Train Trip 3: Fiasco at Lafenwa

Femi Akintunde-Johnson

On our return trip from Ibadan, a sad commentary on the business model that NRC is running poked us in the face. At the splendid Omi-Adio station (aka Ladoke Akintola), the travelling contingent was merely a little more than half of the number of people we left Agege with (something needs to be done to the marketing and get-out-the-commuters strategies of the railway corporation). 

  Anyway, we were given two Business Class tickets (C3-31 & 32) – cost of tickets is consistent, to and fro the Lagos-Ibadan-Lagos line. Because of the paucity of passengers, we were less than 10 in the Business Class coach, and I played with the notion of taking an entire double seat for myself to stretch; after all, several seats were empty, literally begging for embrace. But reason overcame fantasy, and I sat on my designated seat. 

  Less than an hour later we arrived at Professor Wole Soyinka station (what we used to call it Lafenwa station) in Abeokuta, and an unusually large contingent of passengers boarded. Most of them, apparently from one Owambe party or the other, were Business Class ticket holders. They searched for their seats using their tickets as touchstones. A gentleman came to our seats, and demanded our seats! Shooo! Lo and behold, he was also holding a ticket marked C-3 – 31! Sorry, this older “C-3 – 31” was not budging. He was advised by his co-travellers to pick any of the remaining seats, as there were still many unoccupied seats. Less than five minutes after we left the station… and a quick interjection here is in order: in spite of the boisterous and large contingent of Abeokuta revelers, the train kept to its five-minute waiting time. Stunning!

  Back to the ticket fiasco. Few minutes after we resumed our journey, another elderly gentleman asked to see my ticket – he was also holding a pair of tickets: C3-31 & 32. Exactly like ours! So, I asked him under what authority he was asking for our tickets. He brought out an identity card of the NRC…apparently, he was a senior staff member, and he got his twin tickets in Abeokuta declaring our seats from Ibadan as “unoccupied”. He was visibly amazed to see our tickets, bearing the same hand written seat numbers exactly as his own. “There is a mix-up somewhere,” he announced to himself. I couldn’t be bothered, though shaking my head at the naiveté of a 21st century business outlay operated on the track of a 19th century procedure. 

  I believe the mode of payment for tickets, and the lack of digital interface between stations would make such errors unavoidable. And more worrisome is the possibility that senior officials of the corporation could be dispensing complimentary tickets for themselves, their family members and friends, making it easy for over-invoicing or wanton allocation of seats already bought and occupied. I was not sure if I should be sad or incensed.

  Of course, this would be easily excused in 1983 because of our lack of management and maintenance etiquette… not in 2023 – forty years in which the world is verging on extraordinary accomplishments and cutting-edge advancement in diverse areas of human existence, our railway corporation cannot get the right tickets for the right seats!

 With that ticket-mixup distraction behind us, I settled to enjoy the return to good old Lagos. I took in the fading sunshine, and the glory of boundless forestry and scattered settlements of hinter dwellers carving out their tiny acres of fertile landmass. The small station after leaving Omi-Adio is the nondescript Olodo Station (named after former Ogun governor, Aremo Olusegun Osoba)…the train didn’t even slack its steady pace when coasting through Olodo, with only the nearby grass bowing gently in recognition of the throttling behemoth.

  The Papalanto station (renamed Chief Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Fela’s mother) comes into view after Abeokuta. It has hardly changed from 1983…apart from the newly spruced up rail tracks running parallel to the few old tracks. Forty years ago, it was at Papalanto we would heave in shards of sugar canes… delirious in the gushing streaks of sacharined juices from the chopped sticks, wrapped in bunches with coarse twigs. No matter how many you bought, they would never go farther than Jebba, in Kwara State, where other assortments of local confectioneries would come to our rescue.

  Arriving at Kajola station, named after the immediate past vice president, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, ensures that you are welcomed by the rustic background of what I believe is the old Ewekoro cement factory on the horizon to the right side of the station. Ewekoro used to be a clear attestation that we were almost in Lagos in the 70s when returning from my secondary school, Lisabi Grammar School in Idi-Aba, Abeokuta. Kajola seems like a quietly busy oasis cut out of a massive wilderness. If my recollection is fairly adequate, it was at Kajola station one was seemingly assured that the business model of the railway corporation was more than passenger traffic. We saw several articulated train trucks, half-bodied compartments, parked at the other side of the station. Surely, these must be for hauling goods and produce, we mused. Praise the Lord! 

  Of course, our train didn’t stop at Kajola. Nor did we stop as we entered Àgbàdo station, named after the former “action governor” of Lagos State, Alhaji Lateef Jakande – though there was a noticeable mellow in the train’s speed. This makes sense, since the bustling city-state that hardly sleeps is notorious for deadly mishaps between trains and vehicles, and even humans and cattle. Many lives have been lost as the city dwellers encroach and congregate around the train tracks to live in shanties, develop proper residencies (with or without permits), or bring their wares nearer to the milling throng of workers and buyers, swirling and weaving across old and new train tracks.

  At the skirt of Àgbàdo station, the scenery has changed from the lush endless flow of greenery, to the tight-knit ungainly contours of habitats dotting the sidelines of the tracks. We are in Lasgidi!

  All through our trips, the thought kept recurring in my subconscious: what if those itinerant drifters and scavengers had removed some of the steel columns or even the ramparts securing the tracks – so as to sell to their co-miscreants? Such an ugly, critically life-threatening scenario was never part of the landscape forty years ago – not to mention the barely lingering threat of train jackings and abductions…a telling deterioration of the quality of living and devaluation of human life in the most populous black nation on earth. 

(The End)