“Wait what?”
Was my reply to the first shock I got few days after I moved to Abuja.
If you’ve been reading my posts, it won’t be news to you that I’m currently serving in Abuja; thus, I’ve been living in the city for a couple of months now.
My first weekend in Abuja, my dad and a friend of his had taken me on a mini tour of the city’s major attractions including letting me know how I was going to be finding my way to work everyday. I don’t drive(yet) and my workplace isn’t on my dad’s way to work so I basically had to wrap my head around adapting to the cab life on my own.
They importantly let me know that there were two varieties of taxis in Abuja; the ones they called the Drop which is the one you use alone and then the other taxis which have kind of replaced the buses used in Lagos. They are a lot cheaper and one had to share with a couple of people.
My dad’s friend who uses the cabs let me know I was going to be sharing the cab with a couple of people and I had just thought okay, we’ll be four passengers then, which is, one in front and three at the back, I could cope with that.
But imagine my shock when on my first day of finding my way to work the driver casually said: “Madam, shift make another person enter”. We were already three at the back and it wasn’t even comfortable, and the cab driver was insinuating that another person was going to join us ;thus the above reply.
It took a while before I got comfortable with the arrangement, but did I really have a choice? Neither NYSC nor my work place pays enough to be spending recklessly. Somedays I pay for the extra seat just to be comfortable, other days I flow with it or use an uber or the drop.
This however doesn’t dispute the fact that taxis are considerably cheaper in Abuja compared to Lagos where I am used to.
Another uncomfortbale realisation in my stay in Abuja so far lies in the lack of consistent power supply. I am not talking about this from the perspective of someone that has gotten accustomed to the constant power supply abroad, it was one of the many things I prepared myself for before my post-uni move back home. I am talking about this from the perspective of my life in Lagos. Imagine an area where you hardly need a generator?
I remember I used to complain about the light back there but when I got to Abuja, I realised I had been enjoying. Abuja is the capital city, I definitely expected better. But hey, the way Nigeria is going nowadays nothing shocks me anymore.
This post wasn’t supposed to be a comparison between Lagos and Abuja, but I constantly find myself comparing the two cities. For instance, the traffic situation.
On several occassions, I’ve had cab drivers here tell me they will have to hike the price because of traffic and I’m expecting to meet a serious traffic on the way only to find a moving traffic that lasts under a minute. Those of us that have lived in or live in Lagos understand that when someone says there’s traffic then one should expect a standstill traffic.
Away from all of these though, I’ve been in Abuja for the past seven months or so and although I constantly miss the hustle and bustle of Lagos, Abuja is definitely a serene place to live. And if you’re looking for a quiet place where people actually mind their business (something lagosians find difficult),then this is the place for you.
I hope you guys enjoyed this post.
Do have a fab day
🙂
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