Guest: Fiction: The Armageddon of Transition - Pius-Vincent Okwuanya.

Yesterday, a woman was taken into police custody for trading her only son for ten litres of gasoline. Wait! Do not browse that.

Yesterday, Some of the banks closed down indefinitely or till such a time when gasoline will not be purchased after cutting off an arm and a leg. This one you can browse.

Thus, I woke up this money fully anticipating a struggle before getting to work, however, I did not see a struggle, what I saw was Armageddon. There was no cacophony, no deluge and certainly no fireballs falling from the skies consuming all on its path and turning anyone who dared to look back into a pillar of salt. What I saw was a deathly calm, abandoned highways and bus-stops, full of dejected faces, who must be asking themselves: "why did i  wake up this morning?"

I crossed the road and joined in the communion of dejection. Once in a while, a salon car passed the road, ignoring the mindless rush by the frustrated waiters who circled like prostitutes would circle a fancy car. I reached for my pocket to check the time on my phone, but
stopped halfway, epileptic power supply in my area has reached cataclysmic
proportions. Power has not been supplied in five days.
I looked up and saw some groups of students coming back from school.
Puzzled, I accosted one, a smiling, dark girl of about eleven years, with her hair plaited in smoothened corn rows.

"Hello Dear," She stopped and looked up at me.

" Why did you guys leave the school this early?"

"Our principal say make we go house, say he no get fuel for his car."

Startled, I fixed my eyes on the girl,  looking for the tell-tale signs of mischief, but there were none. The girl had merely related what she had been told. I wondered how the principal could make his way to school and still say he had no fuel. Or did he send a messenger to pass the information to the students?
She excused me and continued on her way.

However, my worry was calmed when a bystander assured me that the teachers had embarked on a strike over non-payment of salaries. I was dejected,  but my dejection was not unique to just me, it was commonplace in the faces of the frustrated bystanders who sweat under the early morning sun, men on smart suits, whose only giveaway of their status were in the fact of their standing under the sun at that hour; their badly scuffed shoes with badly scraped soles gave some of them impromptu bow legs.

The dejection was also evident in the faces of the middle class car owners, with
their teeth clenched, hands gripping the steering rather than holding it leisurely as they would want to do, swerving and swearing angrily, while cursing everyone for the messy state of affairs in the
country. I saw all these through their wound down windows; car AC was a bit insensitive to the austerity measures. Like they say on the social media, "Ain't nobody got fuel for that."

"Carry person!" A man of about thirty years - with shaven hair cut, his blue jeans trousers sagged below his hips, his white T-shirt with popped collar also sagged at its end - shouted  to the many car owners who pass through the bus stop, he earned no second glance from them in return. He hit on their cars as they
sped by, firstly in plea, but later in in anger. I was not sure if he was angry with them for buying a car or angry with himself for not getting one.

After over thirty minutes, still waiting, a salon car stopped at the bus stop; pandemonium broke loose, over sixteen prospective passengers hurtled around it which could only accommodate a maximum of five persons. They snatched at the doors, exchanged intense shoves,  like prostitutes would circle a fancy car
whose price-tag was boldly written on its body.

"Berger!  Wuse! ..350 naira!" The driver turned to the passengers in exaggerated calmness which was executed to
pass the message of his ownership of the car to them; he was merely doing them a favour - another message.
Just last month, people would've been begged to enter the taxi to that same destination for a hundred naira and often time, they were not keen about the price.

Some alighted, deciding to save money than their jobs. Calmly, I approached
the car, not quite ready to risk a job where I get paid to learn. My steps were deliberate, consciously defying a country
which seemed intrinsically configured towards chaos.

"I hope you have #350?" the driver bellowed.

I was sure I had it somewhere, but then, from his side mirror,  I could see the Long Buses called "El Rufai" and since "objects
in the mirror are closer than they appear", I surmised that it will certainly not hurt my pocket to save two hundred and fifty naira. To put that into perspective, two hundred and fifty naira was the price for a litre of fuel, a plate of food at Dutse, not Wuse or Garki, and would be enough for two trips on the "El Rufai" bus.

I feigned disappointment, artfully furrowing my brows.

"I have1000 naira note." I mentioned the highest denomination, hoping that it will dissuade the car owner from picking
me up. If there was a 5000 naira note, I would have claimed to be carrying it that
morning. It worked a charm. The car sped off,  leaving a cloud of smoke and dust in its wake, while a bundle of hundred naira notes and a few fifty naira notes pricked on my behind from the comfort of of my
wallet. The truth would have left me two hundred and fifty naira short.

Thus free from the dangerously tempting Toyota Avalon, I scrambled towards
the "El Rufai", praying that there was enough space for me to get on. My
prayers were answered, but only just. I was standing in the bus. That was to be expected. A long bus, which was meant to carry thirty-four passengers, was
carrying a load of over fifty people with as many people standing as they were sitting. In the current situation, Albert Einstein and his big brain could as well take a well-earned holiday; Charles Darwin's survivalism reigns supreme now.

I watched the hills of Dutse speed by as the long bus sped away. Clouds of
smoke from a nearby bush fire engulfed the hills blackening the lush, calm
and green hills in an apt depiction of how the green potentials of the country has been sabotaged and truncated through years of prebendal and parochial politics and ceaseless corruption.

"When will this end?" a man sitting behind me asked, caressing his bald head.

I looked behind and offered him a smile. It's tiresome to stand for a journey that will take at least twenty minutes of one's time; conversing in it was tantamount to fatigue. However, another fifty-something man - wearing a navy blue shirt with black ties and baggy corduroy trousers -  answered from behind me.

"Wetin them like make them do, I survived the civil war."

"Make we wait until May 29. Buhari has promised that a litre of fuel will be sold at 45 naira." A woman wearing big spectacles spoke from beside me.

"How is that even possible?"

Too tired to look, I did not see who asked the question, but the voice was young and was trying too hard to sound intelligent.

"Baba is incorruptible. Na wetin this country need right now".

Silently, I begged to differ, what the country needs was litres of Fuel to
postpone the Armageddon. As if to buttress my thought, we passed a fuel
station, it took the bus riding at over sixty kilometres per hour three minutes to pass the queue of vehicles waiting for the
precious liquid.

Interesting scenes of two days ago played out in my head. It was like Mel Gibson's Mad Max flick all over again. The police had to be on hand to quell the fight that nearly started between a driver and his passengers. It was said that the driver took his passengers to some distance before he begged all of them to disembark due to fuel shortage. He even offered to
refund them their full fares. A woman, one of his passengers, threw the money at his face.

"I no need money. Wetin I need na to rush go meet my customer".

Buhari has a thankless job of fulfilling the dreams of over two hundred million Nigerians and in the transition relay race, he has lost so many yards in April and May. However, I know a very good starting point.

Control the fuel and you control everything.

***************

Pius-Vincent Okwuanya holds a degree in Political Science and Public Administration from University of Benin. He loves Jazz, Chess and Scrabble or at least pretends he does. However, he does not like to hear that he is a Book freak, a football fan and an ardent follower of SpongeBobSquarepants, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Fairly Odd Parents, Penguins of Madagascar and a whole lot of other flicks that should make grown men blush.