Salvation in the bus!, by Stephanie Shaakaa - Vanguard News Vanguard News Home News Top Stories E-editions Politics
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Business Sports Editorial Columns Allure “My landlord says the rent is going up again.”Related NewsHow pregnant
woman died in our facility - Ojukwu Varsity HospitalAlcohol: Nigerian children caught in deadly trapInspector Omogbai:
Doing policing with motherly love “My son graduated two years ago. He’s still looking.” “Rice was cheaper last
week.” No one raises a voice. Hardship rarely requires volume. It simply settles into the empty spaces between
ordinary conversations. The woman with the tomatoes says nothing. She is occupied by a mathematics that no university
teaches. If she sells everything before noon, she can restock tomorrow. If prices rise again, she will buy fewer
baskets. If her youngest daughter’s cough refuses to disappear, medicine will compete with school fees. If nothing
unexpected happens, and in Nigeria that is always the most expensive assumption, perhaps tomorrow will resemble today.
The bus moves on, carrying not merely commuters, but a republic in miniature. In Part Two, I’ll pivot from this bus
journey to the deeper political argument, showing why the real issue was never the preacher at all, before ending with a
much more haunting conclusion built around the tomato seller. I think that’s where this version can rise from
excellent to genuinely memorable. The bus offers a useful education for anyone trying to understand the country’s
political imagination. A visitor spending his first day in Nigeria would leave with a catalogue of obvious national
anxieties. He would see roads that consume more hours than distance should permit. He would hear conversations shaped by
inflation, unemployment, rising rents and shrinking purchasing power. He would notice that almost every passenger is
carrying a calculation invisible to everyone else, forever adding, subtracting and postponing. He would reasonably
conclude that these are the questions occupying the full attention of those entrusted with governing. Then he would
discover that one of the loudest public arguments concerns what should happen when someone begins preaching before the
conductor has finished collecting transport fare. The bewilderment would be understandable. No society should object to
conversations about courtesy in shared public spaces. Commuters deserve peace if they want it. Those who preach, trade
or entertain inside commercial vehicles should exercise consideration for people who may be carrying grief, exhaustion
or simply a desire for silence. Civilised societies are built on mutual respect. But proportion matters. The measure of
a government’s seriousness is not whether it can regulate the small inconveniences of everyday life. It is whether it
can summon the imagination and discipline to confront the larger forces that make those inconveniences feel unbearable
in the first place. The woman carrying tomatoes does not board that bus wondering whether someone might preach before
she reaches her destination. She wonders whether she will sell enough before the afternoon heat softens the fruit. The
graduate is not consumed by the possibility of an unsolicited sermon. He is wondering whether another week will pass
without the telephone call that changes his life. The elderly man is thinking about test results, not public order.
Their burdens are older than the debate. They will almost certainly outlive it. That is the danger of symbolic politics.
It creates the reassuring appearance of movement while leaving reality stubbornly where it has always been. It is easier
to regulate behaviour than to repair institutions, easier to draft another rule than to rebuild an economy, easier to
police the visible than to confront the slow, patient failures that quietly shape a nation’s destiny. History is full
of governments that became remarkably efficient at organising appearances while neglecting foundations. They announced
campaigns as factories closed. They enforced order as public confidence dissolved. They perfected the language of action
while ordinary people perfected the art of endurance. Nigeria has never lacked regulations. It has too often lacked the
institutions that make regulations meaningful. Perhaps that is why the commercial bus feels less like public transport
than a moving census of deferred dreams. Every morning it gathers strangers whose lives would never otherwise intersect
and reminds us that the country’s greatest common language is not ethnicity, religion or politics, but quiet
perseverance. The accountant, the trader, the mechanic, the graduate and the widow may vote differently and pray
differently, but they all understand the arithmetic of survival. That is also why the preacher is not really the central
figure in this story. The tomato seller is. She never interrupted the sermon because survival had already become her
liturgy. She needed no microphone to testify. Her gospel was written in prices that rose faster than her earnings, in
children whose appetites ignored inflation, and in the fragile hope that tomorrow’s market might be kinder than
today’s. When the bus finally reached her stop, she lifted her bags with the same care she had shown when she boarded,
stepped into the morning and disappeared into the crowd. The preacher’s words remained inside the bus. Her work
continued outside it. Perhaps that is where every public policy should ultimately be judged. Not by the applause it
attracts, the headlines it generates or the impression of decisiveness it creates, but by a far simpler question. When
the woman carrying the tomatoes gets off the bus, is her journey towards dignity any shorter than it was before? If the
answer is no, then we may have regulated another symptom while leaving the disease untouched. Everything else is
conversation. She still has tomatoes to sell.