World’s Worst Traffic Jam: How a 40-mile trip to Lagos took 12 hours
IT WAS LONG AFTER DARK on the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, outside Lagos, and traffic had barely moved in five hours. Through the rear window of our Land Cruiser taxi, I could make out an apocalyptic scene: six lanes of buses, 18-wheelers, fuel tankers, and sedans, wedged bumper-to-bumper in both directions. Curses and horn blasts pierced the diesel exhaust-choked air. Brakes screeched as vehicles inched forward. I lay down in the backseat, trying to get some sleep. Moments later, I felt a thump, and the car rocked violently back and forth.
“These crazy men—they steal the headlights!” my driver exclaimed. Crowbar-wielding thieves were prowling the traffic jam, preying on captive motorists. “Don’t get out the car,” the driver warned.
Lagos, a megalopolis of 21 million people, has been plagued for years by a gamut of urban problems: exponential population growth, crumbling infrastructure, poverty, crime, corruption. But nothing had prepared me for the Apapa-Oshodi Expressway, the gateway to Nigeria’s two busiest seaports, Apapa and Tin Can Island, and home to what may be the worst chronic gridlock in the world.
My driver chose this coastal route while taking me from the Benin border to Lagos, a distance of about 40 miles. What I had assumed would be a routine commute turned into an epic, 12-hour journey, and a lesson in the dysfunction and criminality of Africa’s most populous nation. The ordeal suggests the challenges that lie ahead for Nigeria’s recently elected president, Goodluck Jonathan, who has pledged to root out corruption and to make his country run more efficiently. As Nigeria struggles to contain Boko Haram, a jihadist group based in the north, this highway anarchy also raises questions about how the government can deal with the threat of international terrorism when it can’t even get its roads under control.