By Akin Alaka,
So I went to Saki, 300 kilometers from Lagos, to find out the effect of the Federal Government Policy on the ban on the exportation of shea nuts.
How does this policy affect the farmers, the traders who buy from the farmers, the big merchants who buy from everyone, and sell to the big-time exporters?
But, there was a problem, I have not been to Saki since 2003.
I called my friends and got some contacts in town, not exactly in town, in Tede, about 20 kilometers away.
We got to Tede around 11:15 am; we left Lagos at about 6:45 am. I called our contact, but she was away in Gwanara, Kwara State, doing some private business. This report is for the newswire, and it cannot wait.
We did what we know best to do…we asked for the weekly market day, and luckily, it was Sango Market day, so we drove to the market in downtown Saki.
While we navigated the morning rush of small Volvos and 504s loaded to the roof with bags of elubo and dry pepper, women and men selling unseeded melon, garri, fresh vegetables and pants, and bra too.
More than half of the roads that passed through the market were people’s shops. So we beg, cajoled, and blustered to move our car through the chaos, then we began shopping for a space to park in this sea of human beings and food items.
Luckily, we happened on a market guy who doubled as the security, enforcer, and traffic warden. He was passing us to go to the other side of the market.
‘E loo saale e lo saa. iyaa yin ti di. Go the other way, go to the other side, the road is blocked here.’
We told him we are not leaving the market yet, and for some reason, he pointed us in the direction of where to find a space to park our car.
We tipped him for his help, which made him happy, and he proceeded to take us to the parking space.
Parking was in a nondescript drinking-joint doubling as a motel for market women and men. We introduced ourselves as journalists and said that we would like to speak to people selling shea nuts in the market.
He took us to meet an old man. Alhaji Monyashau, after explaining ourselves, the old man told the security cum traffic warden to take us to the market line where we would see the shea nut sellers.
While we navigated the hubbub of the market, our man got interested in the okada men dropping off passengers. He stopped a couple of them, coaxed and threatened them to turn around.
Some gave him money; he blessed the stubborn ones with invectives. We were looking at the time, then we called his attention to our mission.
‘Baba, take us to the women Alhaji had directed you to…’
Then he hums haws, and he said, ‘Yes, yes, let me take you.’
He took us through the winding market roads, but from the description given to him by the amiable old man, we could tell that he was taking us in the wrong direction. Then I pointed that out to him, which seemed to bring him back from confusion. It was then that I noticed that his breath stank of dry gin.
So he turned around and then took us through a couple of turns through the colours and people in the market, then he stopped in the middle of the road to waylay some more okada riders.
At that point, I had had enough, so we decided to proceed on our own to find the traders that Alhaji Monyashau had told us about.
We walked around for another five or six minutes, and we got to a stall where we were told that they do sell shea nut, they showed us some bags of shea nut, and in that instant, an old woman was willing to talk to us about the effect of the policy, but most of them were afraid.
Some of them do not want their face shown on TV, but that old woman went ahead and told us that the Federal Government of Nigeria did not communicate properly.
‘The government did not notify us. It is sheer wickedness.’ She complained
While speaking with this woman, a younger woman, in her early forties, hovered around, and she kept dropping nuggets of how policy is affecting farmers that she knew.
She seemed to know more about that ban than the old woman. Then we asked her to have a conversation with us, but she demurred. While we were trying to get another interviewee, she came back and started talking again over our heads, then we suggested we could interview without showing her face, but she demurred again and again.
Then we considered going elsewhere to look for other sellers, but she came and told us we can’t really get people to talk to, and she knew the topic, but when we asked her again, she turned us down.
At that point, it was obvious this woman had ensnared us with her knowledge, but it was clear that she was not willing to share, and her comment was hurting others willing to share, as they felt she knew more.
Then I asked to see her stock of shea nuts, she turned it down, then persuaded the other women not to show us their bag of unsold shea nuts.
At that point, I told my colleagues that we had to get going, because we needed to see the farmers, the shea nut vendors, the big merchant running the warehouse, but we must cut this woman off, or we will never leave the market.
We mustered the courage and left the place, luckily for us, based on some hint we got from Alhaji Monyashau, we got another vendor who had a series of warehouses loaded with shea nut, who granted us the interview, opened her stores, and allowed us to film as her people work, scaling, cleaning, and drying shea nut.
Eventually, our story took us out of town to a farm along Gwanara Road called Foori. Along the way, we decided to talk to some farmers who were sitting and lounging under several shea trees.
They knew the topic, they had heard about the new policy, and it was hitting their pockets, just like the man and the woman we had encountered earlier. There was a man who wanted to delay us, believing that we might be working against the farmer.
It was clear we would not receive any support from them, even though their land is filled with the cash crop, shea tree, and their women sell the shea nut, which was at the centre of our story; they chose not to help us.
It was late by then, it was around 5:30 pm, the sun was beginning to dip, and we were in a place we had never been, with a craggy dirt road…yet we needed farmers to really ground this story on the effect of the policy on the lives of real people in the countryside.
Eventually, we drove to Foori, where we met farmers who openly welcomed us and showed us around their shea nut farm. They told us how the policy to ban the exportation of shea nut was killing their income, affecting their family.
One of the farmers we spoke to was a 45-year-old woman who had six children.
The ban has led to her inability to pay her children’s school fees, and now she is indebted because she bought more shea nuts from other farmers with a loan with a plan to resell, but with the policy, the product had already witnessed a 33 per cent drop in price.
But that is not the moral of this story. The lesson runs deeper.
We all need help. Always.
Sometimes we need people to hold our hands. To open doors we cannot see. To introduce us to worlds we cannot access alone.
Just like we needed that first traffic warden to connect us to the right people. But here’s the profound truth most people miss:
There comes a moment when your helper becomes your hindrance. When the hand that once lifted you now holds you down. When the person who opened the first door now stands blocking the second.
The drunk guide who started as our salvation became our obstacle. The knowledgeable woman who could have been our breakthrough became our trap.
This is the hardest life lesson:
Knowing when to let go of the hand that helped you.
Knowing when to walk away from the person who brought you this far.
Not out of ingratitude.
But out of necessity.
Because sometimes, the very people who help us take the first step are the same ones who may prevent us from taking the next.
And if you don’t recognize this moment, if you don’t dare to cut the cord…
You will never leave where you are.
You will never reach where you’re going.
The question isn’t whether you need help.
The question is: Do you have the wisdom to know when that help has expired?
And the courage to continue alone?
Akin Alaka, Content. Coverage. Documentaries.
