Without doubt, Governor Akinwunmi Ambode of Lagos State has shown both spark and spunk. He, it was, who chased tanker drivers out of Oshodi-Apapa highway. It was almost like magic. Lagosians woke up one morning to notice that the tankers that had imperially blocked that all-important road had disappeared. It was a scourge which neither Bola Tinubu nor Babatunde Fashola could tame. But Ambode did. Kudos, Mr. Governor.

But there is yet another challenge on Lagos roads: the niggling matter of Area Boys, street urchins, who rob, at gunpoint, Lagosians in traffic. Lagos traffic snarl is legendary, ranking head to head with traffic in Bangkok in Thailand and Jakarta in Indonesia. The state government at various times rallied to check the bogey, but each effort is frustrated by many factors: the indiscipline of motorists, especially commercial bus drivers, the complicity of law enforcers who collect bribes from these motorists (they call it Egunje) and allow them a free reign on the roads and bad roads puckered by ditches and craters. All of this makes driving in Lagos hellish and mind-bending. It is worse when darkness sets in.

It is in this blackness of darkness inside Lagos traffic that the unimaginable happens. Once it is 6pm and you are stuck in traffic on Lagos roads, get ready for the worst. While the police whose duty it is to protect lives and property look away, street urchins, some with blood-shot eyes and scary visage, take over the roads, smashing car windows and robbing occupants of vehicles of their cash and phones and other valuables. Conventional wisdom says; do not dare a man with the gun. So, once they accost you in your car, don’t try to play the hero, just comply.

Once, last year, this writer had the misfortune of driving through this monstrously evil road, the Apapa-Oshodi expressway, after visiting an Apapa-based media house. There was absolutely no premonition of what was about. The road was free from the Apapa end and it was not dark yet. Commonsense tells you it was a good time to hit the road, so you did. But barely a few hundred metres out of Apapa by the Coconut axis of the road, hope took flight and despair set in. The traffic was benumbing. It was total lockdown, real gridlock. I was alone in the car, making me more vulnerable. For three hours, we crawled through the logjam but only achieved barely a 100-metre movement. By 10pm, I was still by Berger Under-Bridge in the thickness of the traffic snarl.

At that point, neither soulful music nor radio could get you out of restiveness. I reached for my phone and called my wife, sustaining the chat just to fight my frustration. Just, then in the midst of our conversation, I heard a bang by the car window. A young, scruffy guy stood by the window and gestured to me to wind down the glass. All I could say was “Jesus…Jesus…!”. My wife heard my conversation with the crook and I could hear her praying and pleading the blood of Jesus. My assailant was getting livid. To prove to me he was no jester, he rolled up his T-shirt and showed me a black pistol strapped to his trousers by the waist. At that time, my wife had called a few people narrating to them my predicament and prayer was made on my behalf.

But, strangely, I found strength at the spur of the moment not to accede to his demand. I could hear him mutter a few words in corrupted English and Yoruba, alluding to my stubbornness. I was unfazed, and so was he. He refused to leave my side, banging furiously at the window and asking me to surrender my phone to him. A Danfo bus laden with passengers was beside me in the traffic; the passengers were watching us but none of them could help or even dared to confront the brat. I ignored the hooligan, but this time, he brought out his gun, his eyes darting from here to there, as though afraid he might be caught. It was at that point that I emptied my shirt pocket, wound down the window glass just enough to squeeze the few naira notes in my pocket into his waiting fingers. He slipped them into his pockets swiftly, pushed back his gun into its holster and dissolved into the night. It was a horrendously nasty experience, but I was lucky, somehow, Providentially-protected.

My friend was not this lucky. He was returning with his colleagues from Victoria Island barely three months ago and they got stuck in traffic at Oshodi-Oke about 8pm. He was driving and the lady in front was busy ‘pinging’ away on her phone when suddenly a long knife-bearing hunky brute appeared from nowhere and ordered them to wind down. They ignored him but he was not one to be ignored. He quickly shattered the back-door window glass with the knife and almost simultaneously stabbed the lady in her thigh, took her phone and the phones of other occupants in addition to cash money and bolted. That was how the journey from office to home terminated instead in the hospital. The lady was sutured that night and the bleeding arrested.

Such is the harrowing experience Lagosians go through these days in traffic. As Chief Security Officer of the state, Ambode must work in tandem with the relevant security agents to halt this sipping discontent in Lagos traffics. The police in Lagos must get innovative this time. Mounting road blocks is good but the best security is virtual, mobile policing. Authorities of Lagos State working with the police should map out the state, identify the flashpoints and take the initiative of protecting motorists at these crime-infested points. Lagos is too strategic to the nation and we must not let criminals run good, law-abiding citizens out of the roads.