Before 2007, bus shelters in Enugu urban used to be under trees or any available sheds along the road, there were little or no Infrastructures in place. In those days bus stops were named after popular roads, joints, eateries, trees, churches, schools and events, the likes of Otigba, Sabbath, 4th Dimension, Ukwu Mango, Polo, Dustbin, Artisan, Sub-way, Mr. Biggs, Fire Service, Texaco, Car wash, among other bus stops.
Visitors could easily miss their way around the city due to unfamiliarity with the neighbourhood or the bus stop known to them, this posed lots of difficulties for people who go about asking indigenes directions to some bus stops without signage or structure.
After Former governor Sullivan Chime assumed office in 2007, he promised categorically that he’d focus on developing the Infrastructure in Enugu which he eventually accomplished. Sullivan Chime’s administration constructed standard transit bus shelters with the bus stop names well inscribed on the top of the shelters for ease of identification by both residents and visitors. It became a new normal to locate the nearest bus stop to take or alight from a vehicle.
Before this Infrastructure was put in place, the mentally derailed were kept in safe zones or roamed in bushes and waste dumps. But after the installation of bus stop shelters, the mentally derailed took over the bus stops, something that looked like a temporary or misplaced activity started becoming the new happening as most of the buss-shelters were invaded and occupied by mad men while the people the infrastructure was intended for were forced to move away or stand on the sides of the shelters out of fear. Not just that, politicians and churches have turned the bus shelters into billboards and dumps.
Governor Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi who in early 2022 refurbished the existing bus shelters into a concretized and more comfortable space with innovative point inscriptions (Stands A1, B5, C8 etc.) has just refurbished an apartment for the mentally derailed who have taken over most of the bus-stops in Enugu urban as home. It is funny that what should be termed infrastructural development has now turned out as a 21st-century mad people’s home.
If the government of Enugu love the people of Enugu and desires for them to enjoy and value bus shelters, it is recommended that these mentally derailed roaming the streets of Enugu be taken to suitable psychiatric homes to be treated and taken care of to curb the fear of standing at bus shelters. No matter how beautiful an Infrastructure is, it becomes useless if the people it was intended for cannot access it.