In Dire Need of Verdification*

by Muhammad Shakir Balogun

My old man, bless him, has an almost artistic, if somewhat quaint, sense of beauty. And he has photo albums (one of them he entitled ‘Memories are Made of These’, some of the contents of which I have purloined) wherein camera captures moments of history, personal and national. In those days when he was a roving sales representative of Kingsway Chemists and subsequently Johnson & Johnson he collected scenes that caught his fancy in his peregrinations all over the country, almost all of which he duly captioned in an elegant semi-cursive hand and with a touch of professional imagination. He must have considered himself some sort of amateur Sunmi Smart-Cole. But he’s no photojournalist or photographic artist. Some of the captions include, “The Niger Bridge at Onitsha”, “Federal Palace Hotel at Night”, “Mallam Aminu Kano International Airport”, “Shere Hills, Jos”, “Army Day Celebration in Kaduna”, “Sallah Durbar, Kano”, “A Polo Match, Kaduna”, “Gidan Goldie Overlooking Mallam Kato Square”.

This last was one of the beautiful, abiding vignettes of my childhood. It was the picture of an imposing building named after Sir George Dashwood Taubman Goldie, an infamous entrepreneur of Empire who created the Royal Niger Company. It once housed my dad’s place of work. It maintained its staid façade until recently when it got an utterly tasteless facelift by, presumably, a new owner. The other part of the picture, on the other side of the boulevard, was Malam Kato Square. It was one of the places to which I performed a pilgrimage as soon as I was old enough to find my way about town. Of course before that I had passed by it a number of times in my dad’s car. A concrete parabola arched over its entrance from which a walkway led to a pavilion containing a fountain, a canon and a cenotaph dedicated to heroes of the World Wars and other theatres of hallowed bloodshed thereafter, as proclaimed by the bronze plaque. The fountain was surmounted by a gun-wielding soldier standing in petrified anonymity. On this pavilion wreaths are laid every Armed Forces Remembrance Day. Gowon laid the first bundle of flowers in 1969. Laid out in artistic proportions, it contained cacti, neems, a few conifers and a variety of flowers in huge concrete flower beds.

It was one of the vestiges of the opulence and architectural splendour of the generous, though sometimes extravagant, Gowon era. And like most public monuments across the country (the state of the National Theatre at Iganmu is especially heartbreaking) Malam Kato Square languished in a state of barbarous disrepair for years until…

Until the return to civil rule at the end of the lean nineties - when it was dealt the final indignity. The PhD-taunting rural aristocrat – to borrow an apt phrase from a friend – who tenanted the Government House at that time savagely hived off the larger part of the ‘square’ that gave it the most modest trappings of a public park, leaving just the ceremonial platform. On it he erected a most aesthetically repugnant motor-park - a veritable eye-sore – for the rattle-boxes we call public transport buses. Equally appalling is the colony of commercial motor-bikes and rickety cabs that has sprung up around it like hideous flies buzzing around a turd. It’s a particularly galling instance of the sustained uglification of Nigerian cities abetted, nay, spearheaded by the authorities.

When I was growing up in the eighties there was a large public park with benches, flower hedges, guava trees etc on the southern side of Zoo Road until a decade later when the considerable swathe of greenery and open air was carved up amongst people who couldn’t care less that it must have been intended as a neighbourhood park for the thousands of people living in the federal housing units on both sides of the road. Shameless Capital, corrupt officials and sheer philistinism are collaborating to guzzle up whatever green space is left in Nigerian cities. Today, in the vast urban sprawl called Kano only the Kano Club golf course has the slightest semblance of a park. And I doubt if it’s open to public use. It’s as if the authorities abhor open spaces. Every available piece of land, especially along major roads, is soon sold and developed into a ‘shopping complex’ without the least regard for urban planning.

Each time I go around Kano I can’t help feeling a nostalgic pang for the erstwhile decency, if not beauty, of many areas of the metropolis. While authorities all over the world, including even some African countries, apply the latest knowledge and technology to make their cities more habitable, we are wilfully allowing our cities descend into previously unknown depravity. Of course Kano is not alone; it’s worse for the mega-city of Lagos. So much pathos has been spewed on the pervasive chaos in the Centre of Excellence by people who knew it in its age of sanity. When I went round Onitsha I knew it must have seen more civilized days. Imagine what salubrious effect a large public park at the heart of that most bustling city would have on its harried, ever tensed-up inhabitants. I suggest that the huge vermin-infested chasm lying between Main Market and Fegge be drained into the nearby Niger, filled up (there are enough junks, scraps and refuse to do the job) and a park created in its place.

In our thoughtlessly built-up, barely inhabitable cities children hardly find space for play and recreation leading to heightening juvenile delinquency. There’s hardly any open space left for people to assemble in cases of disasters such as a fire outbreak or take a leisurely walk without the fear of being run down by a car or the omnipresent motorbike. And in a country where electricity supply is abysmal there’s no place to seek refuge from the blazing sun during the sweltering hot season. Recently in a clumsy attempt to salvage what remains of the public green spaces in the Nasarawa G.R.A. in Kano the government ended up adding insult to injury by constructing inherently unsightly fences around the tiny plots of grass largely taken over by flower sellers and their nurseries, and painting them an exceedingly gaudy white-and-bright yellow, and red. Dreadful lack of taste or aesthetic feeling.

It’s in this regard that I laud the restoration of the neighbourhood parks in the Abuja Master Plan by the FCDA even though, I must say this with loud, painful emphasis, it could have been carried out with greater consideration for the livelihood of affected citizens. Nigerians were rendered homeless while the vast majority of the houses in Gwarimpa, built by the government, remained colonized by reptiles and rodents. But to return to my point, the importance of the green areas in Abuja to the city’s beauty and sanity cannot be exaggerated. The last but one time I was in Abuja I spent some time in one of the parks and, moved by the almost idyllic serenity and beauty of the place, I scribbled a few lyrical lines in poetic rhythm with the gently flowing brook coursing through.

Even though all this may sound indulgent in the midst of the myriad of pressing, more immediate problems (to wit - grinding poverty, scandalous illiteracy, scarcity of safe pipe-borne water, epileptic power supply, diabolical roads, lack of social security etc etc) bedevilling this nation, it still doesn’t take anything out of its urgency. And who says multiple problems cannot be solved at the same time? Moreover, I didn’t intend this to be a litany of the frightfully proliferating decay in public and social infrastructure in the country – this is getting constant, if yet futile, attention from journalists and commentators – but rather to focus on a particular problem.

For crying out loud, our cities are so ugly, ungreen, unclean, and psychologically unhinging that no sensible person can deny that they are in dire need of verdification among a number of pressing needs.

* Verdification: my coinage; from Greek ‘verdi’, meaning green.

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