Nigeria streets cleared for elections

LAGOS, Nigeria — Drivers the world over complain about terrible traffic, but the gridlock in Lagos, sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous city at 15 million people, is on a different scale.

Lagosians spend an average of three hours commuting each way between home and work, the rich inching along in air-conditioned cars and the working class jammed into decrepit minibus taxis known as “danfos,” stuck in the sweltering heat.

Hawkers take advantage of this instant marketplace of prospective customers, selling everything from chewing gum to bags of water to fake designer sunglasses, often from bundles carried on their heads.

Most travelers are apprehensive about visiting crazy Lagos, and so was I. But on the day that I toured the city, the garbage-strewn streets were deserted: no cars, no danfos, no hawkers. The normally congested highways and bridges joining the city’s islands to the mainland stretched empty ahead of us for miles. It felt like the rapture had come.

The traffic hadn’t just evaporated from Lagos. Everywhere in Nigeria, cars were banned from the roads, planes were grounded, national borders closed. The country had shut down for parliamentary elections on April 9, and will do the same for the upcoming presidential and gubernatorial votes on April 16 and 26.

It is a drastic measure but one also taken in previous Nigerian elections to try and stop voter fraud. The idea is to prevent multiple voting by making it difficult to travel between polling stations.

On election day, in a car marked with a press pass, I set out with two other journalists to visit polling places around Lagos and take advantage of the traffic-free day to tour the city for the first time.

Shutting down the city required the army, and military checkpoints were set up at entrances to all major roadways. Even with a pass, our driver was nervous about the soldiers armed with automatic rifles and bulletproof vests manning the roadblocks: “Don’t say anything. Let me do the talking,” he said as we slowly pulled up to a barricade.

We saw about 25 different polling stations, stopping off at many of them to check on what was in Lagos a largely peaceful and orderly day of voting, though there was violence in other parts of the country. In a few hours we drove all over this massive city, seeing only a handful of other cars along the way. It was a trip that would have taken all day, or longer, in the usual Lagos traffic.

We passed huge markets where hundreds of stalls stood empty, and stopped the car on a bridge to get out and look down at the city’s notorious water slums, where young boys hopped across floating logs in the filthy and polluted bay below. In the normally frenzied Idumota market area, children played soccer in the middle of the empty street.

Shutting down a country of this scale shows impressive efficiency, especially since Nigeria is plagued by corruption and a bribe can usually get you past any obstacles. Not so if you want to travel on election day.

But in the process of trying to ensure a fair election, some voters were disenfranchised by the strict procedures. In Lagos, some voters had registered near their offices instead of their homes. Since the city shut down starting at 10 p.m. the night before election day, these people were unable to travel to the correct polling station and were consequently unable to vote. For example, at one poll in a commercial area that I visited, 1,065 people had registered but only 225 people showed up on election day.