First days

04.01.2010




We have been in Abuja now for 4 days and we are clapped. I don’t quite know why because we have all the mod cons at our disposal: a luxury suit at the Protea hotel with two toilets and two TV’s, a chauffeur cum guide who can take us anywhere and do the haggling and in general make life a lot easier and I have spoken more Afrikaans than I ever spoke in KZNatal.

It became a bit easier for me once I managed to source a map of the town at the Sheraton Hotel at a price, hold your breath R170 (About 24USD) and it is not a book, just a flat map. Everything is incredibly expensive here. A simple one course meal for the two of us cost about R600, a load of washing (4days clothes) was R500.



The town is in the throws of the dry scorching heat with a blanket of dust from the dessert. Unlike mist this blanket does not keep the sun out and it is very hot and everything is in a white haze. Even though the city (more like a town) has broad boulevards with lots of trees it looks washed out because whatever grass there must have been before, is wiped out and looks dryer than a Jhb winter. The rain season was suppose to be here already and asking people if that brings relief you get different answers. Apparently the first rain is an acid rain that does not make your skin feel good, but on the other hand they say an oncoming storm is a magnificent experience.



Some parts of the town reminds one of Rosebank with its big houses, high walls and treelined streets and then in other places it looks neglected and even abandoned. The capital is not even 2 decades old, although is the planning stage from about the seventies, an enormous amount of building has and is being done.



The Nigerians are friendly, humble people (the ordinary ones, not the druglords we encounter in SA). Most of them seem to have a hard struggle to make a living. The country should have been one of the richest countries in Africa but a combination of greed and incompetency has drained it. Their politics looks a bit like a circus of pompous parading. Their education is a joke if not very sad. In the newspaper I read that only 2 percent of the school leavers who wrote their final exams last year passed, (private schools included) and that in spite of a huge amount of cheating.



South Africans who have lived here for a while say they feel much safer here than in South Africa and even in the 4 days we have been here I never felt threatened or even been looked at strangely because my skin is white and there are not many white skins here.