This could be the weird reason people buy Christmas chickens
It is Christmas Eve and the street where chickens are sold has morphed into what we cannot call a street any more, it is now a rowdy market place with market women and men not afraid of selling right in the middle of this Lagos street, making finding your way in or out near impossible.
I parked on another street and walked the rest of the way to the area wherehot boiling drums of water and chicken cages were lined. After the yuletide season, the cages will of course disappear and life will return to normal. For now, the queue to buy chickens is long and curved to two lines.
As Lagosians are wont to do, people find ways to cheat the queue, some act as if they are just making enquiries and place orders and some people, like me, make it their duty to catch them while they are at it.
I had placed an order for chickens online. But the chicken company, that I have used for several years, never delivered. Their reason? demand far exceeded their capacity to supply.
A friend had told me of a makeshift chicken market earlier in the month, but i wasn’t interested in buying chicken at that time. its just chicken, after all, I thought to myself. Turns out it is not just chicken considering the stress i was about to put myself under.
In Lagos, you can’t separate Christmas from Chicken. For many years now, families received chickens as gifts and gave it as a gift too and despite complaints about the economy people still went out en-masse to shop for Christmas chicken. According to a 2018 survey by Picodi. The average Nigerian family spends $160 on food during the yuletide season.
Ms Tonye, a director at Pearltreasure Rehoboth Farms A farm at Agbara that rears and distributes poultry, fish, pork etc tells me December is their busiest month with poultry sales going up over 50% ‘ this year people didn’t necessarily buy more, but we have more footfall at our stores, people who ordinarily would not buy chicken are buying because its Christmas ‘.
Its 5 pm as a took my place on the long line of hopefuls wanting to buy chicken. I took a good look at the near-death looking chickens, all of them looking frightened. I imagine chickens aren’t animals given to much deep thinking, but the number of people using their eyes to weigh them and the delicacies they plan to make with the hapless chicken is enough to upset any living thing.
I take my place beside a boiling hot drum of water. This is the drum the chickens are swiftly dipped in after they are killed. It is quite hot and the queue was a slow-moving so in no time I was sweating from the heat.
But for the most part, the water was boiling and people bought chicken, had its wings tied and carried it home along with all the other things heavy things they have with them.
As I stood on the chicken queue, dizzy from running so many errands that day, a voice, I believe its God, Jesus, the host of heaven whispered to me’ Chineze you will not die if you don’t eat Christmas chicken’. I was like the 60th person on that queue. People were picking the weightier chickens and I was getting worried with the quality of chickens I may have to pick from and though the sellers promised more chickens will be delivered, the man behind me on the queue said there was no guarantee. This new information spread on the line and people began to panic. The woman in front of me, who kept on confirming the price was N3500 counting her money as I assume is her last bulk sum and had tried to haggle her way into paying 3000 for one chicken. She had asked if they had cheaper chickens, but her request was met with stony silence from the seller. The chicken seller who I recall was always pleasant on normal days, developed an arrogance that came with selling a valuable and culturally significant animal; the sickly-looking chickens that no one would want on a good day.
Another woman in front, turned to me, as people normally do when they are looking for support only strangers can give and asked if i knew how much it cost to kill and skin the chicken. I replied that I hadn’t asked. I was too uncomfortable to bother and God knows there was no way I could add to my stress by taking the fowls I was about to buy out of the market alive.
The man behind told us he wouldn’t be needing the services of the chicken killing boys. ‘ I will take it home, my children have to see it and I don’t anyone to say I did not buy chicken this Christmas’ he concluded with a chuckle. The women joined that they also wouldn’t be killing their own chicken too and will take it home. ‘ no be everyday person dey buy chicken na’ one of them added.
From what I gathered from my new friends the cost of killing it was perhaps a deterrent but the need to show the nosy neighbours that they also bought Christmas chicken was a big reason for buying and carrying the chicken home in this crazy Lagos on Christmas eve.
As I removed myself from the queue and walked to the meat shop that sold ‘Nigerian frozen chicken’ it struck me, that the Christmas chicken is not just for the eating. It means more, our people have taken it and given it a cultural significance that had nothing to do with food and everything to do with something to prove, to your neighbours, wife, children.
For many its either the ‘live’ fowl or nothing at all and its not just for the neighbours and children, its for self.
