By Odoh Diego Okenyodo
My father was a fine artist. He saw artistic value in anything and never believed in art for art’s sake. For him, art had to add value to society, playing a function; doing something that could not be done without which society could not function. Society, too, had to see the design element in whatever we do. For instance, as children, when my father made us sweep the compound morning and evening, he said we needed to see the designs we made on the floor by dragging the broom on the floor from one end to the other and back in a different direction.
For this reason, I wonder what my father would think of the persistent fuel station queues. Did it serve the purpose of showing us what a constipated belly would look like? Or how it feels to be bloated when the roads are so constricted that movement becomes reminiscent of terminally ill persons? I don’t know exactly what it can be, but when I flew to different cities and saw the strings of cars from the air, I saw what my father could have thought of the fuel queues if he had been here to witness the rituals. From the sky, the lines look like multi-coloured jewellery made by a master jeweller. Depending on where they flow from, they are bracelets, earrings, rings, and necklaces twisting from metal sheets that constitute the fuel station. The bunch of impatient car owners trying to enter through the filling station exit gate would make a good replica of the mould.
If my father were still around, perhaps, he would have been an adherent of the late artist Gani Odutokun’s famous theory of accident and design. Speaking about the theory, Odutokun was reported as follows: “The guiding light behind most of my work is the concept of ‘accident and design’. I see art as life, and I perceive life as an endless circle of oscillation between accident and design. Man attempts to order the world around him through design. Forces intervene to aid or disrupt. In the end, what gets realised is hardly the precise thing the mind conceived. Man is never in control. I like my art to reflect the essence, for that is my perception of reality.” This is what is happening around us with the fuel queues: “Forces intervene to aid or disrupt” what we all conceive as the design of our cities and existence.
We do not have queues at our filling stations because fuel is scarce; we have queues because there is fuel and the owners of the fuel stations choose not to dispense them normally. This sounds antithetical in terms of what we understand is happening. They tell us there are queues at fuel stations because fuel is scarce, but you can see the filling stations with no fuel and no cars lined up for the nonexistent products. If a filling station has 16 fuel pumps and decides to dispense products through just one or two, there will be lines and lines of cars awaiting their turn at the two pumps. This is why there are queues, creating beautiful trinkets that adorn all our cities. No question.
Well, as I write this, I see a breaking story that the State Security Service (often going by the alias “DSS”) is giving marketers of petroleum products 48 hours to remove our bracelets from the streets, something that has become a common feature of the beauty of our nation. Why would they do this? They say they classify the trinkets as “economic sabotage of concern to national security”, which I find rather shocking. Why all of a sudden did the expression “economic sabotage” spring this surprise at us? Nothing has been classified as economic sabotage for ages now. What did the Jerrycan boys do wrong? I know they may be the ones who have caused this. This year alone, some persons imported poisonous products that damaged many cars and businesses that depend on generators and that was not economic sabotage. Some of us spent nearly a million fixing cars, and no one cared to bring anybody to book, so the newfound zeal by the DSS is fascinating and needs to be commended, not condemned. Those who love bracelets need to understand. The DSS statement even boasted that they “will carry out operations across the country not minding whose ox is gored.” The fact that there are oxen notwithstanding.
How should people feel about this pronouncement by the secret service? What would my father have thought about this? Nothing much, I guess. It is part of the forces Odutokun referred to in his theory of accident and design, which “intervene to aid or disrupt.” He would, like me, be wondering what has happened to warrant this intervention in a free market economy that our government has always touted itself as promoting. Imagine how many times the government has held Nigerians for private sector actors to rape them. Imagine the ridiculous bank charges that have been legitimised, and new ones are introduced every other day, while the beneficiary companies and individuals buga everywhere with their billions. That is why it is hard to know what to make of this newfound patriotism and care for the plight of the citizens.
So, the fuel queues, if they do disappear, would be missed for their ornamental value. The way the cars sit at the feet of street lights like expensive candleholders helping to light up perpetually dark cities, you would admire whoever created the concept of selling fuel from one or two pumps out of 16. They deserve the Nobel for something I am yet to figure.