My fright was not unfounded. That Wednesday was the first night most European countries opened their air space for flights after a week of ash cloud scare, no thanks to the Icelandic volcanic eruption. I had booked a seat by the window to enable me have a view of the space. I had prepared my mind for turbulence. But not for a plane crash. Most of the passengers in the aircraft were expatriates. What this meant for me was that I could only commune with my mind.
The six-hour flight from Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja to Frankfurt, Germany seemed like a 30-minute drive from Lugbe to Utako District in Abuja. I slept, woke up, then slept again, and the next time I woke up, I was in Germany. The huge airport, numerous Lufthansa airline planes to prove that Frankfurt was its hub in Europe, the calm, a little bit frosty morning, and the polite officials at the airport, effectively caused my fear to fade. There was no turbulence. I did not see any trace of ashes in the cloud. But I suddenly realized how lonely I had become. Hardly did anyone speak a language I understood. No English, no Igala, no Idoma, no Yoruba, no Igbo, no Hausa. I was lost, though in a sea of faces. Even those who could speak English, I thought, pretended as if they didn’t understand the language.
The next hour, I was airborne to Geneva, my final destination. As the cabin crew announced the final descent into Geneva, joy welled up in my belly like unrelenting spring water. I had conquered ash cloud. I had arrived in Geneva to spend five days for the Global Investigative Journalism Conference (GIJC) 2010. What first struck me while the aircraft descended were the trees in the city. After tearing through the cloud, Geneva became bare to us. The spectacle transported my mind back to the 1970s when I was growing up in my village in Ogene-Igah, Kogi State. Though my grandparents had moved to a new settlement, we still had to return to their old settlement every morning for our farms. The old settlement, called Alacha, had become a forest with wild trees, tall grasses, lakes, spring waters, and most significantly, farmlands. In this forest, we could still find traces of dilapidated mud houses that reminded us that our forefathers had lived there. The spent structures were scattered in Alacha like landmarks, such that we could identify where the forefathers of some of our contemporaries lived before they moved close to the major road built by the colonial masters.
As the Lufthansa plane descended into Geneva that was the memory that awoke in my mind’s eye. Unlike London where one could behold the cluster of buildings while hovering over the airport, Geneva seemed like a town built in the woods. Tall trees surrounded buildings and a major lake, such that I feared our plane might land in either the woods or in the lake.
A ride through the woods
Mandat International. This is the name of the hotel where I was supposed to sleep and wake up during my stay in Geneva. About two weeks before the conference, I had memorized the name of the hotel because I would need to take a taxi from the airport in Geneva to the hotel. As English was an odd means of communication in Geneva, I tried my faltering French on the first taxi driver I encountered.
“Je vais au Mandat Internationale,” I told the driver.
“Mandat, c’est bon, entre,” he said, opening the car booth for me to put my bag.
As I sat behind this driver, I prayed he did not engage me in any discourse, because I might not make sense out of the fast and breezy manner Europeans speak French. To my advantage, the driver was engrossed in the lyric and rhythm of the French music blaring from his car stereo. He followed the lyric with the perfection of a man who had memorized the song, and swayed his head and other body parts in symmetry with the sound of the instruments.
While the driver occupied his mind with the music I was busy admiring the woods. Leaving the airport environment after a few meters, the driver took a road bordered by trees. It was like driving through a forest, and as we moved on, leaving the city to negotiate the road to the hotel, what I noticed were the woods. They were everywhere. After driving for about ten minutes, the driver turned to what I would consider a bush path that could probably have been leading to our family’s farmland. The only difference was that there were exotic houses in between the buildings every 200 metres. This gave each house owner the allowance to plant trees around his own building. When we arrived at Mandat International, the serenity was emphasized by the woods. I was excited.
“Bien venue, Monsieur,” a hotel attendant greated me.
“Merci,” I replied, adding, “Je suis Monsier Theophilus Abbah de Nigeria.”
“You are for the GIJC conference?” the lady switched to English, having discovered how I was struggling with my French.
“Yes,” I replied.
In those brief seconds of dialogue with the young lady, I stole a furtive look around the environment: settees in an open space overlooking the trees and in reciprocity, the breeze from the woods spread their wings to the place. I had begun to imagine spending my after-daily-conference-hours in one of the settees to savour the pleasure of the cosy environment.
“Okay, but you are no longer staying in Mandat International,” the hotel attendant told me. “You have been moved to Hotel de Geneve, which is closer to the conference venue.”
Momentarily, I felt disappointed, almost dejected. The driver who took me there had departed. The lady helped to call another cab to take me to Hotel de Geneve. I wondered there were woods in that hotel. Yes. There were trees all around, but Hotel de Geneve lacked the serenity of Mandat International.
“Why are there so many trees in Geneva?” I asked Michel Buhrer, a middle age photo-journalist, when we began to interact at the lobby of the International Conference Centre venue of the GIJC 2010.
Michel was excited at my question because he told me he had carried out a study into the tree phenomenon in Geneva. Another Geneve lady who had eavesdropped on our discussion drew closer.
“The story behind the trees is linked to families,” Michel began. “Over 100 years ago, many big families with large properties actually made their money from trading abroad. While returning from foreign trips, they brought back exotic trees that did not grow naturally in Geneva. On those imported trees, they wrote the names they were called from their countries of origin. Each big family planted so many trees and created parks in their woods.”
Michel told me that at a point, the families could no longer maintain the parks and decided to donate them to government with an agreement that they should not be cut down to locate any structure there. “But government has violated the agreement,” he added, and pointing to the huge United Nations building surrounded by trees, Michel said, “that place used to be called Arena Park, but government had cut down the trees in order to give more space to the United Nations which needed more space.”
Even as government flouted the deal with the park freaks, a conservative estimate has it that about a quarter of the total landmass of Geneva is occupied by parks. Some of them include the English Garden, Bastions park, Parc La Grange, Eaux Vives Park, La Perle-du-Lac and Parc Moynier, and Batie Woods. The parks are located in the proximity of the two major lakes in Geneva, the Twin Lakes and Lake Geneva.
Who is the president of Switzerland?
Impulsively, I asked myself the question, who is the president of Switzerland? It occurred to me that Switzerland evoked two images – of the United Nations and financial secrecy. The images do not normally have any accompanying face of the political leader of the country.
When I put this question across to Michel, he said, “there are seven federal ministers, and every year one of them becomes president. But he has no more powers than the other six, except that when a federal minister is president, he is seen as the face of Switzerland, just to receive foreign leaders and represent Switzerland in foreign meetings.” I asked what the name of the current president is, Michel was lost. He turned to another Swiss who was also not sure and walked away after shaking her head.
Jean-Claude Peclet, a Swiss journalist came to my rescue. He said, “the current president is Doris Leuthard. The system is parliamentary democracy with a strong blend of direct democracy. The government (conseil federal), 7 members, is elected by the parliament. There is a rotating presidency, one-year term, and the role is until now essentially honorary. There are plans to change it to a two-year presidency, because it would be more efficient for international relations.
Peclet said the Swiss are distrustful of elites and personal power. “They like to discuss and decide as much as they can at the local level (commune or canton). For many of them, politics is a necessary evil, and the best leaders are the ones who keep a low profile. This has worked for decades. It has reached its limits now in a globalised world, and the Ghaddafi affair, the tense discussions about bank secrecy show that you, sometimes, need a stronger leadership. But Switzerland is not well prepared for that.”
In the 26 counties in Switzerland, there is a deliberate attempt to maintain their individuality, as Michel told me. “Switzerland was built piece by piece; it is an aggregation of different pieces. That is why to survive as a country, we find a way in which everyone of the people is represented. Though a small country, there are four official languages: German, French, Italian, and Romanches, which is a mixture of old Latin, Italian, German, and an old language spoken by a tiny part of the population. A third of the population speaks French, while two-third speaks German. But as an evidence of the independence of the regions, every county has its own educational system to the point that when a family moves from one county to another it has to adjust to the educational system of the new county.
A City of the United Nations
One of the distance markers for strangers in the city is the United Nations. As I boarded Bus 5 from the Place Isaac-Mercier in the city centre on the 15 minutes journey to the conference centre, the word that I watched out for was Nations Unies, meaning United Nations in French. As soon as the announcer uttered those words, I began to solicit a passage to the door to alight from either the tram or the bus. All around the bus stop are United Nations buildings housing any of the agencies one could recall. But Switzerland is not a member of the United Nations. Why did the UN site its agencies in this country?
“The story dates back to the 1920s,” Gianora Delphine said. In those days, Geneva was the headquarters of the predecessor of the UN, the Societes des Nations. But after the establishment of the United Nations, the agency maintained its presence in Palais de Nations in Geneva because Switzerland was not involved in the First and Second World Wars. The country remained neutral throughout that era, and has remained the venue of international diplomatic conferences since 1945 when the headquarters of the United Nations was moved to New York, United States.
Security agencies missing in Geneva
The lady at the front desk of Hotel de Geneve handed me a card as I attempted to walk to the bus station. “With this card, you will not pay for the bus or tram that you enter. It shows you are a tourist and all tourists do not pay when they use public buses.”
It sounded pleasant, but when I entered the first bus I didn’t find anyone making any payment. So why should I hold the card that signaled I was a tourist?
“They paid,” Michel told me. “Every passenger has purchased his ticket and kept it in his or her bag. No one collects it from them because at the point when the payment was made the money had entered into the account of the transport company.”
“But no one would know who didn’t pay,” I pressed on.
“Yes, but the transport system is built on trust that no passenger would default by entering a bus or tram without purchasing a ticket. What happens is that once in a while regional or city control officers would enter the train and ask passengers at random for tickets. If you didn’t produce a ticket for that journey, you will be prosecuted. Everyone is aware of this so passengers buy their tickets.”
It was not only the bus and trams that are not policed. As against the phenomenon in Nigeria, I can’t remember seeing any security operative on the streets of Geneva, not to talk of those wielding weapons like the anti-riot policemen on the streets and highways in Nigeria. Even traffic lights didn’t fail their counts, so there seemed not to be any need for traffic wardens. The only time I heard about security operatives was when I entered into a hotel to visit a participant in the conference who came from the United States. The lady at the front desk insisted on having my international passport before permitting me to accompany my friend into his hotel room.
“Why?” I demanded, thinking that I was becoming a victim of racism.
“I’m sorry, Sir,” the lady replied. “There was a case yesterday in which some pick-pockets robbed some persons. The control people (policemen) came here and it was tough for me. I want to have a record of who enters the hotel.” I smiled to myself. Why should policemen query a front desk staff over pick pockets. In Nigeria, the police would laugh at you if you complained that you lost money to pick pockets…
Who has the right of way: bicycles or motor vehicles?
It is difficult to neglect bicycle riders in Geneva. Either as a form of exercise or a means of moving from one point to another, bicycle-riding is a culture in this city. The young and old are caught in this frenzy.
Delphine explained this trend thus: “cycling is taken seriously in Switzerland. Cyclists wear helmets, reflective clothing and all-weather protection. Many bikes are hi-tech pieces of machinery, all carbon-fibre-framed and elastomer-suspension-camped. People like to have lots of gears to deal with the mountainous terrain. The saddles tend to be higher up than the handle-bar, so the cyclist can bend forward for maximum speed. You can buy all kinds of glamorous accessories to go with bikes: box-shaped trailers made from recycled plastic to go shopping with, aluminum chariots to carry around your children in… Cycling in Switzerland is seen as a sport, and as a lifestyle choice. If you cycle, you’re bound to be healthy, green and modern.”
Though Delphine has painted the beauty and advantages of cycling in Geneva, Peclet said it is not a tradition restrict to Switzerland. “Netherlands is more so, or even Germany, I would say. Geneva has a lot of bikes because it is flat. The German part is also more “bike-minded” than the French part. I think this has to do with northern cultures, being more social and cooperative and southern one more individualistic, to put it in a simple way.”
On the last day of my stay in Geneva, a delegate to the conference and I took a long walk round some parts of the city and took an hour-long rest at the Lac Parguin, a tributary of one of the lakes of Geneva. It was a Sunday afternoon. The sun was mild. The wind from the lake was soothing to the body as we sat on a wooden bench under a tree. To enjoy the bliss at their park many riders had parked the bicycles beside the lake, cruising in speedboats from one end of the lake to another.
