The Gospel of Lagos Traffic

There is no lane in Lagos.

I mean there are painted lines. Technically. But nobody is following them. A danfo will be in three lanes at once. An okada will find a gap that does not exist and somehow fit through it. Someone will just decide the shoulder is now a lane. Nobody agreed to this. Everybody is doing it anyway.

The first time you drive in Lagos, you think everyone has lost their mind. The tenth time, you might realize something far worse. You've also lost your mind.

It's Mario Kart. Except the banana peel is a pothole, the shell is a bus that wasn't supposed to be in that lane, and there's no extra life. Dodging a near-accident isn't a bad day on the road. It's just another Tuesday. Everyone has just quietly agreed that's normal, and kept driving.

It's not chaos. It's conditioning.

Here's the thing I figured out. It seemed like just pure madness at first, but I quickly realized it's actually a lesson, repeated every single day the average Nigerian steps outside their house. Hesitate at the gap and someone else takes it. Wait your turn and you'll wait forever. The road doesn't punish the person who breaks the rule. It punishes the person still looking for one.

So you learn. You stop looking. You join the swerve.

That's not lawlessness, not really. That's training. Every trip out the door is another rep. Accept the chaos, it's normal. This is Lagos. By the time you've lived here long enough, your body has already agreed to the T&C’s of insanity.

Littlefinger had a line for this, more or less: chaos isn't a pit, it's a ladder. Somebody's always climbing it while everyone else is busy calling it madness. The system you’re being trained to accept is one that reinforces that the people who get ahead are opportunists, lawless and corrupt. They're the ones who read the chaos as opportunity and move before it closes. The people still holding onto fairness, structure, sanity, keep getting run over, literally and financially.

I don't think that's an accident. A system that keeps rewarding the willingness to abandon reason isn't broken by mistake. Somewhere, it's working exactly as it was built to.

The economy is doing the exact same thing

Nobody is really following the rules in the larger society either (are there even rules without enforcement?). Not because people are bad people. Because the rules keep changing, or don't show up when you need them, or were never built for what's actually happening on the ground. So everyone builds their own lane, reading the road. Finding the gap. Getting ahead before the gap closes.

It’s funny and also not funny at all.

Because someone always gets hit

The thing about a road with no lanes is it works, until it doesn't. Someone swerves wrong. Someone doesn't see the okada. And there's no rulebook to point to afterward, because there was never really a rulebook, just straight vibes and the Lord keeping His beloved.

The concerning part isn't the near miss. It's how normal the near miss has become. In a real game, dodging disaster is the fun part. In the real world, it can cost multiple lives.

A system that runs on everyone improvising around a missing structure is impressive, until you're the one who needed the structure to actually be there. It's also just a very honest photograph of what it takes to be a Lagosian. You improvise because you have to, not because you want to. And you get good at it.

Anyway. Drive safe. There is no such thing, but drive safe.