Diary

Ben Rawlence

The sky is never fully clear in Ibadan. A haze of pollution hangs above Nigeria’s third city. It is most visible in the morning, when the sun lights it from the side; lit from above, the sky simply becomes murky, like soup. It was early morning when my American colleague and I left Ibadan, after six suffocating days. Our taxi nosed its way through crowded streets, as the faithful made their way to Mass. Everyone was wearing their Sunday best: lavishly embroidered trousers and tunics matched with head-wraps of the same cloth, or shoes with stripes. Even the boy who ran alongside the car motioning to his mouth pleadingly was dressed in a beautiful yellow two-piece, embellished with what looked like gold thread. He eventually left with our bottle of water and a nervous backward glance.

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[*] The AC is a new party made up mostly of disgruntled PDP members, who sided with Abubakar after he led the opposition to the president’s campaign to change the constitution. That campaign prompted the president to launch a criminal investigation, which duly indicted the vice-president on charges of embezzlement, and which prompted Abubakar in his turn to give the press copies of cheques made out by Obasanjo to bogus companies. In the end, however, Abubakar has come off worse, having spent most of the campaign fighting court battles to allow him to contest the elections.