Trapped and groping about in foreign state

Officials attend to passengers at Murtala International Airport in Lagos, on March 2, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. PHOTO | AFP

What you need to know:

  • And so we set off. I fell silent for the rest of the trip as Lanre and his taxi driver friend exchanged banter in their mother tongue.
  • I still hadn’t realised the gravity of my situation. I had been the one calming down my family back home since they seemed more worried than I was.

On a rainy Tuesday morning on March 24, as agreed, my local contact in Nigeria, Lanre Ajkobi, and a cab driver well known to him, picked me up at CitiHeight Hotel at 6am.
We congratulated ourselves for waking up early enough to beat the morning rush.

This was not my first visit to this colourful country, therefore, I had experienced the anxiety-inducing and time-consuming traffic jams that are common in Lagos. The nightmare of stagnant traffic once almost made me miss a flight after sitting in it for three long, hot hours.

And so we set off. I fell silent for the rest of the trip as Lanre and his taxi driver friend exchanged banter in their mother tongue.

LAST MINUTE FLIGHT

I was anxious and throughout the journey, I kept reassuring myself: “Surely there still must be a last-minute flight. After all, the airport closure was announced a few hours ago, everyone could not have caught a flight back home, right?”

I still hadn’t realised the gravity of my situation. I had been the one calming down my family back home since they seemed more worried than I was.

My mother had foreseen the possibility of me getting stranded in Nigeria, but I thought she was overreacting. We arrived at the airport before 7am.

Nobody was wearing a mask. The enormity of this virus was yet to hit us. We were not social distancing and as more people begun to arrive, we stood in a group.

By 9am, an impatient crowd was milling at the entrance, no one ready to accept that they were not going anywhere. I soon realised I was the only Kenyan in the group. Almost everyone else seemed to be travelling to Europe or the US. Once again, guards informed us that there were no flights since the airport had been closed.

Disbelief, shock, denial. An agitated man arrived waving an American passport, saying, he’d been told that as long as he had the document, a flight would be available for him.

I looked at him pitifully as it slowly dawned on me that our goose was cooked. We would not be travelling back home. We were stuck here indefinitely.

NO FLIGHTS
We, however, continued to plead with the security personnel to allow us to go in and confirm for ourselves that indeed there were no flights. Finally, they relented and allowed Lanre in only for him to walk out a few minutes later and confirm that the offices were, indeed, closed.

The only hope of any communication with anyone at the airline was a phone number stuck on one of the doors. When we called the number, a woman sleepily confirmed that they would not report to work until further notice. They were closed.

My heart dropped to my stomach as the possibility of not going home sunk in. Most people, now in a panic, were making frantic calls to the airlines that they were supposed to travel on, or to their relatives or flight agents. I stood there in disbelief. I had called a Kenya Airways contact who informed me that they were grounded.

Seeing my crestfallen face, Lanre called an agent he knew to see if there was a possibility of connecting through another country, including the possibility of travelling by road, probably to Lome in Togo, where the airport was still open to international flights, or even Accra, Ghana, which we were not sure about.

Even these were not viable options since borders had been closed.

TRAVELLING HOME
At 10am, three hours after we had arrived at the airport, I resigned to fate and opted to proceed to Owerri as earlier planned and go ahead with the job that had brought me here.

aving accepted that there was no possibility of travelling home that day, Lanre and I set off to the domestic wing of the airport, where we intended to board a flight to Owerri.

Assailed with mixed emotions and unsure of what lay ahead, I decided to focus on the job awaiting me in Owerri. Hungry, Lanre and I decided to take breakfast as we waited for our 12pm flight, all the time consoling ourselves that the situation would probably be short-lived, and that if we gave it serious thought, we would find a way out.

Ms Ndinda is Research Manager, Transform Research Africa Ltd. She is stuck in Nigeria, where she has been since March 21.

TOMORROW: My uneventful journey to Owerri, and my return to Lagos where I find out that the hotel I usually stay at was closed.