By John Ogunlela

Last week I drove from Lagos to Oshogbo, naturally through Ibadan. But instead of turning east in Ibadan to head for Gbongan, I boldly headed north to Iwo for an onward route to Oshogbo.
Eleven years ago I drove that road any time. I once left the Lagos airport around 8 pm, got to Ibadan by 10 and headed north into that rather rural road to get to Oshogbo by midnight.

There is something between me and the forest. I feel at home there and it is one of the safest places on earth. Forest people are always friendly and ready to talk to strangers. They have a strong instinct for safety but you won’t know. The forest is huge but all those who work or live there as hunters or farmers or occasional traders know themselves. You’ll be surprised they also know a few unusual things about themselves like the print of their shoes on the soft road. If you drift into another person’s farm, you’ll leave a sign behind which is peculiar to you and the farmer will identify it and just smile. No worries. The only thing that startles in the forest is the sound of a st partridge taking off not far from you in full fright.
Then came kidnapping. It was first in trickes, around 2016/17, then one day, a van carrying a contingent of Baptist Church ministers was crossed and all the occupants kidnapped!
Oshogbo-Iwo-Ibadan dried up fast and everybody chose the longer detour through Gbongan. There was now a real danger in the forest and I nearly forgot that road even exists.

I got to Iwo around noon last week from Ibadan and it was a pleasant experience once again. The rural people were all there in their usual pleasantness all along the way. I learnt a lot has been done about security in details we should just leave as security matters and move on to our own issues.
The road is in a worse condition though, full of craters and failed sections which were manned by the police. Without that protection, there is no telling what would be happening on those bad spots. The policemen greeted me courteously at every point.

All along the way, fresh yam tubers dotted the roadside, all drapes in black soil. They smell of the freshness and the blessings of the earth. It was the market day in Iwo itself and fresh yam was everywhere in such quantities that I was moved. Everywhere you looked it seemed the earth could not help itself but just had to disgorge a blessing on the people.
The yam season is something worth standing aside to observe. How can a blessing be so abundant! How can such riches be everywhere! But there is it and it with the relief and happiness it brings. Nobody can get to this type of yam markets and not get their instincts for thanksgiving stimulated. You just stand there feeling it in the gentle breeze that there is something innately good about life and that God is a good God and He does provide for us.

So I laid by on the market road and approached a woman yam seller to ask about a little heap. Then something antithetical to the abundance I had seen happened.
I was instantly surrounded by beggars. Two youngsters and then a man in his 40s who alighted from a commercial motorbike. As he approached me toask for alms, I had a mental ache trying to figure out all about it – a healthy man brought right to me on a bike to beg? Immediately a woman showed up
She was dressed normally and she looked okay like a regular housewife. The man who had alighted from the commercial motorbike staved her off, telling her he came to me first. He wasn’t going to share his potential alms giver with her. The kid beggars by now kept a distance.
I started battling sadness as my yam tubers were being loaded into my light truck by Mama Hafiz, the happy yam seller. The beggar man made a nuisance of himself in trying to assist the woman. The woman beggar was trying to make herself relevant as well while the kid beggars looked on with their hope for a handout getting thinner. By now I was facing a lot of inner troubles and all I wanted was leave that place as soon as I could.

Good roads are a catalyst for prosperity and bad roads being poverty. It’s a simple fact of economics and it applies to rural economies in its harshest form. That much was clear in Iwo.

The stretch from Iwo to Oshogbo is one of the most beautiful forest drives you can have in southern Nigeria. The forest lies in a great plain and you will see the beautiful zero degree alignment of the road for tens of miles ahead. You see the long, grey-brown ribbon stretching from your windscreen straight ahead to merge with the sky on a gentle rise several kilometers away and to your left and right are those massive forests nestled in peace and quiet. That section makes me think about the straightest road on earth which is 400 kilometers in a straight line – in Australia. Or of California roads or Russia railways that a section was once drawn with a ruler by Stalin.
Iwo-Oshogbo isn’t a tenth of Australia’s 400 kilometers but could be a twentieth of that at a point.
The section is not a flood plain, it is just a plain. I have some data on the geology and I am always dreaming of how you can convert the whole 50-kilometer stretch into a monoculture of crops like barley, soy or potatoes to provide raw materials for industries and keep the southbound narrow gauge railway running through Osun to the Apapa port busy all year round. That whole belt should be turned to a massive, well managed pasture, planted with selected pasture crops and from there, you can produce enough beef for West Africa along with the crops earlier mentioned. The barley (yes, I know it’s wet, hot humid tropics) is the stuff for malting drinks and the waste goes into livestock feeds. You won’t even need to break a bank to do it if you can source a few good hands and you have something like N15 billion to spend on the right items. But we import barley and soy and corn and some beef and we have farmer-herder clashes that takes lives.

I know other things about that field that makes my heart beat. I know that Iwo lies on a bed of plastic clay southward and eastwards and the plasticity declines at a point such that you have only kaolin, – clay at its purest form. This can give you all the sanitary ceramic products that you need an the insulators and such stuff. To the right as you enter Egbedore local government area, you have an extensive bed of gem stones like tourmaline. Artisans mined it in the 1980s until they got to depths that call for heavy equipment and then left. The locations are waiting for investors with real capacity. Go further east and you’re on the gold seams of Ife North down to Ilesha and the story rolls on.

I cannot give up on us because we are a blessed people who are merely asleep. I see all the good things and they stretch on as far as eyes can see.
One day, we will find our groove again and a generation of leaders will arise who will make all these things work and instead of giving alms, we will be giving jobs and creating businesses

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