Property Inspection???

There are a lot of people who believe that writers are depressed little people who sit in unlit rooms, suffering from OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder)and hardly have any form of social life. Well the truth is that a lot of us spend a lot of our lives in the open, mixing and socialising and if i could go a bit far, i'll say we're have the best receptive responses when it comes to experiences.



Well most of the time i've always found experience through my passive observation of things around me and this normally leads me to experence all sorts of emotions along with other people, truth is they might never know i feel this way, but i take in everything as a new experience; i am alive..

so waiting in line to buy fuel was annoying in a way but it gave me a new perspective on the things professional private drivers go through.

Part of the experiences i enjoy in Abuja for now is the fact that as a corper i'm required to spend a day out of the five working days of the week performing community development (CD), but seeing that most of the communities within the Abuja metropolis are government developed there isn't much else to do, especially as my own CD group is sanitation and hold on a friday, i cherish the lack of the need to pick up a broom or rake or what ever form of sanitation equipment/ tool. All i am required to do is pay the hush money which is adequatly named CD dues and make sure i show up every friday to answer present.

"Well that now is being threatened oh"... i just came across an outgoing mail to the director of NYSC asking him to change all the CD days of the corp members in my office. most annoying is that no one CD is to fall on a friday if this letter is acted upon. Well that is if it is acted upon, i mean even if they had still left someone's CD on a friday at least i would have had someone to resent for the next 4 months.

for now lets just say the letter is being "taken care of ministry style" (i'll expalin that to you later).

Meanwhile i had a busy day at the office yesterday, so as much as i wanted to post something new, i barely had time, i was turned into virtually everything an office staff was required to do, from fixing extension boxes to typing memos. The jobs kept coming in thick and fast and i could barely catch a break.

Then an interesting offer came in; one of my deputy directors and The the boss were going round abuja to inspect the properties owned by the property wing of the NNPC within the FCT. It was basically routine appraisals to confirm the conditions of the properties before proceeding ahead with sale or privatisation.
i jumped at the chance immediatly since i happened to be the only one in the office at this point in time (the rest of the corpers had vanished into thin air).

So out we went, 7 of us; The Boss, deputy Director, Senior enterprise officer in charge of NNPC properties, myself , two consultants to the properties and the driver....
We ended up heading for a six hecter land in Maraba first of all, this land had been enchroached upon by illegal builders who apparently had done more development in 5 years than the local area council could do in 25... they had built several houses and a handful of mini estates (i mean large face me i face you compounds) every where. This was obviously going to pose a problem if the land was to be sold. Meanwhile the consultants claimed to have been attacked by illegal builders the last time they had visited the property, immediately i heard this i became uncomfortable, not just because i had seen some hard worn faces on the way in to the place but because i feared that running in any direction would not do me any favours. My survival instincts kicked in the funniest way; my slight frame became enlarged in my mind because i had widened my hands by my sides and walked as if there were medium sized balls under my armpits, this i figured amplified the effects of my inflated chest which i had done by sucking in as much air as i could. i figure i could discourage a few aggressive attackers who believed in sizing up the opposition (though my somewhat childish face didn't do me much favours).

Each turn on the dirt paths we took had me braced for a rather directionless sprint, experience in hostile areas made me stare straight into the eyes of any onlooker we encountered but it just so happened most of the people i came across were either toddlers who were half naked or semi obese women who sat in front of their stalls selling small biscuits and soaps.. the stares i got back in return were either repraochful or curious ones. meanwhile the consultants who had raised my terror alert from green right up to red kept on repeating a paricular statment while failing to hide their apprehensions, they kept saying ;" in fact if you see the amount of people that came out to fight us ehn". it was around the 43rd time they mentioned it that i realized i wasn't the only one who was feeling insecure so i relaxed a bit knowing i wasn't the only one who was anticipating one form of ambush or the other. We spent about 45 mins on this particular property though by the 30th minute i was beginning to suspect my purpose for this trip.

We left Maraba and began our journey to another property closer to town and that made me more relaxed and tired after the animalisitic attempts at potraying an alfa male in, so i dosed off a bit on the way to the next property and started dreaming of gallops and dirt roads, it seemed as if that was the only way i could stay asleep since the route had a lot of bumps and port holes. from this point on we encountered no more problems that required me to utilize my alfa male dominance. I just relaxed and took in all i saw. i hope NNPC don't have more properties located in similar areas cause it seems the rest of my group didn't even notice anything i did.... since no one offered me lunch.