Oko-Oba Abattoir and Tokunbo Wahab’s axe, by Bamidele Johnson
Really chuffed watching Tokunbo Wahab, the Lagos State Commissioner for the Environment, announce that the infamous Oko Oba Abattoir was finally getting the axe. Or the sledgehammer. Or whatever environmental closure tools commissioners carry these days.
That place, in all its gory glory, has defied every known hygiene code. It is a place that should be preserved not as a functional abattoir, but as a museum of how not to run anything involving meat, humans or oxygen.
If I say the sanitary conditions are indescribable, I mean that quite literally. Language, in all its richness, lacks the vocabulary. The slaughter slabs resemble the kind of surfaces you’d expect in a medieval torture chamber. Only war criminals should be visiting where they are-as a deterrent.
I was a regular there for over 25 years, including when i was a bachelor. That works out at two and a half decades of visual, olfactory and psychological assault. I stopped going last year perhaps because my nose finally filed for divorce. But in those years, I saw things proper people should not see, especially before breakfast.
Shockingly, people sleep there. Not just quick naps. I’m talking REM cycles (recently picked this up from a sleep therapist). In the same space where cows meet their violent end and intestines are flung with glee. These are people raised on blood and gore, and somehow their dreams aren’t haunted.
The smell, If your nose has ever worked properly, it would short-circuit here. The effluent alone could qualify as a new variant of chemical warfare. And just when your lungs begin to adjust to that, another enemy approaches. It is the smoke. Fumes from pyres where cow bones and horns are incinerated in some sort of sacrificial bonfire to the gods of bad air.
There are residential estates next door and around. Real people live in them. Children play. They breathe. Which is a miracle, frankly. I have no idea how those estates are not yet crawling with mutants. These are real life survivors of what should be a bio-hazard exclusion zone. I keep waiting for someone to grow horns or start mooing in traffic. But no, Lagosians are built differently.
The residents of those estate should sue because no human has suffered this much because of beef. Exposure to those fumes should qualify as trauma. Emotional, physical, nasal trauma. Let them demand compensation for exposure to cowactive substances. Not radioactive. Cowactive.
Of course, we’ve had this kind of shutdown announcements before. They make a show of locking the gate, snapping photos, making high-sounding statements. Then, next week, the slaughterers and butchers are slicing away like nothing happened, and the smoke from the pyres rising again like evil incense.
But I have a sliver of hope. Tokunbo Wahab doesn’t look like a man who makes threats for sport. He looks like the type who has watermelon-sized balls. If anyone can enforce standards where chaos has had a long, unchallenged reign, na him.
Let’s see if this time, the estates next door can finally take a deep breath without coughing up their ancestry.
