The unsustainable operation of Nigeria’s rail sector (1)

This is meant to be a sort of travelogue of my first train ride in Nigeria. I will focus the first part on exactly what happened and the second part on an analysis of what can be done better. I need to say that I am not one of those who are unnecessarily cynical or overly critical. Equally, I am not one of those who are impressed by mediocre performance. I am somewhere in between. Yet I know that Nigeria has sunk into mediocrity for several decades, and that we have almost come to a point where we have now agreed that we can never do anything right.  There is therefore some sort of inferiority complex growing among the majority of poor Nigeria, which contrasts sharply with a ‘superiority complex’ which is growing among the leaders of Nigeria. In the context of the rail system as I witnessed on the ride between Abuja and Kaduna (return trip), it seems the leaders do not believe that the people deserve a better life or habitation.

The Trip

I was to depart on a Saturday but I assumed that Nigerian train stations work like others elsewhere. I also clearly underestimated the crowd. So walking into the train station around 9am for a 10am ride was a no-no. The Kubwa station was jampacked as people were going back to several locations after the new year holiday. Students were also returning to school. A gentleman I met at the station managed to obtain a ticket through a thriving black market for him and his son returning to school in Kaduna. The station was chaotic like everything else we try to do in Nigeria. I decided to hang around a bit, to understand how things really work. This is not one of those train stations abroad where you buy tickets online and walk in freely.

I learnt there are touts – and staff of the Railway Corporation – who buy tickets and resell at a premium. Then there were those who allow passengers in (for an unofficial fee) as ‘standing’. I will explain how that works shortly. The Nigerian government had spent some money building the station. Scratch that. The Chinese spent all the money; providing the loans, bringing in the trains, laying the tracks, the signals and what have you. And the trains are still being driven and maintained by the Chinese. But in spite of this, the car park at Kubwa was untarred – maybe the Chinese loan does not cover that aspect which would have added a good finishing touch to the otherwise solid structure of the train station. I had been hearing about the achievements in the rail sector. I commend those who have striven to even get us to this level, but I will not allow them – for the sake of all of us – to sink into mediocrity. We can do a lot better.

So I gave money to a friend whom we were to embark on the journey together to obtain tickets for the next day. We were three on the trip. He called later to say all was sorted for 10am the next morning. I arrived the station the next day at 930am, believing all was truly sorted. Not a chance! I forgot that the standard system is that you could only obtain tickets one hour before departure. A staff had promised to help and assured my friend. But no ticket was on hand the next morning. After about 20 minutes, my friend was handed one first class ticket. Two to go. The other two tickets had been bought on our behalf by someone in Idu Terminal, who was on the train coming. We finally got the tickets anyway, and embarked on our journey. As we got on the platform we saw some policemen bundling some young boys whom they had arrested from the train to their station. I thought the boys had tried to steal on the train but upon enquiry, I learnt from a policeman on my return trip that the boys sat on the train track smoking Indian Hemp, just as the train approached Kubwa. This forced the train to stop and police arrested the boys. This has implications which we shall discuss shortly.

The journey to Kaduna was smooth save for a short stop at some point where they had to do ‘crossing’. On both legs of the journey, there were slight signal challenges and they had to resort to ‘manual’, while approaching one of the stations. These were the terminologies used by the staff I asked.

The trip back to Abuja from Kaduna was more eventful. We had been warned by someone who was used to the way things worked that if Kubwa was jampacked, the Kaduna end was something else. Whereas there weren’t enough sitting space for the deluge of passengers at Kubwa station and the few iron chairs that there were, had begun to collapse (as is usually the case in Nigeria), I didn’t see any provision whatsoever at the Kaduna end. What you will see is a rugby scrum of passengers trying to make it through the gate to the platform. The security was lax, on both sides of the journey. Security men with hand scanners randomly selected passengers with traveling bags and performed some perfunctory check which was not thorough at all. The body scanners were unmanned. They beeped loudly constantly as people passed through with no questions asked. In both stations, it was evident that they were grossly understaffed, and almost unserious about the work. At the Kubwa end there was one person who scanned some select bags with his hand scanner, two ladies who sold tickets, and two people who manned the door to the platform. It didn’t look like a serious station at all.  At the Kaduna/Rigasa end, it was hard to tell how many staff were present, but the chaos spoke eloquently.

So we had been warned about Kaduna. Upon arrival there from Abuja, our third passenger who was used to the trips, identified a staff, whom we gave money to help obtain the ticket back. We went into town. I kept calling intermittently. The man had told us that the First Class tickets (which cost N2,500) had been sold out but he will try. We said OK. Then he later confirmed that that was impossible. Will we be okay with economy tickets? I said OK. But upon getting back to Kaduna Station, he confessed he couldn’t get any ticket. We may have to stand. I said OK. And so we were ushered onto the platform and into the train. I didn’t know how this worked. But the money we had paid went into the pockets of the staff. We had no ticket but no one harassed us on the trip. We stood quite alright in First Class cabin. I realized that ‘standing’ is good business for the staff of the Railway Commission. I and my colleague started to calculate how much these guys could make per day from such a lacuna. The Railway Commission will at best only demand for payment for the number of seats on each train. But if you collected an average of N1,500 from 100 people per trip, that is N150,000, and if you make 8 trips a day, that is N1,200,000 or close to N400million per year. This is how ‘God’ blesses some people in Nigeria.

More next week as this issue has now attracted national attention. Some of the racketeers were arrested a few weeks back but the problem still goes back to the conceptualization and daily management of the system. Our leaders failed, not the people.