I can imagine the self-righteous anger rising in many readers at the sight of this headline. I am sure many people would ask: “What the hell does this writer think he is talking about? How dare he compare us to danfo drivers?” I get it. But that is all that it is—mere self-righteousness, that disposition that makes us forget that we are human and fallible. After all, isn’t it said, that “to err is human?” So, if you are honest with yourself and patient enough to go through this piece, I am positive that it will make sense to you. At the end, you might discover something that you can do better to contribute positively to national development.

For so many reasons, Lagos is often described as microcosmic of Nigeria. One of the reasons is because you would possibly find someone from every ethnic group in Nigeria in the city of Lagos.

Danfo driving in the city is another peculiar phenomenon of the former capital city of Nigeria. The danfo is the ubiquitous yellow commuter minibuses that you find on Lagos roads. About two years ago, the Lagos State government said there were seventy thousand of such buses in the city, and threatened to remove them in their determination to impose sanity on the city. Everyone in Lagos has one bad tale or the other to tell about the danfo driver, who is in fact a representation of all that is wrong with the city. He signifies several things that most of us do not want to imagine about ourselves. Lately, I have been pondering over this issue and I wondered if the attitude of the danfo driver is different from the behavior of the average countryman. Apart from the intervention of time and chance that places different people at different levels of opportunity, the danfo driver, to my mind, is the archetype of the average Nigerian.

One of the things that you first notice about the danfo driver is that he cares only about himself. Owing to competition from his co-drivers, he has trained himself to believe that swiftness gives him an advantage over other people. The greater the number of bus rounds he makes, the more dividends for the day, especially when he makes daily returns to a bus owner. Therefore, anything that stands in his way bears the risk of being run down. If it happens to be another danfo driver, they would fight to the finish; if it is vehicular traffic, he is ready to run against the tide. He is prepared to do anything and as far as he is concerned, he is the only one on the road and that is exactly how he drives his bus along. When anyone, no matter who he is, contests ownership of the road with him, he is ready for war. He thinks he must always have the advantage and when that does not happen, he is determined that no one else gets it. So, he blocks the road, and everything comes to a halt for as long as it takes for a sane person to appear and assuage the ego of the danfo driver, or for a man in uniform, whip in hand, to come shout him down. Only then, does he get some sense of decency.

Depending on the scale of our responsibilities, a lot of us are like this. For those who reside in Lagos, traffic in the city tells you the story of Nigeria. The average driver on Lagos roads sees only himself. It does not matter if he is a chauffeur or a top executive who loves to drive himself. He puts himself first and if he cannot be the first, everyone can as well be held up. This attitude is evident in every area of our lives. Our businesses, our careers and even our government. The businessman explores the inefficiencies in the system to exploit every other citizen. People hoard fuel at the slightest opportunity or embark on industrial actions without considering their responsibilities to humanity. Nigerians just want to make profit no matter the cost.

When people like this get into government, they appropriate everything that belongs to everybody for themselves and their families. People steal and cut corners. They deny millions of people the opportunities that could change their lives forever. We are a community of self-centered people.

It is true that there is suffocating poverty in the land, but poverty is not the same as outright callousness. Is poverty the reason why people burst pipelines and leave millions of their compatriots suffering? Is that why they vandalise power installations without care about what happens next?

We are also extremely impatient people. Like the danfo driver, who wants to maximise his bus rounds, we are always in a hurry to arrive at our destinations or attain targets. That is ordinarily not a bad thing if we toe the right line and pay the right dues towards attaining our goals, but we do not have the time for that. In our impatience, we are ready to circumvent every rule of engagement that has been set. We would manipulate our way to promotions and pay to get others to lose their opportunities. These days, parents  initiate compromises that will spring up opportunities that their children do not deserve. These two tendencies— impatience and manipulation—then lead us into being unruly.

Take our model, the danfo driver for instance, because he is in a hurry, he will drive against traffic and climb the kerb just to get an advantage over other drivers. He will overload his bus against regulation, just so that he can make some quick gains. If you were to ask him how he became a driver and if he has a driver’s licence, you would learn that he likely did not go to a driving school and paid a tout to buy him a licence, even when he could not distinguish between the clutch and the brake. He might have casually graduated to take the wheels after he had hung on the door for two years as a conductor.

Most of us are no different from the danfo driver. We drive our cars without authorisation, refuse to obtain the required documentations for our cars, we even drive against traffic or compete with the BRT buses on lanes designated for them. Many of our compatriots, especially those in high offices feel too big to present themselves at licensing offices. They create the problems that make things impossible at the passport offices, and then they circumvent the same procedures. We are prepared to bend the rules to make life better for ourselves, yet we expect others, who are not as privileged as we are, to live by those rules.

We are always quick to place the blame for disorderliness in the country on our leaders. Sometimes, that makes sense, but the progress of a country depends on good citizenship, which is the combination of the leaders and the led. That becomes easy to accept when we realise that everyone who becomes a leader rises from this same society and take those tendencies with him.

Sometime ago, a lawyer friend of mine spoke to me about his determination to stop when the traffic light turned red because the incoming president had decided to lead by example. He said he battled with obeying traffic lights before because the outgoing president’s convoy disobeyed the lights. This is amusing because my friend lives in Lagos where a governor observes traffic lights, so how come people looked to Jonathan rather than Fashola?

This is a charge to all of us. We owe ourselves the duty of renewal. Let us give our country a fresh opportunity to grow by offering responsible citizenship.

The PUNCH

21 May 2015