Alfatai and I met on the road outside the office. Arab Contractors were laying down a new thick black tarry carpet of asphalt. The road surface looked like an expanse of pitch flapjack. It was hot. Pools of water and tar were being squeezed out by a huge roller. Heat pumped from the engine and the road.
We greeted each other and walked into work. Suddenly there was a blurr of movement in front of us.
"SNAKE!" Alfatai screamed. I looked in time to see the green curls whip together and the snake sprang into the air. His mouth was a pink flash. It was wide open.
Alfatai pushed me to one side but now he was standing in the snake's way. As he pushed me he leaped up to avoid it.
I had no idea snakes could leap like that. I had no idea Alfatai, who is a rather, er... rotund man, could leap like that. His feet must have been at my shoulder. Before I knew it he was running in the other direction. The snake hadn't quite reached him.
All the road tar gang stopped what they were doing and came to see the snake. It had sped off under a truck, past a couple of lizards who -as usual- looked fairly nonplussed. One of the guys grabbed a tar rake, hooked it under the trailer and hit the snake repeatedly.
"Kill it! Kill it!" Alfatai shouted. The snake looked limp curled on the ground. I wasn't buying it though... Then one of the road gang said: "Which one of you will be the man now?" he strode over and picked up the snake behind the jaw, pinning it with one deft movement.
"See, I'm the king of snakes," he said. Everyone else refused to even come close to him as he stood there. He had a swagger about him, but I hoped it wouldn't backfire.
He squeezed the neck and the jaw openedshowing the fangs. I wasn't going to get too close either. After posing for a picture he flung the snake into a maize field behind him.
"Why you no kill am?" demanded Alfatai, his brows knitted, finger pointing, accusing. The guy shrugged and picked up the rake to carry on working. The snake had been caught out warming up on the new tarmac, I hoped it would not come back.

Snake bites kill a huge number of people in Nigeria. A study in 1980 published in the Lancet medical journal found that over 10,000 Nigerians die every year, nearly half of the recorded deaths from snake bites in West Africa. Incredibly, according to research published six years ago in the medical journal Theraputic Drug Monitor that's just under 10 per cent of world-wide snakebite deaths.
If you were bitten in Benue state, the Lancet study found, 12.5 per cent of cases were fatal. A lack of anti-venom, poor health infrastructure, remote farms and Naja Nigricolis (the spitting cobra), make for poor prospects. I doubt things have changed much since then.

When I told him about the snake later, Attahiru said: "Ya! Snake-bite, you work in the fields, this one bite you. CHA! You die."