I remember, I remember…

The past enjoys a universal reputation as the good old days. There is a sense in that. The past invokes nostalgia. And nostalgia is about what we remember and what we miss. 

There is a cruel irony here too. The past is a grave yard of ambitions not realised, and opportunities missed. Some hate to remember the past because it dredges up pains of the deprivation and the injustice they suffered in the hands of their fellow men and women. 

The real irony in being nostalgic about the good old days is that those days did not feel so good then. I remember that in my village, Ikpeba, we knew nothing of electricity or pipe borne water or modern health facilities or schools. Or, what Nigerians call motor roads. We had narrow footpaths and rickety wooden bridges. The diviner and the native doctors were on hand to tell parents that their child was ill because they had offended the gods that lived on his father’s farm. The simple remedy was to appease the gods with a chick or a goat – and the child was made well.

By modern standards, we lived a life of deprivation. Is it not funny to look back to those days of deprivation when life was lived on the whims and caprices of nature and call them the good old days? In truth, today should be the good new day. 

The mind is a funny thing. It keeps drifting between the past and the present. Nostalgia is more than the remembrance of things missed. It is a reconnection to the process of human progress and development. Hey, remember the wag who said that those who fail to remember the past are condemned to repeating its mistakes and regretting them? 

Well, I remember. I find my mind drifting to the good old days. And one thing that keeps bobbing up in my mind is how much I miss the passenger trains of the Nigeria Railway Corporation. In my youth, the train was our only means of transportation. We thought it was the ultimate invention by the white man.

 In our village, Ikpeba, we saluted the train each time it chugged loudly along and announced itself with the blast of its whistle. The rail line that run from Port Harcourt through Enugu to Igumale and all the way to the various northern towns along its route, was many miles away from our village but the train whistle was loud enough to wake up everyone in the early hours of the morning. We did not grumble. We saluted the train with words of praise by the older men, the most common of these being, “ah, the great machine that travels to far places.” 

We loved the train. I knew its wonders only when I began to travel on it to school. We travelled third class, of course.  We trekked long distances to either the railway station at Eha-Amufu in the Eastern Region or Igumale in the Northern Region. The trains always ran on time. The railway station was a beehive of activities. Hundreds of people embarking and hundreds more disembarking. It was always a joyous chaos.

The coaches were quite often crowded with passengers and their luggage. But the coaches were surprisingly clean; the seats were comfortable too if some self-important Igbo men did not monopolise them in a show of bigmanism.  Whatever discomfort we suffered beat the insane prospects of making it on foot from Ikpeba to say Otukpo or Kaduna. The journey of several weeks and months took the passenger train only one day any which way we travelled. Ah, the glorious yesterday.

The train whistle has since fallen silent. I no longer hear it. The train has more or less disappeared and yielded place to the huge buses that travel day and night on roads that inflict maximum discomfort on their passengers. The train has fallen on hard times. Here in Lagos, I occasionally see what look like anaemic and near empty passenger trains on their way from Iddo to Agege or somewhere up country. People generally look at them and ignore them. They know nothing of the good old days when the train was the king of transportation of human beings and goods.

I remember that the fortunes of the train began the corrosive process of dwindling in the seventies. I remember that the Obasanjo military administration sensed this and came to the sensible conclusion that the Nigerian Railway Corporation needed some help from more experienced railway managers to stop the train from becoming a museum piece in a junk yard. It contracted the management of the corporation to the RITES of India for a given period. The company had proved itself in the successful management of train services in that country. I would imagine that the daily passenger haul by the trains in India was close to half of the population of our country. RITES came and executed its contract. But today, nothing is left or remembered of whatever magic the Indians wrought on our railway system. If there was some magic, then it was not a sustainable magic. Or, at least, as soon as the Indians left, the gleaming private cars and buses having caught our imagination, we let the NRC go to seed once more. Rail travel had become blasé, beneath the citizens of an oil rich nation.

I remember that the Shagari administration, very much aware that our railway system had virtually become obsolete, decided to save it by replacing the old rail gauge with the standard railway gauge. The standard gauge became the industry standard long ago but at least Nigeria woke up to it in time to benefit from it. Sadly, we did not. Whatever was spent to get us on the right track, railway wise, was lost because the plan became a victim of the country’s shameful policy mortality.

I think our attitude to the development of our railway system is a metaphor for the lack of clarity in our national development paradigm. The rail system is a heavy duty transportation system. Perhaps, the sense in that is illustrated by the fact that the colonial authorities built the east-north and west-north rail lines from the coast for easier and more effective transportation of exports and imports between the coast and the hinterland. One goods train can carry what 50 or more trailers cannot – and in greater security and safety.

Our roads are comprehensively bad. The roads are not built to take the heavy transportation load. So, the roads sooner than later, give way. It stands to reason that if we cannot save our rail system, we cannot save our roads. In the good old days, this was wisdom elementary.