The computer village

Remember my posting from February regarding toxic electronics waste shipped to West Africa? Since then I'd wanted to visit Alaba and see it for myself. That turned out to be pretty impractical, but I did still want to visit the "computer village" in Ikeja. This is where anything and everything related to computers can be bought or sold.

I had mentioned this to Jesse (our driver) some time ago but didn't really think much more about it. Then Jesse asked one day if I still wanted to go to the computer village and if so he would be interested too since he needed a new keyboard for his system. I had recently, and foolishly, plugged the AC adapter for my computer speakers into the 220V outlet and fried it. These clever power strips that have outlets for all types of plugs make that a real easy thing to do. So I had something to look for too, no fun shopping without some prey in mind.

Yesterday morning at 07:00 we set off. Due to the ongoing petrol shortage, traffic was reported to be a mess, but I figured if not now, then when? About an hour later we'd made the 5 miles to the office and let my wife off for her daily grind. Back on the expressway, things were slow at every filling station with long queues along the road. Finally onto the third mainland bridge and things were moving right along. For those unwilling to wait for the controlled price (N65/litre) at the stations, guys with jerry cans along the road were reportly selling at N200/litre with no line.

Computer village is not really a separate town, simply a neighborhood that had grown up around this business. It previously had quite a bad reputation for crime and rip offs but has been cleaned up some time ago by the merchants hoping to attract more customers. There is lots to buy, new and used, whole systems or just parts. Sort of like a third world Akihabara.

But really, that was not meant to be a knock on Ikeja, I had an interesting visit and both Jesse and myself found exactly what we needed. Jesse knew just where we could find a secure parking place and we set off on foot down the narrow road. I had a hard time keeping up, what with looking over my shoulder constantly for cars and okada and pushcarts. Fortunately, at least by my judgement, we came across a LAWMA truck that was blocking most all the traffic as it made it's way along so we could proceed with less risk of being run over.

We came to the store pictured above, that's Jesse standing on the left, where he had bought things before and we went up stairs to look at what was available. Turns out Jesse also wanted a power supply for another one of his systems so while they were negotiating, I had a chance to talk to the owner. Quite a young guy, he bought bulk lots of imported used systems and components and resold them as is or integrated them into complete solutions for customers. He showed me a whole room full of 17 inch monitors that he thought he might be able to get US$25 each for, but I thought he should just get rid of them all, everyone wants LCD displays. He did have lots of those too. That pile of HP systems Jesse is standing next to apparently came from the Rolex corporation at least according to the asset tags that were still on the systems in storage, those on display had been cleaned up for sale. The owner said one might go for about N24,000, that's today about US$150, depending on disk and memory. ( think I got that right). I wonder what Rolex got for them from the surplus dealer?

Jesse bought two keyboards and a power supply, I got my AC adapter, listening to gdradio.net using it right now. We had arrived at the computer village at about 09:30, shopped for about an hour, leaving at 10:30. By 11:30 we were back in VI, made a couple stops including a N500 papaya alongside the road, they are really getting expensive, back home by 13:00 and felt like a successful outing.

Last night, rained like hell, lots of lightning, not much thunder. Gloomy all day today with periodic rain squalls off the lagoon .