Caution, which is an
essential you'll stow away in a trunk as a functional make-up of the
maintenance kit turns up missing in a Lagos driver's vocabulary. These roadhogs
hit their mind's delete key on a whim at a hint of the C-Word—and don’t you
dare pretend the situation’s less complicated where you live. They've laid down
their cautionary hats. These days they prefer not to.
There was an age when
blinkers were a vehicle's most delicate hardware. The world moved on and subsequently,
readjusted the standpoint on blinkers.
In more recent time, motorists traded interest in the
turn signal for vehicle part of a little more elevated status—and that’s not on
the terms of importance but of position—the sideview mirror. When a Lagos
driver isn’t all over trying to trump James Bond’s driving skills; which
happens when he (or she) is constrained to proceed at a crawl, motorists turn
their energies to ripping off the other guy's sideview. 007 stunts are small
potatoes compared to this delirious real-life-car-chase-choreography from hell.
I should clear up the air a
bit so I don’t hand you the wrong end of the stick. The episode conveyed through
this prose is stringently localized (that don’t extricate the speed daemons in your locale). If you've been
around Lagos, Nigeria or better yet, if you read my post on “James Bond driving,” you have a roughly sizeable
idea how this yarn’s going to come out.
 |
| Courtesy: pbase.com |
Let’s do a little comparison.
A covert intense virtual feud is all the rage on the internet right now. A development
not alien to the action flick scenario played out on a minute by minute basis
on Lagos highways and byways rules the digital multiverse. Millions of site
owners strive for awareness or traffic—pardon
the pun—it gives a sense of congestion on the internet. But as it is with real
traffic so it is with the virtual; there is a destination in the big picture.
Saying’s still true ‘if
you keep your focus soon your focus will keep you.’ You don't have to take
the lead. You aren’t stuck in some sick race where the laurel wreath gifts the
suicidally speedy. What you can do, and should, is seek out new and fresh
channels to pull in your resources as some Lagos commercial bus drivers
sometimes do even though at the expense of commuters.
One minute you're staring out
your rearview watching some bum stuffed behind the wheels of a beat-up truck pull
up to your bumper. What happens next is a blur as the monster hunk of metal hurtles
into the scrawny space between your automobile and the highway divider. It
gives your ride the bum's rush, collecting paint scrapings for souvenir and not
quite leaving your sideview out of the wager. Splinters of glass spray on the tar
and all that’s left is a hollow, battered (mostly plastic) housing.
In time, drivers learned at a pretty price, the implicit
meaning of the warning legend engraved on the wing mirror; the one which reads “objects in the mirror are closer than they
appear.”
Akpan
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