Without mincing words or being sentimental, Abuja is currently the best city to reside in Nigeria.
Here is a quick story; I was away from Abuja last weekend for the Salah holidays. On Friday, my house gatekeeper called me to inform me that the electricity transformer that supplies electricity to the estate I reside in got blown up.
I quickly made arrangements with him on how we can switch to an alternative power supply because I was already thinking that it will probably take at least a week or even more for it the transformer to get fixed; considering the Nigerian factor and how non-challant public workers are to work and the bureaucratic process it takes for issues like this to get to the topmost top of those that will give the directives for it to be fixed.
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Well, I was amazed when the gatekeeper called me back on Monday morning (which was still a Salah holiday) to inform me that the transformer had been fixed. He said the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) officials came as early as 10 am to fix the transformer.
Well, if you have lived in any city in Nigeria then you will understand why this is shocking to me. I have lived in Benin, Kano, Port Harcourt, Onitsha, Abakaliki and Lagos and I can tell you that none of those cities I mentioned have seen a blown transformer get fixed in less than a month. That is why I was amazed that a blown transformer could get fixed in less than one working day in Abuja.
Maybe we Abuja residents are enjoying this level of preferential treatment because we live close to the corridors of power. It is possible that the AEDC officials quickly attended to us probably because the estate is littered with top government officials like senators, house representatives members, Ministers, Director Generals, Executive Secretaries, CEOs etc. In fact, inside the state, there is an embassy, so maybe it is one of the “ Ogas at the top” living in the estate that called AEDC officials to act on it this fast and they got a blown transformer fixed in less than a day.
Outside blown transformers getting fixed in a jiffy; there are as well other things that helped me form the opinion that Abuja still remains the best city to reside in Nigeria as of now. kudos to the FCT minister, you can barely see portholes around the Abuja city centre; once there is a porthole, it gets fixed in a matter of days, unlike other cities I have lived in where portholes turn into death traps and take long before they are finally fixed.
In terms of security, Abuja is averagely safe; you barely see or hear of bag snatching or robbery, especially in the city centres unlike other cities like Lagos where you can even be robbed in Ikeja, a stone throw from the government house or even in Ikoyi. I am yet to see “Agberos” harassing motorists and road users in Abuja, unlike other Nigerian states.
Well, this is not me marketing or promoting Abuja, this is my personal opinion that Abuja is close to being the most sane city to reside in Nigeria.
