Chapter 3 - Carrying Thirteen-Naira Concrete Blocks Under the Scorching Desert Sun
The dawn air at the industrial construction yard in Ibeju-Lekki smelled of wet cement, diesel exhaust, and raw sweat.
By five o'clock in the morning, more than two hundred men stood huddled outside the rusted iron gates. They were casual laborers—men who had abandoned farms, failed school dropouts, and desperate fathers. When the heavy gates squeaked open, a foreman named Master Gabriel stepped out with a thick bamboo cane in his hand.
"Line up! Line up, all of you animals!" Gabriel barked, his voice coarse from cheap gin and cigarettes. "Today we are offloading ten trailer loads of nine-inch solid vibrated blocks. Thirteen naira per block carried from the truck to the fourth floor foundation. If you break a block, you pay double. If you collapse on the stairs, we drag you to the ditch and don't pay you a kobo!"
The men surged forward, shoving and shouting to be picked. Ekenna did not fight or curse; he simply pushed his broad shoulders through the throng, stepping directly in front of the foreman.
Gabriel looked at Ekenna's tall, lean frame, noticing the educated clarity in his dark eyes. "You. You look like a church boy. Your hands are too soft. You think carrying blocks is typing on a computer?"
"Try me," Ekenna said, his voice flat and dead. "Just give me the tally card."
Gabriel sneered and handed him a stamped metal chip. "Don't die on my site, boy."
The work was an inferno.
A single nine-inch solid concrete block weighed approximately twenty-five kilograms. Ekenna hoisted one onto his bare right shoulder, cushioning it only with a folded rag, grabbed another in his left hand, and began climbing the rickety wooden scaffolding toward the high foundation platforms.
By mid-morning, the sun was a white-hot furnace hanging directly overhead. The rough concrete abraded the skin on his shoulders, tearing through the fabric of his sleeveless vest. Blood mixed with gray cement powder, forming a burning paste that stung like salt in an open wound. His knees trembled with every step up the timber ramps.
One block. Thirteen naira.
Two blocks. Twenty-six naira.
One hundred blocks. One thousand three hundred naira.
While other men rested in the shade during the short midday break, groaning and drinking murky water from a plastic drum, Ekenna kept moving. Up the ramp. Down the ramp. Stack the block. Collect the tally stamp.
"Ekenna, slow down!" warned an older laborer named Baba Tunde, whose back was permanently bent like a bow. "The sun will dry the marrow in your bones. Nobody gets rich carrying another man’s bricks."
"If I stop, my mother does not take her medication tonight, Baba," Ekenna replied through cracked, dry lips, lifting another block onto his bleeding collarbone.
He used his mind to escape the agonizing physical torment. As he stepped across the vast excavation site, his geologist’s eyes could not help but observe the earth beneath the construction foundation. He noticed the peculiar stratification of the soil—the sudden transition from standard red clay to a dark, mica-rich pegmatite gravel near the drainage culvert. While other laborers cursed the dense, heavy rocks that broke their iron shovels, Ekenna quietly analyzed their fracture patterns and quartz veining.
Even in the gutter of manual labor, the earth was speaking to him.
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By six in the evening, when the whistle blew, Ekenna had moved six hundred and forty blocks. His fingers were locked in claw-like cramps. Gabriel counted out his earnings—eight thousand three hundred and twenty naira.
Ekenna took the crumpled notes, bought a loaf of bread and two sachets of antimalarial pills at the bus terminal, and held the change tightly in his pocket. He was broken, bleeding, and covered in gray dust, but he was alive.
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