The Beach Boys of Yenagoa by Pelu Awofeso

Sand sells in Yenagoa, Bayelsa State capital. “It is the second most important business here after consumables,” says Chancellor, one of the young men who earn their living at the Down Yenagoa Waterside area on Jetty Road. The Down Yenagoa Waterside draws people by the hundreds, most of them youths in their twenties. Well before dawn, boats bearing loads of sand - sharp and soft - coast slowly to shore, where dozens of thick-set young men swoop on them, offloading the sand onto land, from where tippers ferry them to construction sites around the capital city and beyond.

When I arrive at the Waterside, a young woman carrying a black handbag approaches me at the gate. “You need sand?” she asks almost in a whisper. I smile, shake my head and we both walk towards the busy spots. Dried out, brownish-grey shells litter the sandy floor. “They are empty water snails,” my companion explains. “The flesh inside is very sweet.” Those same shells, she adds, are used to firm up the roads in very marshy areas.

I am not in time, though, to witness the weekly meeting, which ended two hours earlier. “The Monday meetings are for the dump owners and association executives,” the other woman I meet afterwards says. It’s gone past midday and sellers and buyers carry on with the day’s transactions. Behind me, bare-chested men in wet shorts take turns to ferry basins of sand to pre-determined spots around the Jetty, creating multiple mounds of varying heights, much of which are scooped into waiting tippers. 

Far into the distance, speedboats rumble away, parting the water-hyacinths in their paths. Towards the other side of the channel, dug out canoes of all shades stand adrift on the river.

Every now and again, nearly naked male ‘loaders’ plunge below the water surface and bob up some half a minute later, bearing pails of sand, which goes into the canoe. The loaders have no need for oxygen masks or any underwater gear for that matter; they are natural swimmers, born and bred in the vicinity, some of them indigenes of the nearby Ogbogoro community. With jobs still hard to find, sand mining remains the chief preoccupation for a number of youths in the area.

“Most of us come here as early as two or three in the morning to wait for the boats and we work till late in the day,” Preye says. A graduate of a Federal College of Education, Preye has worked here as a ‘raker’ for nearly two years. By ‘late in the day’, he means sometime around 7 p.m. In essence, anyone who is lucky to find a boat to attach himself to gets to work for more than half a day, usually with little or no break time.

“Wetin we go do now? We cannot go and steal,” the one nicknamed Capon tells me as he swings an empty head pan towards the boat. He is as angry as some of the other labourers who feel that hauling sands all day is beneath them. It is too much work that brings in too little income. They would be happier, they say, working elsewhere on jobs less demanding and which pays better.

The wage per head is not so remarkable. The standard vessel contains 20 drums of sand, the equivalent of a tipper load; and one boat is worked on by a ‘raker’ and two ‘jugglers’. The raker scoops sand with a raking pail into the head pan balanced on a platform near the edge of the boat, and the pair of jugglers take turns to lift the pan from the boat to a dump site ten to 20 metres away. It takes between 90 minutes and two hours to offload a 20-drum boat with both jugglers making some 70-80 trips to the dump. The trio will collect N1200 per boat emptied, which means N400 goes to each man. So depending on how quickly they can free up a boat for another to anchor, each one of them may end up working on seven to ten boats per day.

“Sometimes, we dey work eleven or thirteen boats,” Baba cuts in from a boat next to Preye’s. Baba, it so happens, is working on the seventh boat as we speak. It’s almost 4 p.m. and he hasn’t eaten all day but has decided to soldier on. When I first ask permission to take some photographs, he was one of the few who vehemently opposed my request, threatening to smash my camera and beat me up. It didn’t take too long for the reason for the anger to unveil: they associate anybody from the media with the government, and they believe anyone with a camera has been paid by government to come and capture scenes for God knows what.

Unlike many of his co-workers Preye is politically conscious. He has a take on every development in the polity: the seven-point Agenda of the current government, the electoral reforms, the INEC imbroglio and so much more. “I listen to the network news everyday,” he says. His colleagues at the Waterside recall that he came to work in the past with a transistor radio all so that he could listen to the news. But from all indications, he is not pleased by the things he hears. “It is by shouting like this that I let out my anger,” he adds.

It pains even more when they consider the future. “There is no pension, no gratuity - only your daily wages is what you get,” Preye says as he ‘rakes’ his fourth boat of the day. “If you fall ill no one will attend to you. You are just on your own.” Indeed, he took ill the previous week and he could not work all through the time. That meant no pay. But he is here today and fighting fit, to say the least. His face bear the tell-tale marks of fatigue, though, the result of not having slept enough in the past two days. But he is all smiles.