In the hottest month of the year, just days from the bare-knuckle brawl known here as elections, Africa's most populous city, the commercial hub of the world's sixth-largest oil producer, faces a gasoline shortage.
Even when the pumps run properly, this city of 13 million people seems on the verge of boiling over. But the long lines for gas bleeding into traffic lanes have achieved the unimaginable: the city's infamous ''go slows,'' which routinely turn office commutes into two-hour diesel-choked ordeals, have grown even worse. It is the same all over the country, and the lines are as unpredictable as they are annoying. Some days, when a tanker comes into town, the gas lines are short and sweet; some days, there are no lines, because there is no gas. On others, bus drivers, cabbies and otherwise luckless Nigerians who cannot afford to pay someone else to do it find themselves waiting for hours, sometimes for up to two sweaty, bug-bitten days and nights, to buy gas.
''It's the Nigerian situation,'' lamented Femi Shokunbi, 32, an insurance underwriter who had slipped out of the office one afternoon to wait in his Toyota Corolla in an immobile line under an unforgiving midday sun. ''Lots of excuses have been given. But we are not sure.''
Lagos being what it is, tempers are fraying on the streets. Fistfights are breaking out. A few houses have already gone up in flames, according to newspaper accounts, as desperate, or greedy, commuters resort to stashing fuel at home.
Then again, Lagos being what it is, some are also making out like bandits. Black-market entrepreneurs peddle gas at up to five times the official rate. Cabbies raise their prices. From a cursory look at city gas stations, police officers with the power to determine who gets to cut in line, are well positioned to make a bit of extra cash, too.
That a shortage should happen here in a country with some of the world's most ample oil reserves speaks loudly about all that ails Nigeria. That the fuel crisis has not yet led to large-scale rioting speaks just as loudly about the durability of those who live here.
Shortages are certainly not new in Nigeria, but the immediate cause of the current one is murky, like so much tied to politics and money here.
The more conspiracy-minded of Nigerians have theorized that the crisis was, rather impossibly, contrived to embarrass the president, Olusegun Obasanjo, seeking re-election to a second term in national and state elections that start Saturday.
The shortage struck not long after the president reminded his compatriots of the gas lines that plagued the country under the ruthless military rulers who preceded him. That gas lines had disappeared during his tenure, he said, was among the greatest dividends of democracy.
For its part, the state-owned Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation blamed its foreign suppliers.
Nigeria may be the fifth-ranking supplier of oil to the United States, but it has only enough refining capacity of its own to produce half the gasoline its citizens need; the rest it must buy abroad.
With a rush on world markets earlier this year, fuel suppliers on whom Nigeria relied failed to deliver, the company's public affairs chief, Ndu Ughamadu explained. Perhaps, he reasoned, they were lured by the higher prices they could command elsewhere.
Perhaps, too, say others outside the government, the shortage is due to sheer incompetence, and Nigeria should have negotiated more reliable contracts, or taken steps at home to satisfy the fuel needs of its people.
Making matters worse was a dose of the country's ritual political violence. Recent unrest in the Niger delta, the country's oil patch, crippled as much as 40 percent of production, for a time driving out major international oil companies and bringing one of the state's feeble refineries to a standstill. Last Saturday a major pipeline was vandalized, further choking domestic supply.
So, Nigerians wait. On a recent afternoon, Abel Adeyanju, a 56-year-old bus driver, sat this week in the driver's seat of his yellow Nissan van, sweaty head resting on left hand, bare feet spread on the dash and a Yoruba language slogan painted on his windshield.
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