The commencement of railway service to and from Abuja/Kaduna was meant to ease the hardship travellers to these important destinations were being subjected to by multilayered fears of armed robbery, kidnapping and other security challenges bedeviling Nigeria. Though the railway project started during the Jonathan administration, it was completed, inaugurated and put into full operation during the early years of President Muhammadu Buhari. Perhaps this explains why some Nigerians tend to passively ascribe this development as one of the achievements of the Buhari government.
Meanwhile, as security issues are daily worsening in the country, patronage of the railway service has kept increasing, because it is the only safe option for those who cannot afford flights for their frequent journeys to and from Abuja to Kaduna. Civil servants working at different ministries and parastatals in the FCT are in the forefront among the regular patronizers of the rail and those who used to spend weeks without visiting their families now find it easy to return home every weekend. Now that patronage of the railway service is rapidly increasing, fears and anxieties not completely absent – the rumour that the train was once unsuccessfully shot at by unknown gunmen, recent reports of exchange of gunfire between security men and suspected kidnappers/armed robbers on the way to Rigasa Terminal in Kaduna state.
But the threats triggering the anxieties of travellers are not only caused by precarious security situations; officials and workers involved in managing the railway institution and administering the sale of tickets to passengers contribute chiefly to the growing tribulations faced by travellers. A traveller can now leave Maiduguri or Yobe and escape the traps of insurgents and the snares of kidnappers, with the aim of catching the train at the Rigasa Terminal, but be thrown in greater fear of impossibility of accessing ticket even if he happens to be among the first 100 passengers on queue.
The train has more than 10 couches, with each couch having the capacity of containing 80 passengers. Even on busy days like Sundays, Mondays and Fridays, passengers queuing to buy tickets experience untold hardships spending hours without being able to get the tickets. When ticket issuing officers begin their sales, only few passengers on the queue can practically get it, while the crude market of the tickets operate openly. In broad daylight, officials and their cronies freely bypass queue and hoard huge bundles of tickets for resale at ultra expensive prices. Before one can say Jack Robinson, one can hear announcement that tickets have finished, not minding the hours passengers have spent sweating despondently on queue. I was one day on the queue, despaired by the tickets-have-finished announcement, while the engine of the train was revving as its way of telling everyone that it was about to go, when a tall, dark-complexioned man waved at me. He asked me if I was alone and I answered in the affirmative. I then followed him until we reached the departure lounge. He quickly handed a ticket to me and instructed me to pay “just N5, 000!”. I declined, but he further asked how much I was going to pay. I said I would pay the amount written on the ticket, which was N2,600. I refused this offer not because I was convinced my action would contribute to bringing sanity in the corruption galore that has become a normal culture in the railway sector, but because I preferred to wait for the next schedule since I was not having an urgent assignment on the Sunday on which I was traveling.
The initial price of ordinary ticket was N1,300. But as protocol to ensure social distancing inside the train, the price was hiked to N2. While passengers buy tickets at the doubled amount, in most cases, the social distancing protocol is observed in the breach and the seats due to be unused are also marketed and sold to desperate travellers. The tactic is simply that those who are on the queue but could not get tickets at the regular price must be compelled to, at last minute, negotiate their ways into the train through the facilitation of greedy railway agents.
Passengers in other climes usually pay for tickets online and those preferring to buy the tickets manually do not have to suffer on the queue before they get tickets. In countries like Morocco, a passenger can buy ticket at any hour of the day and can manually or electronically, book for his or her journey a week ahead. Instead of one to think of any rise in price, in Morocco, passengers get 50% discount if they buy tickets three days ahead of their journeys. Nothing like hoarding of tickets ever exists and the presence of railway staff is only meant to accredit genuine passengers and facilitate smooth accessing of locations and specific directions in the railway terminal. This same atmosphere is found almost everywhere in the world with a shameful exception of Nigeria. Nigerians are at liberty to interpret the refusal to automate the accessibility of tickets and the insistence to maintain the status quo as one of the ways through which leaders derive pleasure from the suffering of the people.
Abubakar writes from Kano via [email protected].
