Nigeria Customs and Airport Bribery

It is illegal to take or pay a bribe under the constitution of Nigeria however no thanks to the Nigerian Customs Service who search through our baggages when enroute our various travel destination, 90 percent of Nigerian travellers on International routes pay a bribe.

"Oga wetin dey dere, shey na dried fish?" the customs guy asks me on a recent trip abroad.. Nigerians love their local meals and they are quite pricey in the African shops in the Houston market or various city centres accross europe so we usually love to buy a reasonable amount and take along when travellig and this man was about to crank my style.

My first trip abroad as a British Council scholar, my dad shoved his hands in my face as the activist in me was about to throw a protest party when they requested "something for them" becauase of this same food issue.

This time, I was going to speak english.. and when I did i saw the way people were discouraged to fight the systen. "Oga, your food has to go through quarantine"... Nice play... I calculated my flight time.. Check in time at tge quarantine zone and saw every move had been perfected to frustrate anyone who tried to fight the system.

After all my grammer "it pained me" that I had to settle with 500 naira.. Albeit palsy sum that the Customs "Oga" had opressed me into paying.

Maybe my love for stock fish and peppered soup, condiments which i had packed in my bags had betrayed my fighting spirit.

Well, he who fights and runs away, lives to fight another day. C'est la vie! Musings from my country Nigeria.