The Series Of My Life - Season 1 - Episode 2

Episode 4 years ago

The Series Of My Life - Season 1 - Episode 2

With the help of two hired drivers, we crossed the border into the Federal Republic of Nigeria. It took us about 30 Minutes as we had to stop at custom checkpoints to show them the card we got from their office. We busted out at a small town called Owode somewhere along the Sango-Idioroko road. We had to stop there as we saw numerous other tokunbo vehicles crossed from Benin Republic that night. Owode was like a rendezvous point for the smugglers. ''Since we paid clearance and custom duties, why did we have to go through the bush'' i asked Chike. '' The cars that uses the bush path are the cars that are ten years old or more'' he said as he educated me on the Federal Government laws on Tokunbo vehicles, cloths, tyres etc. We waited at Owode as more cars came out of the bush like rabbits coming out of their underground holes. We relaxed the in the front car seats and la!d on them as time heads towards dawn. Around 5am, it was time to start moving again. Some of the cars had left already. We waited until some guy i had never seen before, came and gave us some forged documents for our vehicles.


The documents were of the the two vehicles we purchased with their Engine and Chassiss numbers written on them. The surprise package yet was that this new documents shows that we cleared our vehicles at the Apapa wharf of Lagos Nigeria. Chike explained that we will need that since we were going down to Onitsha to sell the cars. We left Owode aroud half past 6am and moved towards Sango. We arrived Lagos later and headed towards Ojota and Lagos Ibadan Express route. During our drive to Lagos, we encountered a few more police check points, army, navy, airforce, boys brigade, boys scout, Man o war etc as each group recieved some more tips from us. At a stage, Chike had to go down and settled them upfront while giving them our vehicle number. Worthy of note here was the fact that the forged documents also came with a fake number plate. Some cops proved sturborn but we eventually made it to Ibadan expessway and the rest of the Journey to Onitsha was smooth except occassional tips here and there.


We arrived at Onitsha that same evening amidst cheers from from our peers and some young ladies who lived in the same street with us. We ate some foods and took one of the cars out for meriment: aftall we just bought two cars.