Living the Nigerian Dream – The Tale of Chijioke’s Fan

Thanks to cognac and the effluxion of time my memory is no longer as sharp as it used to be but I think that the fan belonged to Chijioke. If I remember correctly, he conscripted the aging relic of an electric table fan from the store in his mother’s restaurant located somewhere in the middle of the ever bustling Oshodi Market in Mainland Lagos. The fan had earlier been retired meritoriously from active service after decades of providing succor to sweating patrons gleefully swallowing morsels of eba garnished with Mama Chijioke’s delicious variety of soups, so you can imagine the poor fan’s chagrin when in the year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Six, it found itself dragged back into active service in “Powerfulss 107”.
Chijioke, Eric and I where classmates at the Department of English of the University of Lagos as well as roommates in Room P “Powerfulss!” 107 of Unilag’s Fagunwa Hall. At the time, “Powerfulss” (for reasons I can no longer remember) was a prefix we attached to anything good or anything we were proud of and our Hostel room, located on the first floor of Fagunwa Hall’s “P” wing was one of such things.
Those days it was quite difficult to get On-campus accommodation in Unilag, especially the elitist “two-man-room” variety. This spawned a Black-market where the lucky few sold their ‘bed-spaces’ to the highest bidders, sometimes at outrageous prices. The scarcity of bed-spaces in turn created a new social pecking order; The “Landlord”, being the owner of an officially designated bed-space, the "Squatter", being the officially designated paying or non-paying "tenant of the Landlord" (each Landlord is entitled to one Squatter), the “Floater”, who pays a fraction of the cost of the bed-space, has a mattress which during the day is usually placed beneath the mattress of one of the Landlords’ beds, but spread on the floor (where the centre table occupies during the day) at night, and the lowest on the food chain, the “Underwater” who during the day hides his own mattress in any of the other occupants wardrobes, stays as long as possible in either the Lecture Halls, any of the Butteries, Freedom Square, the Lagoon Front or under the almighty Indo-Tree and only sneaks back to the room late at night when every other person has taken their sleeping positions. The Underwater is not a paying occupant, a Freeloader; it is his lot to calmly and thankfully squeeze his mattress into any space he can find on the room floor. The pecking order is reversed for waking up. Naturally the Underwater has to get up first to make room and avoid being trampled by the Floater. Then the Floater gets up and folds his mattress to avoid being trampled by either or both of the two Landlords and their Squatters, the Squatters get up before the Landlords and of course the Landlords can wake up anytime they choose. Before the “busy-bodies” amongst you ask who was the Floater or Squatter between Eric, Chijioke and I, let me state upfront that technically, though we were three in the room, P107 did not have a Floater. We had converted what was originally a “three-man-room” (one single bed and a bunk-bed) to the more aesthetically pleasing and elitist “two-man-room” (two single beds) by taking out the bunk-bed and plundering a single bed from an unlocked room in another Hall.
I recall Chijioke, ever the technician and the Do-It-Yourselfer, bare-chested, clad in only combat shorts and bright yellow coloured bathroom slippers, screwdriver and pliers in hand, disemboweling the rickety fan after yet another breakdown and trying to make sense out of the mass of bronze coloured wires staring gloomily back at him from the fan’s electric motor. Eric and I will occasionally peer over his shoulder, hoping that this Undergrad student of English Language and Literature has somehow acquired the Electrical or Mechanical Engineering skills required to fix the ailing fan. I suspect that we both knew that Chijioke had no idea what he was doing however the prospect of sleeping without a fan in the sweltering heat was enough incentive for us to give him the benefit of doubt. On the occasional good day when the fan found it in its aging relic of a heart to work, perched on the reading table beneath the room’s sole window, the fan would languidly sweep from the right side of the room to the left or from the left to the right, spewing its warm benevolence on the Landlord occupying the bed in the corner from where its journey of the particular day commenced, briefly touching the Floater sleeping sprawled in the middle of the room, swoops on the other Landlord and occupying the bed on the opposite corner and then sweeps back in the direction it came from.
Anyone who has ever benefited from the good grace of a table fan on a sweltering day knows that unlike its more endowed cousin the ceiling fan, it lacked the capacity to cover everybody in Room P107 at every point in time. So it had to be turn-by-turn. Depending on the speed of the fan’s revolution, the room occupants briefly break out in a sweat when the fan moves away from them, while the salt crusted dripping body heaves a sigh of relief on its return. Chijioke had perfected the art of intermittently fanning himself with the stiff cover of a photo-album when the fan was ‘not in his favour’ and resting his aching arm when the fan swung by once again.
Living or waiting for “the Nigerian Dream” is like our stint in Room P107 governed by Chijioke’s table fan. Think about it, not once has Nigeria had a leadership that has been able to articulate and implement policies that cater for every single Nigerian, at the same time, the same way the table fan’s more endowed cousin, the ceiling fan, could have catered for all the occupants of Room P107 at the same time. Wishing for the table fans’ more privileged cousin, the window or split unit air-conditioner for Chijioke, Eric and I was as much a pipedream as Nigerians expecting the articulation and implementation of policies that make the Nigerian dream a reality, make life enjoyable for every Nigerian citizen who chooses to apply him or herself….and I mean really basic things like affordable healthcare, affordable housing, uninterrupted power supply, plus a society that promotes entrepreneurship and rewards the culture of industry and hard work.
Today, “the Nigerian Dream” is real, for a small fraction of the country’s citizens are living it. However it is lived turn-by-turn, like Chijioke’s table fan and often turns to a sweltering hellish nightmare when the fan stops blowing in your direction. If the Underwater doesn’t get out of the way fast enough he or she will be trampled unapologetically by the Floater who in turns is racing to get out of the Landlord and his Squatter's way.
That is why when fortune smiles on us, our brother, cousin, neighbour, Pastor, Imam, wife, wife’s hairdresser or mechanic; when we find ourselves in a position of authority, a position to dish out privileges and wield influence, then it is our time to eat, and we have to eat very fast (with both hands) and stockpile some loot for a rainy day because we don’t know when Chijioke’s fan will move away from us. We don’t even know if there will be any fan waiting for us when we get to the hostel after a long day at school, for the day we least expect it is when we will walk into Room P107 and are greeted with the sight of a Chijioke, in his combat shorts and blazing yellow bathroom slippers, staring gloomily at the bronze wirey bowels of our comatose table fan.
So whether you are a Landlord, Squatter, Floater or Underwater, it is in our collective interest to find and install a durable ceiling fan, or even a split unit air-conditioner. The other option for us is scary.











Jekwu Ozoemene