My
legs were heavy and it seemed to me that it had been chained behind the bars of
restrictiveness for an unaccounted amount of time. But when I turned my mind
back to the past fourteen hours, I knew with a surety the reason for the
heaviness and the muscle cramp that held my legs in locks of detentions. Fourteen hours from Makurdi to Ibadan and
another lazy drive which drew two hours of mid-night time in its bowels. Besides
the numerous threats of accident, our vehicle protesting on two occasions one
was at Kogi State where the wheel ceased! Another was en route Iseyin from Ibadan,
when a back tyre tired of bearing the weight of those in the rickety bus,
exploded with a bang of atomic recklessness!
Soon the shout of blood of Jesus and people of different religion calling to
their own God sieved the tranquillity of the bus. The bus swayed sideward and
buried its mad rage at the curb of the road where overgrown savanna grasses
cast us a pity salute. We debarked from the bus and Yoruba language which at
that point was a novelty to my ears used to hearing English and Hausa forced my
ears in a compulsory listening. Though I stretched my ears to catch the burning
lines of the words they were speaking, I couldn’t make no meaning of it.
Everything they spoke perished in an “O or Ah” while the mouth stood ajar. The
driver who himself was a Yoruba man and I could tell by the mastery of the way
the words wreathed within his lips, was a Yoruba man in entirety. He called the
attention of some passengers who after helping in offloading the deflected tyre
that had almost caused us to be causalities on that furlong night in Ibadan. They
piled pressure on the jack, with their hands monotonously going up and down
until the height of the car grew up. The driver expertly flung himself underneath
the car, examining if there was any damage beyond the deflected tyre. When he
was sure nothing beside the tyre had gone amiss, they gathered their cooperation
together and began to knot a spare tire that had been cemented to the floor of
the booth of the bus in a devastating and thorough bolt as if a thief will
stretch his hands and pull it out. Time piled quickly and they had not finished.
I wondered if they could ever finish that at all. Soon, the driver made a call
which I later understood as my tongue grew fatter with Yoruba that it meant
enter let us go. That night I believed I banked
some few phrases of Yoruba in my memory. We entered again and sat, both Muslims
and Christians calling to their own God for a safer journey this time. The driver
pressed the pedal and the bus revved its nose forward. He kept driving at outlawed
speed that even a grain of stone could push the bus into a union with the
overgrown grasses by the side of the road. Soon murmured voices climbed above the roaring of the engine.
Again a warning in Yoruba and English to be careful in the way that the driver
was manning the steering wheel.
When the morning had started to
drag the curtains of brightness to the Iseyin camp of NYSC, it was the Man O’
War who first collected our sleep
with their noises. Then the beagle blown sometimes by wiry soldiers followed
next. We assembled at the parade ground singing worship songs in our white
shirts, white trousers, white socks and white shoes like angels on a forbidden
morning. We sang and prayed. Then the Commandant and the Camp Director lined
our ears with daily activities and of all in the list, I personally detested the
morning lectures which sometimes bored my ears. Some even motivational speakers
come to charge the atmosphere with their very dull inspirations. I considered
and reasoned that motivation without God means nothing to me. So whenever the
lectures began, my first prayer point is “oh Lord may it soon come to an end.”
Our time in the camp grew bigger
and soon we were no longer the new corpers which the soldiers had once
associated our personality with. A kind of formidable friendship had been
formed between us and the soldiers, their noises of the morning wake up call
became a longing for a joyous day albeit we looked at them with scornful eyes
only if our sleep had been cut short. The food we ate at the camp which during
the time when the population of corpers was thin
increased our longing for the dinning bell and made us to look at our time
intermittently for the next dinning meal. But when our population magnified, the
food steadily experienced a washing away of deliciousness.
Many who came to camp armed with their mints in their pockets looked at the
dinning disdainfully as the food began to assemble a different sweetness. Mami
Market with music of worldliness often sucking what remains of peace in the
Iseyin Camp terrorized our righteous
ears. Our only comfort was NCCF the regular song which “ NCCF will never die”
and the encouragement to make service year fruitful stood tall in our hearts
like the Tower of Babel. I observed too the many young Nigerian youths without
Christ and in crisis, filling their bellies with liquor and engaging in acts
which I believe was often too strong for righteous eyes to see.
The routine of camp life soon
ended and we congregated under the canopy of the Iseyin sun to receive our
posting letters. When I collected mine, I saw a local government area in
Ibadan. I bowed my knees and caressed
it on the dry Iseyin earth in appreciation to the Lord. Then walked to the bus
that would convey us to our location. It was in the bus that war waged in my
mind. I could not comprehend what a lawyer like myself would go and do in a
local government. I was supposed to be in a law firm. My face soon condensed in
sadness. Throughout the time that the journey stayed, the Lord did not say
anything to me. Hours matured into days
and days wore the crown of weeks and the Lord said nothing. As I lay down in
the corpers lodge one very fast evening, the Lord spoke to me. “Take a walk I want
us to discuss.” I walked climbing a meandered tarred road whose blackness had
been sipped by erosion exposing a chunk of red earth up the road. The Lord then
explained to me why he brought me to Ibadan. As I wound of my stay in Ibadan, I
am reminded that I must not have worked in a law firm, I might not have worked
in a big office. But one thing I am sure of that I did during my service year, I
invested in men and touched men for Christ!
