Just In!: The Sunday Stunt Show

Street car-racing is indeed a spectacle, but not for the faint-hearted, writes Joshua Ocheja

The time was 5pm; venue, Tafawa Balewa Way in Central Business District. A gaggle of mostly young males gathered on both sides of the road in front of and on top of parked cars. The crowd was growing by the minute. Without saying it, everyone expected something to happen, and they waited with bated breath, eyeing every passing car with suspicion. The anxiety in the air was high.

Then a metallic blue car driven by a young man in his early 20s appeared out of nowhere at neck-breaking speed, headlights on and music blaring out of its speakers. Immediately after the car went past Ceddi Plaza, the driver slammed on the brakes so hard that the car skidded around in a series of choreographed circles. The omce still, anxiety-laden air erupted into sounds of screeching, smoke, and a pungent smell of burning tyres. A whorl of fresh tyre-tracks became imprinted like tattoos on the tarmac.

“The show has started!” a lady screamed.

The crowd recovered its breath and broke into applause.

This is the Abuja Stunt Show, a free car-racing competition where the sons (and recently daughters) of the rich and the mighty showcase their expertise in dare-devil driving to an appreciative crowd almost every Sunday. Since starting a few years ago, the street car-racing has gone through different mutations and locations. It is a heart-in-your-mouth spectator sport that is becoming a regular feature of the city, despite spirited efforts by security officers to stop it.

There is no take-off time, and part of its mystique is the uncertainty about whether the show will take place at all. Off-days are usually signified by the heavy presence of security-men—from police to road safety officers. The drivers and spectators will normally lie low for a while; then resurface at a later date.

It is said that there is an underground network for passing information across about the resumption of the Sunday spectacle. However, most drive-by spectators figure out the show will happen when they see other people gathering from around 4pm. They join the crowd and wait. Sometimes, they wait in vain. Sometimes, they are lucky. On show-days, there is no official flag-off. All that is needed is for a driver to be bold enough to bell the cat.

What follows afterwards is a wild jostle for the attention and adulation of the crowd, with stunt drivers taking turns to outdo one another, re-acting scenes that could have been straight out of Fast and Furious or from the best of James Bond movies. There are some regular stunt drivers, mostly youngsters who come prepared to titillate the crowd and impress their fans, especially their girlfriends. Most of the drivers are in their teens or early twenties. Sometimes, they are two or more in a car, and they perform their stunts mostly without seat-belts. Occasionally, however, enthusiastic spectators also join in the race, either moved by the spirit or egged on by revellers. Some people also take advantage of captive audience to showcase their exotic cars.

There are no entry rules. But there are self-caution rules: your car must be in good shape, likewise your tyres. It is said that some of the drivers buy new tyres for each show. No official prize is given, but the crowd makes a mental note of the best stunt of the day and does the judging with side comments and applause. The more breath-taking the stunt, the bigger the exclamation and applause. Mediocre performances are either ignored or booed.

The crowd is mostly young and male, but is an assortment of fun-seekers with high-risk thresholds, including a few children, a good dose of finely-dressed females, some passers-by who just couldn’t resist the spectacle, and a few expats.

But it’s not an all-fun, risk-free show. Legitimate road users are sometimes pushed off the road or forced to wait, and mishaps do happen, resulting in damaged cars, crushed limbs and even lost lives. This is the reason security-men are always eager to break up the party and why the stunt drivers and their spectators continue to play hide-and-seek.

While some believe such a dangerous pastime should be banned and violators prosecuted, some think otherwise. “What the government should do is to provide a conducive space and regulate the race,” says Muyiwa Odele, a regular spectator. “People derive fun from participating in and watching this. Banning it is ridiculous. A more creative approach will be to make it one of the major attractions of the city, organize it properly, and make people pay to enter. People come here because they are fun-starved.”