MORNING MESS

I

t was an early morning madness when an oversized truck and a Honda Civic car jammed into the face of one another on the Galadima High Way.  The Honda car had decreased into a small mass steel.  A man who was vomited when the window of the Honda Civic disintegrated into unidentified pieces of shattered glasses lay on the floor inert. The sirens of the Gwarimpa Emergency rescue harassed the air with a prolonged blare.  Outside, as the men robed in yellow over black trousers began tearing the congealed steel cage that the car had become to free those imprisoned in it, the crowd had gathered, watching what is too strong for the feeble eyes to see. Blood from the Honda car sieved from the back seat unto the waiting dry tar.  Some shook their heads, when the injured were being evacuated.  But others stood and fed the eyes of their phone cameras with clicks of few selfie food. 

A large traffic had started to grip the second lane of the road. A very overweight woman hooked by the stream of morning traffic unzipped her bag and brought out an Iphone 6. With many snaps, she ministered to the gallery of her camera when the sound of – ka-chaka, ka-chaka, ka-chaka amazed the air. The back tyre of her car driven by her chauffer detained in the raging traffic had overtly depressed looks, and the entire back of the car where the woman sat had sunk. May be the back tyre will protest in explosion before they get to Berger.

Two drivers, beaten by the anger of the traffic decided to vent their accumulated displeasure of the morning mess. All the men, looking gilded in porch cars whose status should have cautioned them to exercise little restrain over the muscles of their annoyance.  The man in white caftan banged the bonnet of the other man.

“Move this thing from the road.” He shouted.

The other stirred disdainfully at him and hissed.  He directed his gaze to the queue of cars charmed by the power of Abuja morning traffic. The man came again, knocking harshly on the glass window. 

“Open this door. This road is not your father’s parlour.”

He opened the door, went to the man in caftan and snap a lighting slap on his face. The other replied back two more times than the first. It was not long before the two men embraced themselves like tired boxers pleading for the referee to separate them. The scene unfolded in absurdity.  Motorists parked with their engines running silently in the traffic. Doors flung opened on the road as the crowd sought to break the bound of union between the two men when they fell into a fighting embrace.

“You will know who you have slapped today.”  Shouted the man dressed in suits as the crowd separated them.

“Gbam, do your worse!  Who do you think you are?” The man in caftan replied clenching his face.  He took his phone and excused himself overlooking a concrete drain.  He spoke distinctively over the phone often his cadence rising and falling down.

“Send me some boys quick.” He said as the call ended.

The man came back. He looked violently at the other man.  A helux of soldiers firing warning shots into the confused air arrived. They had drove against the flow of traffic, their headlight fully turned on like fire service men racing to rescue a building caught on fire. They hopped out of the helux and hurried to where their captain made the distress call.  Without allowing the man time to explain the fight,  one of the soldiers hungry to exercise his soldierly strength sank the bottom of his gun into the face of the man who had slapped his boss. 

“Haba, Oga you don kill me!” He cried in his throat.

“Sharrap!” The other soldier with northern marks drawn across his face like the whiskers on a kitten cut in.

“You cari your dirty hand slap our captain.  Na die be your own today. "

A procession of heavy boot kicking on the poor man quickly followed until he lay almost lifeless.   A man took his camera and snapped some selfie directly behind the scene of the soldiers.

“Come here you bloody civilian!” One of the soldiers ordered. When the man approached, he took his Samsung 6 phone and smashed it on the tar. The battery, gorilla glass and phone case all raced in different directions. A soldier plunged the root of his gun directly into the chest of the man. The man fell on the tarred road. Two bodies were on the road looking drained of life.  They dragged both men and threw them into back of their helux. The smell of blood, something like fresh liquid, sieved carelessly into the nostrils of the crowd. This is Abuja traffic, where rage is turned to war, and war into anger and anger into the foolishness of selfie. Ka-chaka, ka-chaka, ka-chaka not all the time.  Danger is not the time to overfeed the stomach of your camera with selfie.