding a wooden stick, koboko(whip) or even a metal rod and demand 20-naira from every commercial bus driver. These guys would do everything including physically fighting with whoever tries to brush them aside.

I’ve observed these Land-Lords several times, and im soon to put forth my formal research paper, and im sure to get a patent from it, definitely patented in Nigeria. As buses are approaching, you see them, holding crumpled Five/Ten/Twenty naira notes, and before you know it, they run after, hang on the bus’ door, and are already arguing with the bus-conductor demanding for their pay. I’m even talking twenty-naira, some of them collect thirty. Any of these boys , who with all their bus-hitching skills miss a step and fall flat on the floor are JJCs. The solid boys dont miss their footsteps. The good thing is that they’ve(Lagos Land Lords) always got ‘change’, if handed an amount like 500-naira, should the bus-conductor insist that he doesn’t have smaller sized bills, all in a bid to collect their own 20-naira, and hand-over 480-naira ‘change’.

Now, the only thing im still trying to understand is why someone would wake up early in the morning, dress up in jean trousers, and an over-small T-shirt, at least to reveal enough biceps to terrorize somebody, and why such would find a metal rod and stand on the street, openly demanding money from bus-drivers especially at bus-stops where passengers would drop from a bus or wait to get a ride. While they look with disdain at people decently dressed and who would choose to make money in a decent manner, these boys are always ready to fight, as early as 5am in the morning. Many times, to my total disgust, I find bus-passengers even abusing the driver and his conductor should they fail to quickly cooperate and hand-over the money. These guys on the way to their offices won’t want 1-minute of their time to be wasted.

Everywhere in Lagos state has its own Agbero/Area boy: in front of every major restaurant(Mr. Biggs, Tantalizers, Chicken republic, name it, you have it); in every petrol station, every bus-stop major or minor; every bridge/overpass/underpass, okada stop/s; every market, every street/major road, car-parks, police-check point/police station, everywhere from Island to Mainland, everytime of the day, in private of public….you better make sure you’ve got some change to give them.

Lagos Land Lords operate in pairs. You’ll hardly see one ‘operating’ alone. Usually, especially at PalmGrove bus-stop, two of them approach buses, one will go ahead and make the financial demand while the other quickly positions himself either at the bus’s front, with a hand on the wind-screen wiper, or near the fuel tank, in a bid to quickly dislodge the fuel-tank cover, or somewhere at the front-passengers side, with a hand finding a way to break off the side-mirror or somewhere else around the car, ready to cause physical damage to the already-damaged and rickety buses plying Lagos roads. By the time the driver sees another potential loss of his bus’ hardware, he won’t mind handing over twenty naira. As soon as these Lagos Land Lords collect the money, they are off to find another prey.

I once had a short chat with a bus-driver, and asked him why they had to pay at every bus-stop before dropping off passengers/picking up new ones. You know what he said, he said “its like you be JJC“……I understood the message. He explained that if they(drivers) don’t pay, these Agberos will definitely put up a fight, which in the end, might be settled at the Police-station, with the Police-officers passing judgment on what they did not see – in favor of the Agbero. Besides, I was informed that Lagos Land-Lords have their foot solid at every police station around town. As a result, the bus driver’s ‘whole-day work-to-make-money-to-put-food-on-his-table’ endeavor is lost because of 20-naira. So he goes, ‘what is 20-naira anyway?‘. I was thinking….’yeah, 20-naira is nothing, but little drops of water makes a mighty ocean’. He further explained that even if these boys don’t cause immediate trouble, “by the time they eye you once or twice”, they would gather together and “plan” for all those bus-drivers/conductors who don’t pay them. He even told me more: that all the agberos from Ikoyi to Ikeja know themselves, group-wise, and that if you want to join them, there are no short-cuts, it has to be a “formal affair”……………as in you can’t just discover that you’ve come to the end of your rope one-morning, and then become an agbero by afternoon, all by yourself….its not possible. He added: they know themselves, would engage in group-fights just to defend one-another, and should they see a stranger-agbero in their “bus-stop”, the guy better run for his life. I would have continued listening to my driver’s lecture, had I not reached where I wanted to “drop”.

Yellow Fever boys might not be as harsh as these Agberos. They use another technique. They would rather stand, dressed fully in their yellow-fever official Nigerian uniform, and holding a ‘kondo’ in hand. Commercial bus drivers would rather hand over 20-naira to these boys rather than face some 30-minutes(thank your stars if its that short) or even 1-hour of questioning, about the particulars of vehicles that might be as old as they themselves before they joined the yellow-fever Lagos force. The intent of these guys is not to verify your vehicle’s papers, they would rather waste your time, threaten you with an arrest, or a trip to the ’station’, and once your bus enters the station, O boy, its fasting and prayer before it finds its way out. With the ‘hunger level’ in the Nation, its better to ‘leave and let-live’.

From my bus-stop(by now, I myself have a bus-stop) to where I work, the stops here and there, and at major bus-stops, making an approximate total of about 7-8-stops, early in the morning. At the major bus-stops, at least 40-naira is handed out to two-different agberos, sometimes three. On a sum total, about NGN150.00 of the fares collected from passengers go into agberos hands, just because of ‘Owo da’. Now, calculate how many trips the buses make per day, and how much they have to forcefully part with. On some routes, these buses pay once per day, on others they pay twice(morning and afternoon). At the end of the day, they are barely surviving, noting that morning/evening trips are more than afternoon trips, because of movement of people. Afternoon trips are quite dry, since theres not much people on the street. Considering also the cost of fuel, nationally, and the multitude of fine-tunings done on a daily-basis, at least to get the bus’ engine in working-mode, all that is left at the end of the day is just a hand-full, with nothing to put in the bank. Bank ko, bank ni.