The Disability and You tour

I’ve spent a working week with a group of special needs educators touring around Nigeria, campaigning about the rights, education and inclusion of young disabled people.

I managed to hitch onto this five-day, five city road show through my Lagos host Abi, who is close friends with the director of the Child Developmental Centre (CDC), Dr Akindayomi (“The Doctor” to the team). As the head and eldest member of he 20-plus party, she is passionate about her work, a vicious dictator and matriarch to the tour group, to the family. The siblings are all in there late 20’s, early 30’s, some have lived and worked in the UK and all welcomed me without reservation.

The welcome I got is a pleasant experience and something about the Nigerian warmth was revealed to me. Whilst in UK, we have a tendency to make judgements about people from a distance – from their dress, their accent, their walk; Nigerians tend to develop their judgements about you, close-up, through open and intimate interaction. Only at the end of the trip were their judgements of me made public – I was all Nigerian, except when I was dancing.

The group are a bit like a communal unit, The Doctor is their Lenin, the young group, who come from 4 different organisations collaborating with CDC on this venture, are the workers with little hierarchy, have many fruitless arguments, but ultimately are effective. All but one is a devout Christian.

I laughed and shouted (you don’t cry in Nigeria), worked and played hard, sang and danced with this group and came out of the end with some very good friends.

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Our trip covered 5 cities.

First, Abeokuta, birthplace of some of the greatest Nigerians, home to the sacred Olumo Rock – a high pile of huge smooth rocks, where sacrifices and offerings were once made and was also home to secret hide outs for the Yoruba kings during inter-ethnic wars between the Yoruba and the expansive Muslim Fulani centuries ago.

Second, we went to Ibadan, formerly Nigeria’s second largest city and a population similar to London. It hosts Nigeria premier university originally set up as a satellite to University of London, but now home to about 12,000 students. Ibadan is a central site of Yoruba culture, but has used its newly built museum (the best I visited in Nigera) to contribute to building a unified multicultural Nigeria, by exploring the deep similarities and superficial differences between the three main ethnic groups of Nigeria (Yoruba, Igbo and Hausa).

Third, was the non-descript town of Ilorin. Ilorin is a large multicultural city that sits between the Hausa north and the Yoruba south and is home to competing numbers of Churches and Mosques.

The first three stops were on a straight road north from Lagos and made for fairly manageable travelling – never more than about 4 hours. The journey from Ilorin to Asaba was particularly long, however as it cuts sharp from the central west of the country to South East.

Asaba, although like all the other cities we visited was the capital of its State (in this case the notoriously volatile Delta State – link), it was a small sleepy and charming town with a high student population.

The final stop was Jos, which was now in the North East of the country and required a stop-over mid-way at a Gboko. Jos is a beautiful town situated on a plateau, which enjoys a perfect temperature of 20-25 degrees. It is surrounded by picturesque rock formations where rocks balance precariously on top of each other in high piles, like a modern art sculpture, as a result of millions of years of erosion. Jos was also centre of the 2,500 year old Nok civilisation, famous for their intricate terracotta head sculptures, displayed rather dismally in the local museum.

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The Disability and You tour group had its rituals and set programme for each day.

The day started with an aerobic session at 5.30 in the morning. Those who see me in the morning (I’m thinking of my work colleagues) know that I can barely hold a conversation for the first few hours in the day, let alone stretch my limbs and undertake speed walking at this time, will know how much I disapproved of this. However, I committed myself fully to the group and I begrudgingly joined in.

Next, we would pack up the bus (we had a good quality, recently serviced 30-seater bus that gave us no problems on the huge trip) and head to the venue where the public event would be held. We would meet up with our local collaborators, often a local branch of JCI, decorate the floats (pick-ups and trucks), brief the drum and brass band and the announcer and set of for a procession around town to publicise the morning event.

At its best this procession was a full blown carnival. The huge city of Ibadan was the most exciting as we undertook a 8km walk with a five-vehicle strong procession, a 10 piece horn and drum band and managed to recruit unemployed locals and school-less kids as groupies along the way. The members of the tour group lifted the spirit with their dancing that was like Notting Hill Carnival, but without a hint of marijuana or alcohol.

The procession would return to the event venue, usually a centrally located park and set-up for the formal part of the day.

The event would often be an agonising 3 hour romp of speeches from ministers and various dignitaries hungry for legitimacy and status that this event brought them. As our planning improved some of the innovative staff would intersperse the endless speeches rarely made with any charisma with interactive sessions related to sign-language, use of language, and include some singing too, usually about love and God.

At the end of the event, we packed up, got back into the bus moved on. On the bus, we would have a feedback session where people would usually thank God for getting us so far, remark on the success of the event and provide some helpful feedback. Most of the really interesting ideas were long-term issues (for next year’s bigger and better tour), like connecting with local unions and women’s groups, building a more hierarchical approach to planning and management, planning each event well in advance, making the procession more than just about publicising the late morning conference and into an interactive session.

After the feedback, The Doctor would give each person a chocolate from Cadbury’s Roses as a rather reward. This was surprisingly well received by the group, but emphasised the slightly weird mother-child relationship between The Doctor and the group.

Then the Doctor would appoint one or two people to say Christian prayers (this also happened at the beginning of the day after aerobics). Least helpful, I felt, was the plea for the Holy Ghost to drive the bus safely to the next destination. I really just want a good human driver that is well-fed, well-rested and knows where he’s going. Unfortunately, whilst the driver was good, he was not well-fed or well-rested and never knew where he was going, but somehow we still (often very late) managed to get to our destination.

Our time on the bus represented a large part of our waking hours and was filled conversation, singing (gospel and pop), and quiet contemplation. With one member of the group, the only Muslim, nicknamed Jatto (meaning “fine”, as in “he’s fine”, said by an admiring woman), I had a fascinating discussion about Nigerian politics. Most Nigerians are very good at providing a narrative to the problems of Nigeria (usually concluding that Nigeria has been punished with poor leaders), few seek to suggest effective alternatives on the big project of Nigeria or on any more detailed policy area.

Jatto is no different. But what makes him different is that he wants to do something active about the situation in Nigeria.

He is an aspiring political actor, looking to build a network of interested people in Nigeria aiming towards replacing the current illegitimate crop of leaders with a new breed committed not to lining their own pockets but to the welfare of Nigerians. We talked about the legacy of poor leadership. I put forward my thesis that the dominance of “development politics” as sole political and economic thinking in Nigeria has eliminated ideological loyalties, making a free-for-all for all unscrupulous ambitious people with nothing to tie them on and judge them by. Jatto agreed, not putting forward his own ideological stance, but arguing that this is largely the result of neo-colonialist influence over Nigeria. International-NGO and World Bank policies, conditions on IMF loans and WTO trade rules have limited the sovereignty of Nigeria and made political competition to little more than a contest between “who can best implement externally constructed policies”.

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This trip gave me an opportunity to see Nigeria from a Nigerian perspective.

On one day, on struggling to get accommodation we found ourselves staying in the grimy residence of the security guards of the President’s residence! Whilst I deplored the relative wealth of expats in a previous post, the extravagance of the President and the State Governors are much worse. In each of the 36 states is an immense President’s residence, which he may use once every two years and must cost millions of Naira per month to tend to, all at the tax payers’ expense. And this is just a fraction of the absurd residencies the President and each of the State Governors have, which include houses at the national parks and leisure destinations. I would put money on the cost of looking after these residencies being higher than the country’s education budget and health budget put together.

Whilst I escaped a couple of times from the conference to visit the local sights of interest, most of my time was spent working and living with the group; eating (on one day all I ate was half an orange, a drumstick and a couple of slices of bread), sleeping (up to 3 in a bed) and drinking with my friends.

(Saturday 1 October)

I became so close to the group, and had earned their respect, that I was asked to give a presentation at the national conference at the Sheraton Hotel, Lagos. Asked to highlight similarities and differences between the UK and Nigeria, on my last day in Nigeria, I spoke to Nigerian government officials, teachers, students, parents and national TV about disability legislation and education in the UK.

A truly unexpected way to round off quite an unusual holiday.