By Sunny Awhefeada
The “buka” and its ally “beer parlour” constitute a significant decimal in the sociology of the poor and the middle class in Nigeria.
They are the equivalents of the restaurant and lounge. Both sites have not only evolved to become domains of intellectual and pseudo-intellectual engagements, but they are also newsrooms where information, true and false, is easily available.
They are stopgaps in meeting the feeding and recreational exigencies of those that patronize them. The buka was a survival index for me before I tied the nuptial knot. It was the same for most of my contemporaries. At the University of Benin, the buka was probably the most important place after the classroom. The bukas at the Ugbowo campus of the university were calibrated to match the economic capacity of individual students.
The bukas were numbered Buka 1 to Buka 12. The best meals were served in Buka 1 to Buka 5 and they were costly. Buka 6 to Buka 8 were fairly okay. But Buka 9 to Buka 12 sold the kind of broth that ran down your wrist as your eba or foofoo exits the plate of soup heading for the mouth. The buka was to play a more significant role in my postgraduate days at the University of Ibadan. The need to judiciously devote time to research ruled out the possibility of cooking. The many bukas on campus, Agbowo, Dugbe, Mokola and Sango were to become my forte.
The buka then had its attractions. The telling smell of the smoke emitting from burning firewood was nostalgic. The sight of amala, abula, gbegiri and orisirisi was irresistible. The scuffle between the pestle and the mortar that manifested in pounded yam and the heaving women doing the pounding were a sight to behold. And I cannot forget the Risi who generously offered extra amala for my friends and I because she liked the way we spoke. In those days, we argued a lot while in bukas. I gave up on buka after marriage, but for occasional stopovers at the irresistible bukas at Ore before Benin during return trips from Ibadan or Lagos.
A few weeks ago, a friend that left Nigeria for Europe twenty years ago was visiting and he insisted he must eat banga soup and starch. His visit was unannounced and Abraka where he came to was some one hour’s drive from home. I then remembered a buka to which my buddy, Dr. Emama, occasionally dragged me and there we went.
Luckily, the buka had grass cutter banga soup and starch. We placed our order and my friend began to talk after we both asked about our families. Sounding distraught about the state of Nigeria, he lamented that this wasn’t the country he left twenty years ago. He went on and on, but I said nothing. He queried my silence and I told him that he left Nigeria twenty years ago because Nigeria was in a bad place. So he wasn’t telling me anything new. He shot back saying that Nigeria was in a “worst place” right now heading for the intensive care unit.
He was about to continue pontificating when the bubbling banga soup arrived in a steaming evwere with an alluring surface that looked like button holes. The starch was yellowish and smooth. The sight of the meal numbed my friend into silence. He fell to and didn’t talk until he was halfway into the meal. He looked up for the first time and remembered that he was giving me a lecture on Nigeria. He said a sentence or two and requested for more grass cutter meat.
This time my friend ate slowly and leisurely. After a while, he returned to “the trouble with Nigeria”. We went down memory lane and remembered the grand dreams and visions we had for Nigeria around 1999 when the transition to civil rule programme eventually saw the light of day. We wandered about what happened and what killed that dream nurtured at the onset of the present century.
Having survived the menace of military rule we had hoped that the new Nigeria that embraced civil rule at the end of that horrifying decade and century was going to berth and bring us “everything good”.
The initial false steps of the first four years of this dispensation were taken to be a learning process. Alas it was a rehearsal for state failure. It was around that period that my friend took off to Europe.
He was among the many that saw the handwriting on the wall early enough. At the time he “escaped” to Europe, it took only four and half hours to travel from Ibadan or Lagos to Ughelli by road and one could do a return journey same day and arrive before dusk.
On this visit, it took my friend two days to journey from Lagos to Warri as travellers got stranded at Ologbo, the border town between Edo and Delta States. My friend was headed for Port Harcourt after Abraka. This trip took him an entire day when twenty years ago it took less than three hours!
My friend railed at inflation, lightlessness, poverty, insecurity, failed infrastructure, collapse of education and health sectors, corruption and more. He bemoaned the absence of governance.
He was terrified by the too many arms bearing security men including hunters and vigilantes who have taken over our roads. He opened his mobile phone and showed me a catalogue of woes that came in through online news media. He spoke all the while and I listened.
He was soon to get upset and again queried what he thought was my indifference. In response, I reminded him about how we argued for hours without end at Ibadan, at times into dawn and the many public lectures on campus that were intended to point Nigeria in a new direction, but nothing changed.
I reminded him about hot debates while reading free newspapers at the campus main gate and elsewhere. He smiled wistfully. He asked for a bottle of cold beer, but I advised him that ogogoro or any other gin or whiskey was better for the kind of meal we just had.
A man who had entered the buka and listening to my friend interfered and admitted that what I said about ogogoro or gin or whiskey was true.
He offered to surrender the one he had in his car because he enjoyed what my friend was saying. When he dropped the bottle of Black Label on the table, other customers who were either listening or occasionally interjecting, asked for permission to drink too. The guy, a jolly good fellow, said we were in a democracy and that everyone was free to drink.
Then the conversation about Nigeria began. And what a conversation it was! The first to speak was one of those who asked to be allowed to drink. He told the man who offered the drink that Nigeria wasn’t a democracy. And he went on to reel out reasons for his position. I wanted us to take our leave, but my friend insisted that we must see the end of the conversation.
He loved the pidgin which dominated the conversation. In no time, the buka was turned into a seminar room and the customers assertively made their points like professors whose sole specialty was the “trouble with Nigeria”.
The number of persons who joined in the conversation increased and the voices got agitated and louder.
Everybody wanted to make a point and insisted that others must listen. One of the conversationalists pointed out that everybody knew what is wrong with Nigeria, but nobody knows the antidote. He was shouted down. He was told that everybody knew the solutions, but everybody wanted to take advantage of the situation so the morass deepens. The whiskey was fast reducing in quantity and its effect on the interlocutors was manifesting.
I again told my friend it was time to go. He reluctantly agreed and we rose to go. The conversation continued with great passion like every other thing in Nigeria.
