If you live in Lagos, you are the proverbial cat with nine lives. In fact, collect seven Gbosas from me. Gbosa! Gbosa! Gbosa! Gbosa! Gbosa! Gbosa! Gbosa!
In Lagos, a lot of odds are stacked up against you. If traffic is not dealing with you; it will be some unscrupulous law Enforcement agents hot on your heels, or it will be some area boys disturbing your business. Lagosians are indeed people with very thick skins; people with special kind of keratin.
On Saturday, the odd against Gbenga was the very people who were supposed to protect him from some of the wild animals that parade the streets of Lagos in human clothing.
Gbenga works with a Lagos based Agro company facilitating the sourcing of commodities and transporting the commodities to manufacturers. As usual, Gbenga woke up to go about his normal business; a truck from the Northern part of the country was already offloading in Ikorodu. Gbenga’s job includes going to site to supervise the whole process and also to pay the driver and the boys offloading the goods for them.
Gbenga stopped over at a First Bank ATM just before the ikorodu garage to withdraw some money for the payment of the driver. The transaction didn’t take up to six minutes and Gbenga was out of the bank premises to continue his journey to the client’s factory.
His plans for Saturday experienced its first ‘flat tyre’ when some touts approached him moments after he left the ATM. “Give us our share of the money you collected from the ATM” some igbo smelling touts croaked at him. “Ogbeni, corporate jor or we will scatter your fine boy and still collect the money on top.”
At this point Gbenga could not believe what was happening to him; it looked like some of the scenes he had seen in Nollywood. He dragged with the boys until it dawned on them that they’ve ran into a bad customer. Gbenga was about hissing a sigh of relief when he was accustomed by the Police who were just a stone throw from the scene of the first incident.
“Hey you come here” one of the Policemen said to Gbenga. “Where are you coming from” One of them said he should identify himself. Gbenga complied, brought his identification card. The policemen took the identity card from him. “What do you have in your pocket?” the men kept barking down several orders at the same time. “Oya crossover; go and meet our oga!” “Oya!” at this point, the two policemen started pushing him to crossover to the other side of the road.
When he crossed over, Gbenga tried to explain his mission in the area. The second policeman shouted him down. “Shut up, Yahoo boy like you!” At this point Gbenga could not maintain his cool any more. “Yahoo what!?” “Please I have people waiting for me at the factory; I need to hurry up to meet them.”
“Shut up, you this Yahoo boy; I don’t want to hear from you again. Don’t worry by the time we are done with you, you will understand” shouted the policeman the second Policeman.
“What are you in the game, are you a picker, Internet dating or are you the owner of the game?” Gbenga answered that he is a staff of a company and that he was going to pay workers at the site.
The policemen said he was being stubborn, handcuffed him and beat him up. The policemen in the van took his wallet and started looking for what they could use to buttress their points. They took his wallet, removed his ATM card and insisted he owned up to being a Yahoo Yahoo boy. Gbenga told them there was no way he was going to own up to who he is not. They started beating him again until they had their fill.
At the end of the day, the policemen took thirty five thousand naira out of the eighty thousand naira he withdrew from the ATM, dropped him off at an unknown destination and drove off.
“I can’t remember the last time I cried like a baby; but that Saturday I couldn’t fight back tears. I was shocked that some minutes after I resisted some area boys from robbing me; I was robbed by men of the Nigerian Policemen. Men that are paid with taxpayers money to provide security to citizens like me” the devastated Gbenga said.
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