About Country, Kerosene And Petrol Stations -By Saliu Momodu

My memory is definitely serving me right on this one.

Back then, it was a circular plastic container but molded to look like the ancient but iconic Middle Eastern keg that they made from clay pot material. Navy blue was the colour, it had a broad neck that sharply tappers onto a mouth, then two handles, each on opposite side for a good grasp.

So with this, I would walk something in the range of one and a half kilometer possibly less- you know how a child’s mind works amplifying things.

Finally, I reach the entrance of this Mobil filling station at the popular Third East Circular Junction in the only official city in the country, Benin City. But just then the real challenge would begin.

How do I proceed when its only vehicles I see going in?

With whom do I speak when there are no random persons in sight?

These questions never ceased to bug my young mind despite the countless times I would repeat this torturous pilgrimage to what the Americans call the gas station.

Intimidated as it were by the impeccable tidiness, orderliness and decorum of this place, I could never help myself from developing a cold feet. I haven’t even mentioned the disciplined aura of those officer-looking uniformed attendants?
But eventually, I would manage to remember the instructions from home as received right before setting out, “walk up to the attendant, and after greeting, say you want to buy forty naira kerosene”.

Under the intimidating sight of those big and bold cautions that say in red “Highly Inflammable”, I would unconsciously tip-toe behind this neatly dressed attended as he walks me to a separate pump almost a “mile” away. He starts the engine, places the gun and fills up my keg all the way to the brim.

How much litre of kerosene? Well I wouldn’t know now. Not even then was I aware of the volume, but it would take approximately one whole month before I had to again hit the road for another round of the experience. But I am sure you can do the kerosene consumption arithmetic for a household with approximately 6 to 7 siblings at any given time, and where meals were prepared almost three times daily- the supplier graciously made sure of that and I am eternally grateful.

This recurrent episode of my childhood has never left me and would most certainly never do.

Why?

It is essentially because today, everyday, I still get to pass by a petrol station. I enter one of them sometimes every other day but only to exit with a feeling of contradiction, a sense of some terrible decay, a decay that is eating away one of the most indelible memories of what structure, functionality and order has always represented for me.

Hardly anything around me today speaks more to the set-back we have collectively suffered as a nation than the sight of a petrol station that looks like a common market place.

And whenever I try to get my head around how we got here and what all these could possibly mean, I remember again that we no longer find kerosene to buy in a petrol station. If you can afford it, you only get it today in the market place or by the roadside measured in little bottles and handed to you wrapped up in polythene bags.

My memory is definitely serving me right on this one.