I recently noted that officials in Guangzhou, China are banning motorcycles. And now, sadly, Nigeria's capital city of Abuja is following Guangzhou's lead. The New York Times reports:
FOLLOW-UP:
Interestingly, the Times itself can't quite seem to decide how it feels about Abuja's motorcycle taxis. First it describes them as "popular and cheap", but later on in the same article, we find the following:
“They don’t want to see the common man, the poor man,” said Comrade Daniel, a motorcycle taxi driver, standing in the rubble of his neighborhood. He lost first his home and then his livelihood to a recent campaign to rid this stately capital of the blemishes of poverty. “They only care for themselves,” he said.Nigeria, of course, is one of the international community's true basket cases, where corrupt rulers exploit a severely impoverished citizenry and human rights are a cruel joke. I'm starting to think that the fairness and justness of a government can be determined by its attitude toward motorcycles.
Mr. Daniel and others who live on the unruly edge of this tidy city in the mossy hills of central Nigeria say that Abuja has declared war on its poorest citizens.
In the interest of cultivating an image as a world-class city, comparable to London, Paris, New York or Hong Kong, the government has been razing unauthorized and unsightly slums, clearing out street hawkers and banishing popular and cheap motorcycle taxis, all in the name of spiffing up the city.
FOLLOW-UP:
Interestingly, the Times itself can't quite seem to decide how it feels about Abuja's motorcycle taxis. First it describes them as "popular and cheap", but later on in the same article, we find the following:
Abuja is a planned city, originally designed by a group of American firms in the 1970s.So, are motorcycle taxis a good thing, or a bad thing? It depends. If you want to show how the wealthy elite of Abuja are hurting the masses, they're popular and cheap. But if you want to point out how a plan devised by American firms has failed, they're torpedo-like street chokers.
...But the city’s master plan was ignored for years by corrupt officials who allowed illegal neighborhoods to blossom, unauthorized street markets to spread and torpedo-like motorcycle taxis, called okada, often driven by illiterate young men, to choke the streets.
Sound familiar? It's the same thing everywhere.
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