I Do Not Come to You by Chance (27 page)

On second thoughts, I deleted ‘David’ and wrote Azuka’s real first name. After all, there was absolutely nothing irregular about an African begging for foreign aid.

 

I definitely had the Midas touch. This 419 thing was my calling. Condoleezza sent him $600 the very next day and a letter full of advice on how to turn his life around. Dollars were hard currency, no matter how small.

Azuka was overjoyed.

‘Make sure you keep in touch with her,’ I advised him.

‘But, of course,’ he replied, still grinning.

Condoleezza would be delighted to receive updates on how much progress her African mentee was making down the straight and narrow path. If her delight translated into Benjamin Franklins once in a while, none of us would complain.

The chain of good luck seemed to have been unleashed. An Iranian mugu replied to another one of Azuka’s emails some days later, and soon Azuka received $10,000 for initialisation fees.

‘Kings, maybe it’s your good luck that rubbed off on me,’ he said.

We were still laughing when my phone rang. It was Charity. Sobbing with all her might.

‘Charity, what’s the matter?’ I asked without much panic.

In between thick sobs, she told me that she had just seen her JAMB score.

‘I scored 198.’

Fortunately, she did not hear me gasp. No university in this world was going to give her a place with such a malnourished score. For once, I agreed that my sister had a valid reason for shedding tears.

‘Charity, stop crying,’ I said. ‘You know they have a funny way of marking this JAMB. Even the most intelligent people sometimes make low scores.’

She continued crying until the customers waiting in the business centre grumbled loud enough for me to hear. She hung up, rejoined the queue, and rang back an hour later. Her sobs had not subsided.

‘Charity, stop crying. Failing JAMB is not the end of the world.’

‘Mummy said I’m not allowed to hang out with my friends again,’ she wept. ‘I can’t imagine staying at home for a whole year, waiting to take another JAMB.’

Could my sister’s poor score have had anything to do with the weeks she had spent in my house prior to her exams? Charity had watched quite a lot of Nollywood movies on my VCD player. There was a corner shop at the end of my street which stocked these movies that were released in hundreds every week. Each featured the same yellow-skinned, abundantly chested actresses and the same dreadlocked men, and each had a Part 1, a Part 2, and Part 3 - at least. Too bad that the JAMB exam did not test knowledge of Nollywood.

‘Charity, don’t let it worry you, OK? Just go home and relax and forget about it. I’ll talk to Mummy later.’

But it was hard to forget my sister’s sobbing. My mother must be in great distress and my father must be revolving in his grave. The following day, I spoke to Buchi about it. I had once overheard her telling Wizard where he could purchase expo GCE question papers a week before the exam date.

‘Is there no one you know?’ Buchi asked me.

I had never needed to know someone for things like this.

She gave me the name of one of the faculty deans in her former university.

‘He helped one of my friends get into Accounting,’ she said. ‘He might be able to help.’

But my visit to the professor would have to wait. Mr Winterbottom was coming to town.

Abuja was different from other Nigerian cities. There were no hawkers in the streets, no okadas buzzing about like flies, no overflowing bins with unclothed schizophrenics scavenging in them for their daily sustenance. None of the roads had potholes and all the traffic lights were working. And unlike in our parts, where a flashy car was the ninth wonder of the world, most of the cars here were sleek, many with tinted windows.

I and the hired driver waited at the entrance to the arrival lounge. Mr Winterbottom soon appeared, sweating like a hog. I strode across and welcomed him with a handshake. The driver rushed out and grabbed the handle of his suitcase.

‘It’s so terribly hot,’ the mugu groaned.

The Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport was even fully air-conditioned. Fighting for space high up on a prominent side of the arrival lounge wall were massive portraits of the president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, of the minister of the Federal Capital Territory of Nigeria, of the minister of aviation of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and of the chairman of the Nigerian Federal Airports Authority. I placed my hand on Mr Winterbottom’s shoulder and steered him away from the incriminating view. Just before leaving the hotel, I had remembered to take off my Rolex.

‘Thanks a lot for coming to get me,’ he said.

The pleasure was all mine.

A few weeks after the London meeting, Ozu High Seas and Changeling Development Cooperation were awarded a $187 million contract for the upgrading of the Akanu Ibiam Airport, Enugu, to an international airport. The government officials had insisted on a $10 million bribe before the contract documents could be released.

Mr Winterbottom sent the money in four instalments. The arrival of the first batch threw me into a massive shock that left me in a species of trance for days. Two and a half million dollars! In one transaction. Just like that. Did such amounts actually exist in real human beings’ accounts?

And from what I had seen, Mr Winterbottom was a normal human being like me. He did not have two heads.

I tried to imagine a life with access to that kind of money. Glorious. All my problems solved forever. But how? By what means? Not even the oil companies paid enough to give anyone that much. Many Nigerian superbillionaires I knew of had attained their wealth after stints in high public office but such an opportunity was not likely to come my way anytime soon, even if I had the heart. Siphoning from foreigners in parts of the world where the economy was sound was one thing, but stealing from your own brothers and sisters who had entrusted you to serve was the abyss of wickedness, especially when you had the firsthand opportunity to witness their daily sufferings and struggles. I was not hurting anyone by taking a little of what the Winterbottoms of this world had. There was much, much more where those millions had come from.

When the subsequent three instalments arrived, I received them without flinching a single muscle.

Now that everyone had received their due bribes, Mr Winterbottom had come to finalise things at the Ministry of Aviation and to sign the memorandum of understanding. Since it was his first time visiting the Lion of Africa, as an act of goodwill I reserved his ticket, booked his hotel room, and picked him up from the airport.

‘Your country is beautiful,’ he said on the way back to the hotel. ‘Everywhere looks so well organised. This isn’t what I expected.’

No need telling him that this was all film tricks; our beautiful Abuja was a Potemkin village. Mr Winterbottom would probably never have to cross the River Niger to Igbo land, where poverty and disarray would stare him eyeball to eyeball. Not only was Abuja the Federal Capital Territory and the new seat of government, it was probably the most expensive city in Nigeria. Whenever the masses complained about the astronomical costs of living, the government reminded them that Abuja was not for everyone. The journalists and opinion-eds were still debating who the ‘everyone’ was. Meanwhile, it was probably time for me to speak to an estate agent about buying some nice property here.

 

The meeting took place in the Ministry of Aviation complex. The real complex. World Bank’s wife number two’s cousin had risen to the level of having a somewhat fancy office in the building, and for a fee, he had agreed to lend it to us.

Cash Daddy was sitting in the executive chair when we entered. He was in a hurry to attend a meeting with the president, he said, but granted us a brief chat before handing over the necessary documents.

‘We’re still expecting the National Assembly to OK the budget,’ the minister said. ‘So, we can’t give any mobilisation fees to any contractors right now.’

Mr Winterbottom assured him that we were loaded enough to go ahead, and he was happy to wait and collect all the outstanding payments later.

‘That might even mean waiting till the completion of the project,’ the minister warned. ‘We might just end up paying the $187 million in full at the same time.’

The sound of $187 million arriving in full does a certain something to the human brain. Mr Winterbottom giggled and hopped about in his seat.

Back at the hotel, I brought out Ozu High Seas letterheaded documents and handed Mr Winterbottom his copies. I guess the Englishman from Uganda and Argentina was not such a mugu after all. He perused each piece of paper intensely, asking me questions from time to time before he was satisfied and finally willing to sign. Then he brought out a sleek pen from his jacket pocket and inserted a signature that looked as if it was in the habit of endorsing billions.

Afterwards, Mr Winterbottom said he wanted to go sightseeing. He had travelled along with his camera. The hired driver said he knew the best places we could see. I agreed to accompany Mr Winterbottom on the tour.

The driver showed us the modern mansions of Asokoro and the scenic streets of Maitama. He pointed out former Head of State General Ibrahim Babangida’s mansion, former head of state General Yakubu Gowon’s mansion, former head of state General Abdulsallam Abubakar’s mansion. He even showed us a house that was built in the shape of an aeroplane. But Mr Winterbottom was not impressed.

‘Where can I get some real good shots?’ he asked. ‘I want some real photos of real Africans.’

I apologised that Abuja was not the right place. There were no bare-bottomed children running around with flies in their nostrils. The driver of the hired car overheard our conversation and chipped in.

‘Oga, e get plenty villages wey dey for around Abuja, If you want, make I take you. Them no dey far at all.’

He took us just fifteen minutes away, to Kikaokuchi village. What I saw was beyond belief. The slum was teeming with real Africans living in real African houses. How could such sordidness be juxtaposed with so much affluence? The villagers gathered and stared at the white visitor in their midst. Mr Winterbottom went around patting shoulders.

‘Bature, bature,’ they whispered excitedly amongst themselves.

After about three hours of babbling with awestruck natives, listening to a bare-bottomed lad playing a bamboo flute, and taking photographs of men drinking fura da nono on raffia mats in front of their shacks, Mr Winterbottom was thirsty for new wine. The driver suggested yet another village that was just twenty minutes away.

‘No, I think we should go back to the hotel,’ I said. I had seen more than enough of Africa for one day.

‘I don’t mind visiting a few more places,’ Mr Winterbottom said. ‘This is really very exciting.’

‘I think we should go back to the hotel,’ I insisted. ‘You know Nigeria is a dangerous place.’ I paused. ‘Especially for a white man.’

That did the trick. He entered the car without another word of protest.

Back at the hotel, the driver nearly zonked out when Mr Winterbottom recompensed him with $100 - a likely approximate of his monthly income in just one day. The man genuflected at least a gazillion times, chanting ‘thank you, Master, thank you, Master’ each time his head arched towards the floor.

I shook Mr Winterbottom’s hand, wished him a good evening, and left him by his room door. Someday, he would look back and understand why I had been so shy throughout the African tour, why I had declined every one of his fervent invitations to feature in his photo shots.

On the day that Cash Daddy publicly declared himself as one of the Abia State gubernatorial aspirants, there was not a single tout left roaming the streets of Aba. All of them had been paid in advance and transported in fifty-eight-sitter buses to the National Advancement Party (NAP) headquarters in Umuahia, where they were gathered and waiting when our convoy of brand new jeeps arrived. As soon as they sighted us, the crowd chanted and cheered with naira-fuelled gusto.

‘Cash Daddy na our man! Cash Daddy na our man!’

Their man descended slowly from his carriage and waved with a straight face. Protocol Officer, his bodyguards, some of his new political friends, and yours truly accompanied him into the building, where Protocol Officer presented a seven-figure naira cheque in exchange for the nomination form. The crowd hollered another loud cheer when they saw us emerge from the building. They grew more deafening when Cash Daddy waved the form in the air. Major newspapers and television stations in Abia State had been paid good money to cover the event, so the cameras flashed and the microphones popped out. When Cash Daddy raised his right hand, the crowd fell silent.

‘People of Abia State,’ he began. His voice was deep and calm, like a defence counsel in a murder trial closing his case. ‘I appreciate that you’ve turned out to show your support as I declare my intention to contest for governor of this great state. I thank you very much. I promise you will never regret it.’

The crowd cheered. He dimmed his eyes and scanned the multitude as if taking personal note of each person’s face.

‘I’ve been very, very blessed in Abia State, and all I want is an opportunity to be a blessing in return.’

He told them of his plans to provide free education at primary school level, about his plans for agriculture and for development of roads and other infrastructure. He promised to attract foreign investors to ensure that Abia was given its rightful place on the map of the world. Once again, I could not restrain my admiration for this Boniface Mbamalu of a man. I had composed this speech two days ago and spent most of the previous night rehearsing it with him. But I was the mere architect; Cash Daddy had infused the words with real life. The touts gathered might not be equipped to appreciate all these wonderful promises, but the television and radio audiences would understand.