Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Puffy eyes this morning from fitful sleep. No power for 24 hours (the light finally came back on this morning). Thankfully it was a cool night so we did get some rest. We haven’t had water for the past two days either so it’s back to survival mode – camping in the tropics. I slowly grow a beard yet again (how can you shave when nothing comes out of the tap?)

We live in the pukka part of town (Dangote and Ovia have houses close by) where owning a house will set you back at least N70m (around £280,000) – around 25 - 30 times more than the average Nigerian will earn in a lifetime - and we don’t have the basic amenities. It’s hard to stem a tide of resentment as one begins the day tired and irritated with life, with all of yesterday’s shopping now uselessly rotten in the fridge. But resentment against whom? It’s hard to resent a facelessly dysfunctional system. Meanwhile, security guards and cooks and house helps notice little difference: their pre-modern post-modern lives are not especially encumbered with electrical requirements.

The system is in a state of accelerated entropy, the heart of darkness (Conrad turned into a bitter joke). As with Leibniz’ monad, the biggest things manifest themselves writ small. For instance, at the entrance to the Ministry, they’ve just installed a scanning device like the ones you shoelessly walk through at the airport. It beeps every time you walk through it. But there is no one there to check why it beeps, or to check the entrant for weaponry. But who cares about technology embedded in structure and process when someone gets paid, and of course someone else gets paid? Again, outside the gates, a throng of citizens with placards block entrance. Their signs read, ‘Ngozi, we want our money.’ Just another random group of unfortunates with nowhere and no one to vent their frustrations at except the underpaid security guards.

Last night, we searched for somewhere to eat (its not easy, cooking in darkness). Everywhere was closed. In Zone 4, dolled up Abuja University girls thronged the earthen track that passes for a road, selling their intimacies in return for money to pay for school fees. Others manage to permeate the security guards at the large hotels, knocking on rooms at random with a “Good evening, Uncle”. With DFID estimates that 80+% of Abuja working girls are positive, the offers are risky. Abuja: where pussy and politics collide and collude.

Why all this dysfunction, this lack of care? Who knows? The PDP is slowly eating itself, as the Atiku and Obasanjo camps lash out at each other. The police seal buildings, make arrests against the other side. The Power and Steel minister estimates that, at the current rate of investment, Nigeria should have stable power by 2050. By that time, the ice caps may have melted, many lowland land masses will be submerged and the biological experiment called conscious life may be on the verge of cancelling itself out. The insects will, of course, remain, oblivious.

No wonder there are no credible signs of extra-terrestrial life or time-travellers on geo-history tourism: consciousness (human or otherwise) suggests itself to be a self-defeating construct. By the time technology has advanced to the stage of crossing light-years of intergallactic space, the folly of conscious intention and empowered egotism will have rendered that passage impossible.