Journalist and performance poet, AKEEM LASISI, gets lost in nostalgia as a test-riding on Lagos Red Line train takes him through a part of the city he had lived for about 20 years, but which he left 14 years ago
When you feel bored or generally low, all you may need is a trip back to your past, physically or mentally. You are likely to run into soul-lifting moments as you cruise back on the wings of time, revisiting places and events that mark them in your memory.
This writer savoured a full dosage of such days ago when he travelled back to the Iyana Ipaja, Agege, Isaga, Agbado Ijaye/Crossing end of Lagos. It was not just a mental journey, but also a physical and historically pleasurable one aboard a Lagos Red Line train, the youngest baby of the Babajide Sanwo-Olu government’s diligent investment in rail system.
The train is still test-riding the Oyingbo-Agbado populous route and it was a colourful delight travelling with it for the first time. The fact that it was not filled to capacity, since the pleasure passengers were select folks, gave one the opportunity to see and fully appreciate its beautiful ambience.
The Red Line coaches are roaming, comfortably accommodating generously-sized seats inside. The blackish leather of the seats have a greenish colour atop the backrest. This made one of the guys on the trip to jokingly note that Sanwo-Olu seems to be using the anointing of the Red Line to advertise the envisioned Green Line, which will run from the Lekki Free Trade Zone to Marina, where it will connect with the Blue Line that has successfully operated for a year on the Marina-Okokomaiko route. While the governor inherited the Blue Line project and completed it, he completely birthed the Red, and now is eager to get the Green on stream. He is surely writing his name boldly on the sand of time as far as rail system is concerned in Lagos and Nigeria as a whole.
Meanwhile, as much as this writer felt the need to fully feel and enjoy the beauty of the Red Line joker, he also wanted to savour the reunion with the areas it was travelling through. To him, a stone could as well kill more than a bird in the situation. As a matter of fact, I will begin to completely own the story for now by transiting into the first person singular. I want to exploit the Red Line train as I travel back to my life as a young graduate in the Iyana-Ipaja, Agege, Isaga, Agbado areas of Lagos.
As a young graduate in 1993, I moved from Ibadan to Lagos. The military had just proscribed Daily Sketchnewspapers, my first employers, amid the protest that greeted the annulment of the 12 June presidential election, won by Chief Moshood Abiola. I had got a teaching job with Victory Grammar School, Ikeja, opposite Ikeja GRA, by Mobolaji Bank Anthony Way. Oladayo Salako, a fellow Great Ife (alumnus of Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife) and great friend, had just left the post to move into the financial world. The first-class chap is a big man in Mobil now and he has never abandoned me his poor pen-pushing friend.
With a salary of N3,600 in 1993, I couldn’t afford to rent any apartment in the Ikeja area and even slightly beyond. So, I got a consolation in Iyana Ipaja — 29, Abari Street, off Araromi Bus Stop, not far from juju maestro Ebenezer Obey’s De Cross Gospel Mission Church and also close to the late Kenery musician Orlando Owoh’s house. A mate at Ibadan District Primary School, Ibadan, Fatai Salami, who was then a panel beater and had japa-ed to Lagos more than 10 years earlier, first hosted me in his one-room apartment. This is not a biography. So, the details of what transpired from 1993 to the 1999 when I stayed there cannot resurrect here. It is, however, important to note that I resided in Iyana Ipaja until I enrolled for a ‘masterclass’ in butchery at the Oko Oba abattoir (a long, long story) and returned to teaching at Providence Heights Secondary School, Fagba, in the Isaga area. Maybe I will still talk about my adventures in Oko Oba before the end of the trip.
Upon joining The Comet newspaper, where the current Commissioner for Information and Strategy in Lagos State, Mr. Gbenga Omotoso, was my editor, I moved a bit higher by leaving Iyana Ipaja for Ijaye Ojokoro. In terms of proximity to the likes of Ikeja and Ogba, it wouldn’t seem a major progress since going to Ijaye is like moving deeper into the crowded end of Lagos, and towards Ogun State. But in terms of space, it was. In Iyana Ipaja I stayed in a room that I eventually rented inside Alhaja’s face-me-I-face-you expansive facility. I paid N300 for the room (upon leaving Fatai’s own where I had squatted). I remember my co-tenants like Baba Mathew (a tipper driver) and Labule, a native doctor and neighbourhood politician.
As the Red Line moved past the neighbourhood, something made me laugh at myself. I recalled how Labule, who was also a member of the Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) then, assured me of the day — and exact time — that the then OPC was going to topple General Sani Abacha as Head of State, and install Abiola who was still in detention. Did Labule’s prediction come to pass? Did OPC even tell him so? Anyway, don’t ask me! But I can assure you that there were many interesting personalities in No 29, Abari Street, Iyana Ipaja, that great house where the about its 30 residents (including those living in the boys’ and girls’ quarters) shared just one bathroom and one pit toilet. And the area is also close to the likes of Agbotikuyo, Dopemu and Egbeda, all of which I used to visit for one thing or the other.
As I, therefore, journeyed with the Red Line train, I, at some points, got lost in my mental journey back to my Lagos beginnings. It gave me the impression that a train is, after all, not just an agent of transportation, it is also vehicle for tourism: for touring interesting places and times.
To be continued
