A class in geography
Nigeria is a ponderously large country—in land mass and in every other sense. But you’d never know it, cooped up as you are in one little corner of the country. We all maintain our own little slices of the nation, hardly venturing beyond our neck of the woods, whatever that expression means.
Take a drive through the northern part of the country and you’d see what I mean. On September 26, 2006 after leaving camp we breezed through Minna on our way to Kontagora. Of course leaving Paiko had its own amazing set of problems but we were all headed for our respective places of posting which had put camp romances asunder and all else could stay afloat until we settled.
Driving through the norther region is an unrivalled lesson in geography. I never knew what Zungeru looked like before RN433 purred through it in Fatherland, but now I know the sleepy little town like the back of my hand. It is filled with people easily scared and excited by crime. I once escaped being robbed in the town on my way to Minna two months later in November. Unfortunately, while I was safe behind the stickup the robbers attacked someone I had come to know even though nominally. Mrs Obi, a peer-education trainer from NYSC and an NACC patron. Later I would get to know more of her.
Back to geography class. The landscape is breathtaking. If there is one thing the north has over the other regions of Nigeria, its panoramic, beautiful landscape—rocky formations rising on all sides and tumbling over each other like tiny cancerous bumps ready to regenerate once cut. The fields of green ears of corn (maize and millet) sweep endlessly before you as if there is no tomorrow. When they turn straw or brown in the dry season the beauty of straw is even more astounding. To see such is to be one with nature at least and God at most. A poet could lose himself watching such wonder and come up with a masterpiece at most or at least a piece that would rival most masters. And the quiet is sheer bliss, broken only by the occasional roar of automobile engine as your vehicle rushes past another.
The only thing breaking this great swathe of Mother Nature is the long black tarred road snaking out ahead and behind you. You could drive for hours and hours and see nothing but green or staw fields (depending on the season of the year) for endless hundreds of kilometres. Not a soul, human or beast.
The human settlements by the roadside are few and far between and are commonly pastoral, bucolic simple fellows who are too busy tending the lone family cattle and gathering the family’s maize and beans to spend two heartbeats drinking in raw beauty. They live with it everyday, they don’t see it. And those who don’t—like us—are too busy trying to find our way to soak up the sights.
I know that, because when Uwa asked whether there were tourist attractions, I said, no there wasn’t. As if none of those qualified as attraction. The sight was beautiful but I couldn’t see that anybody would drive five hours along lonely roads only to park and stand by the roadside to gaze upon endlessly sweeping fields of green and straw. No, sirree.
The time of travel and the landmass to cover once made me want to pat OBJ on the back and tell him he was doing an unenviable job. But I didn’t. After all, I know a few countries that have more landmass than Nigeria and whose presidents still have one head even though they control countries large enough to span several time zones. Russia, China, India, USA, Canada.
Population is a different thing, mind. Some of those countries have more people than Nigeria, others less. But the north definitely has less.
Uwa said that was why the infrastructure remained intact: because there wasn’t anybody to use them, and I believe him. That made Ndubuisi conclude that elected officials here in the north really have no work to do, compared with their counterparts in other regions. Again, he too was right.
But to see how those officials maintain already provided infrastructure needs another change in geography.


