The Country That a President Never Gets to SeeBy MARC LACEY
… Other would-be tour guides took a more prosaic approach. World leaders do not ordinarily spend time in gas lines, but that is just where Franklin Okoye would have directed the president.
If he had, Mr. Okoye, a civil servant, pointed out, he would have been forced to cancel all his talks with Nigeria's politicians, and scrap the ceremonial functions as well. Instead, Mr. Bush would have sat in his limousine all day long inching toward the pump, perhaps sticking his head out into the choking smog from time to time to curse the fact that an oil-lush country has too little gas to go around.
"This is the real Nigeria," fumed Mr. Okoye, who spent six frustrating hours baking in his Honda Prelude recently as he sought to fill his tank after the stations opened after an eight-day strike. There was pandemonium as drivers tried to force their way, or buy their way, into the front of the unruly queue.
Nigeria presents the best and worst that Africa has to offer. The continent's most populous nation, it is a former military dictatorship that has become a democracy, albeit a flawed one that sometimes barely seems to function. As one of the world's great oil exporters, it is a rich place that is often shockingly poor. It is nationalistic and yet deeply divided by ethnic rivalries. Mr. Bush could see little of this from Abuja, the shiny capital where politicians retreat to "run" the country.
In the decidedly grittier world most Nigerians inhabit, the president would eat delicacies from the street, things like goat head and pounded yam, and he would quench his thirst with water that did not come from a bottle, or even a tap. If there was time, he might fetch that water himself, balancing a plastic jug on his head, to get an idea of how so many African women start their days.
He would also spend time out of the big cities, since most Africans live in rural areas. He would be stopped at a checkpoint deep in the bush by children with guns.
But not everything would be so grim. Some slum dwellers in this sprawling city said they would give him palm wine and keep him out late at a music joint. And he would have seen, after waking up from a night's sleep on a straw mat laid out in the corner of some small hut, his arms and legs covered with mosquito bites, that Africans are a hardy lot.
"Somebody like him doesn't understand sufficiently what we go through every day," said a man who identified himself as Sheik Muhammad, and who said he would gladly serve as Mr. Bush's tour guide, especially since he has no job.
"I'd take him around to the neighborhoods around Lagos," he said. "I'd tell him that these are real Nigerians. They wake up at cock crow and work until sunset and they still barely make enough to live."
