There is a particular genius that only governments possess. It is the rare ability to stand in the middle of an earthquake and become fascinated by a loose ceiling fan. Nigeria has refined that genius into an art form. Every nation eventually reveals itself by the problems it chooses to solve. Some build railways before monuments. Some wage war against corruption before declaring victory over appearances.
Some invest decades in education because they understand that civilizations are not inherited but patiently constructed. Then there are countries that develop an almost mystical attraction to the symbolic, treating the manageable inconvenience as though it were the defining crisis of the age.
That instinct surfaced once again when public attention settled on the controversy surrounding the Federal Road Safety Corps amendment bill and the provision dealing with preaching, hawking, and trading inside commercial vehicles. Whether one accepts the explanation that the provision merely retained an existing prohibition or believes the entire episode exposed misplaced priorities is almost beside the point.
The argument that consumed the public imagination was never really about a preacher standing in the aisle of a bus. It was about something far more familiar.Another reminder that Nigeria has an extraordinary gift for debating the edges of a fire while the house itself continues to burn.
To understand this political rhythm, one need only board a Nigerian commercial bus. The woman boards carrying two bags of tomatoes and one calculation. If she sells everything before noon, her children will eat meat that evening. If she doesn’t, dinner will once again depend on the extraordinary elasticity of soup, where pepper performs miracles and hope supplies the missing ingredients. She eases herself onto the edge of a cracked vinyl seat, pulling the tomatoes closer with the instinctive caution of someone who knows that profit bruises almost as easily as fruit.
Around her sits a country that has never been introduced to itself. An elderly man rests a brown envelope on his lap, opening it every few minutes to reassure himself that the hospital test results are still inside. Across the aisle, a university graduate stares into the fractured screen of an ageing phone, quietly rehearsing answers to interview questions for jobs that rarely exist. Behind him, a young mother tries to persuade a sleepy child that another hour of heat and traffic is simply part of growing up. A mechanic with permanently darkened fingernails sleeps so deeply that even the conductor’s shouting fails to disturb him. Two market women argue over the price of beans with the seriousness usually reserved for constitutional amendments.
Nobody knows anybody else’s name. Nobody needs to. In a Nigerian commercial bus, biographies are unnecessary. Everyone boards carrying a burden. Everyone gets off carrying the same one. The conductor slaps the side of the bus. Oshodi! One more! One more! It is the oldest lie in public transportation. There is never one more. There are always four more. Sometimes six. The bus accepts passengers the way governments accept committees, always convinced there was room for one more before the whole arrangement collapsed under its own weight.
The driver eventually surrenders to mathematics that only conductors understand, twists the ignition key, and coaxes the ageing engine into another day’s labour. Outside, the city has already begun bargaining with itself. Office workers hurry past women balancing trays of bread on their heads. Hawkers thread effortlessly through traffic selling bottled water, handkerchiefs, phone chargers, and improbable optimism. Somewhere ahead, a fuel tanker has transformed an ordinary traffic jam into a public holiday.
Inside the bus, the republic conducts its own parliament. The landlord says rent is going up. My son graduated two years ago. He is still looking. Rice was cheaper last week. They say another company is laying people off. Nobody speaks loudly. Hardship rarely needs volume, it simply occupies the empty spaces between conversations.
The tomato seller remains silent. She is doing arithmetic that never appears in economics textbooks. If she sells every basket before noon, she can restock tomorrow. If prices rise again, she will buy fewer tomatoes. If the cough troubling her youngest daughter refuses to disappear, medicine will have to compete with school fees. If nothing unexpected happens, and in Nigeria, that is always the most expensive assumption.
The bus lurches violently into a pothole. The tomatoes shift; she catches them before they roll into the aisle. The elderly man instinctively protects his envelope. The graduate protects his phone. Everyone has some fragile thing. Some people simply carry theirs where others can see it.
The conductor begins his daily pilgrimage in search of exact change, approaching a passenger holding a faded hundred-naira note as though confronting an organised crime syndicate. Outside, an ambulance struggles against traffic, its siren rising above the morning, pleading briefly with the city, then disappearing into the same congestion that swallows everything else. Nobody turns to look for long. When emergencies become ordinary, curiosity eventually grows tired.
That is when the man stands up. He looks like the sort of person memory forgets almost immediately. His blue shirt has surrendered its colour years earlier; his sandals have travelled beyond repair and into loyalty. In one hand he holds a small Bible with pages softened by use. He smiles politely, clears his throat, and speaks. My brothers and sisters. Half the bus already knows the script. The elderly woman in front nods before he reaches his second sentence. The graduate lowers his phone. The tomato seller continues staring out of the window. The conductor continues demanding exact change with admirable consistency.
The preacher never raises his voice. He speaks quietly about gratitude, about uncertainty, about journeys that begin without any promise they will end, and about the strange arrogance of people who assume tomorrow has already signed their names into its diary. Nobody argues. Nobody applauds. Nobody converts. When he finishes, he thanks the passengers, returns to his seat, and becomes anonymous once more.
One imagines the bewilderment of a visitor trying to understand the country’s political rhythm through this lens. He arrives in Lagos, crawls through traffic that defies geometry, reads about inflation turning ordinary groceries into luxury purchases, and hears of farmers abandoning fertile land to fear.
By evening, he concludes the nation’s lawmakers must surely be consumed by these monumental questions. Instead, he discovers that one of the loudest conversations concerns what should happen when an enthusiastic evangelist begins explaining the Book of Revelation before the conductor has finished collecting transport fare. The visitor, naturally, assumes he has misunderstood something. He has not.
The remarkable thing about Nigeria is not that we have problems. Every country has problems. The remarkable thing is our enduring confidence that the appearance of order can sometimes substitute for the substance of governance. We have become connoisseurs of the visible because the visible is reassuring. It can be photographed, announced, and reduced to a press statement carrying the satisfying aroma of official action.
Structural reform, by contrast, is a stubborn and uncooperative creature. It refuses to pose for photographs. It cannot be completed between breakfast and the evening news. It demands years of patient institution-building, political courage, and administrative competence. Symbolic victories require none of these inconveniences. A preacher inside a commercial bus is visible while a failing education system is not. A hawker weaving between seats is visible while the slow collapse of purchasing power is not. A conductor arguing over a fifty-naira note is visible while the quiet erosion of public confidence in institutions is not.
Power has always preferred enemies that can be pointed at. Governments have regulated hairstyles while industries disappeared. They have obsessed over dress codes while hospitals deteriorated. They have declared war on noise, on street traders, on billboards, on signposts, on the harmless disorder that ordinary people create simply by trying to survive, all while the deeper machinery of national decline continued its patient work beneath the surface. The attraction is understandable. It is infinitely easier to regulate behaviour than to transform reality. Reality has an unfortunate habit of resisting speeches.
No one should pretend that unsolicited preaching inside a crowded bus is universally welcomed. Commuters who have endured long shifts or personal grief are entitled to peace. Shared public spaces demand courtesy from everyone, whether preacher, trader, musician, or passenger. That is a perfectly legitimate conversation. But legitimacy is not the same as proportion.
The question worth asking is why this debate so easily acquires the emotional energy that ought to accompany conversations about the far larger failures shaping the daily lives of millions. Somewhere along the way, we developed a political culture that mistakes movement for progress, announcements for achievement, and regulation for renewal.
The commercial bus is merely the latest stage upon which this old drama is being performed. Before it, there were countless other stages; after it, there will be many more. The Nigerian commercial bus compresses into fourteen seats the conversations that echo across an entire republic. There is always someone worrying about school fees, calculating hospital bills, praying that an interview will become employment, or mourning quietly. The country enters the bus every morning long before it reaches the office.
That is why it is impossible to think about the preacher without remembering everyone else who travelled with him. The old man never interrupted the sermon, but his silence carried the heavier burden. The graduate never objected, yet the uncertainty waiting for him after the next bus stop was surely louder than any voice inside the vehicle. The tomato seller never uttered a word. She had no sermon to preach because survival had already become her daily testimony.
One day this controversy will disappear, replaced by another headline and another symbolic contest for public attention. The buses will continue to leave their terminals before dawn. Conductors will continue to bargain over exact change. Passengers will continue to carry invisible burdens onto visible seats. The question is whether we have become too comfortable mistaking the management of minor disturbances for the practice of serious governance.
The answer, I suspect, is waiting where it has always been: not inside the speeches delivered by the powerful, but inside the quiet arithmetic of the tomato seller. When the bus finally reached her stop, she lifted the two bags carefully, thanked no one in particular, and stepped into the morning. The sermon was over. The argument it inspired had barely begun. Her children, however, could not eat a public debate. They would eat only if she sold enough tomatoes before the sun became too hot and the fruit began to soften.
As she disappeared into the crowd, one is left wondering whether that is the truest measure of every law, every regulation, and every grand political argument we ever have. Not whether it can command the nation’s attention. But whether, in ways large or small, it leaves the woman with the tomatoes closer to dignity than she was before she boarded the bus.
Everything else is conversation. She still has tomatoes to sell.
Stephanie Shaakaa
shaakaastephanie@yahoo.com
08034861434
