You Must Set Forth at Dawn (72 page)

I hadn't noticed, but now I did. I sighed. “Is the spelling something to bother about?”

“It's a disgrace. Look, this is supposed to be our window on the world. Everything that comes out of an embassy represents the image of the nation. It should be meticulously prepared, every dash and dot!”

Between Julius and me, we succeeded in bringing the discussion back into focus. “Two things strike me as sinister,” I observed. “You can tell that this collection was in preparation while Abacha was alive. No doubt it was part of the campaign to turn him into a world statesman—remember, Nigeria has been trying to win a seat on the Security Council. The publication was clearly not ready by the time Abacha died, but did they pulp the copies or hide them away in some warehouse? No, they actually held off on the final production until they could co-opt the new head of state into writing a foreword.”

“I bet Abdulsalami did not write that foreword himself,” Julius observed.

“I bet he didn't even bother to read it,” I agreed and proceeded to share the picture I had formed of what was clearly a typical con operation.

“Some bureaucrat—special adviser or whatever—goes to the new boss and says, ‘Sir, we need some kind of continuity. It would look good in the eyes of the world if you paid a tribute to your predecessor. Here is a prepared text, sir. We are close to grabbing a seat on the Security Council, and this publication will clinch it. Once you've done your part in this—just this foreword, sir—you can put Abacha's regime behind you and carry on with your own program, et cetera, et cetera.' That's one possible scenario.”

Both Julius and Sola nodded agreement.

“The second is—a million dollars or two have been voted and cornered by someone for this publication and a number of other Abacha sanitization projects. With Abacha dead, the lucky ministry in charge—Information or Foreign Affairs, very likely the latter—knows that there is no point in going ahead with it. But are they about to give up that loot? No way. In all likelihood they've pocketed the bulk of it. So they rush through the publication, get Abdulsalami to endorse it. They print maybe two hundred copies, just enough to decorate the reading desks of a few of our embassies all over the world and send to foreign embassies in Nigeria. They tag several zeroes onto the end of the number they're supposed to have printed and distributed—all in the name of campaigning for a seat on the Security Council. And that's it! Who's going to bother about that particular budgetary item once Abacha is gone? It has fallen in the crack between two regimes.”

Julius nodded. “Could be a combination of both scenarios.”

“But the least they could do is spell ‘Foreword' correctly!”

There was nothing I could do to suppress Sola's spelling bee in the bonnet. Unconsciously, we had all transferred to a vastly reduced territory of rights and wrongs, competence and improprieties, all nonlethal, on which the built-up passions of the past years were being gradually expended—from insolent taxis to spelling mistakes!

During welcoming pleasantries, that is, as each side keenly summed up the other, I was tempted to transmit to our host greetings from his regular Israeli chauffeur and watch his reaction. Then I decided against it. Who could tell if we would have to renew opposition against this new man and what form it might take? Instead, as soon as we were settled into our seats, I offered him the publication.

“What signal is this publication supposed to send? Is it an endorsement of the Abacha regime? Is it a message, a warning to the nation that this regime intends to walk in Abacha's steps, or what?”

Abdulsalami looked baffled, turned the booklet over in his hands, and turned to his ambassador for clarification. Gambari spluttered and launched a most curious counterattack: “But, Prof, what does this mean? You mean you were rifling through my private papers?”

All three of us responded almost at the same moment. “Private papers? A publication on your coffee table, displayed with other magazines? What are you talking about! Was this not meant for distribution?”

A sweaty Gambari then went into some long-winded explanation. He had received the publications from the ministry, he said, but they had been prepared a long time before and been designed—our guess had been right—to promote Nigeria's campaign for a seat on the Security Council. Obviously they couldn't be discarded, Gambari claimed; a lot of money had gone into the publication, and so, to make it current, the head of state had been invited to provide a foreword....

Bang on cue came our secretary-general's explosion: “And these people couldn't even spell ‘Foreword' correctly!”

“Sola, could you . . . ?”

The new head of state appeared intrigued, insisted that Sola should have his say—“No, no, I think it's an important observation. I really want to hear about this.”

Our S-G needed no further prompting. Sola Adeyeye, a smallish, disproportionately dynamic scientist whose movements sometimes suggest to me what a tree sprite must be like if it existed in real life, is propelled by an inner force that feeds on the nearest anomaly in the way that life or humanity expresses itself, with a blithe unconcern for its immediate context. Then his eyes distend, his arms stiffen into lightning rods as he irradiates the object of attention with instant passion! I often suspect that it has to do with his occupation, that of a biologist, where the minutest specimen must be subjected to an expository procedure that more or less renders all items equal under the microscope. He launched into a tirade on the general sloppiness of our embassies abroad, pummeled the bureacracy, excoriated the level of decay in public service that could possibly result in the disgraceful misspelling of such an important word. Abdulsalami clearly felt—or had decided that he should be seen to be—seriously concerned with this distraction. Inwardly, I fumed, wishing I could leave the two of them alone to thrash out the finer points of spelling, diplomacy, Nigerian image abroad, and so on while I awaited their conclusions in the Italian bar across the street. Julius struck the posture of the urbane international executive that he was—an intellectual who happened to be working for a foreign foundation at the time but who had not hesitated to throw himself into a political fray that now approached some form of conclusion—or respite. I looked to my deputy—he was nearer—to kick Sola surreptitiously on the ankle, but he seemed to be totally oblivious or indifferent to my impatience. It seemed ages, but finally we did get back to substantive issues. Our guess was right, however: Abdulsalami had not seen the finished product. Now he wanted to know everything about the publication.

It was a relief when Sola Adeyeye's background as a preacher, rather than a grammarian, took over some moments later—he was a Baptist who sometimes took to the pulpit in his church. Without a break in rhythm, he now launched a fiery and robust sermon directly at Abdulsalami—whatever god the soldier believed in, thundered our secretary-general, that god stood over him at this crucial moment of Nigerian history. Such a god would call him to strict accounting if he failed to toe the path of rectitude! A short span of time had been allotted to him, Abdulsalami, to rescue the nation from the morass into which it had been plunged by Abacha's regime. Adeyeye's eyes bored into the startled general, his beard stiffly pointed like a painting of one of the Old Testament prophets. “If you believe in any god, sir, if you believe that Allah is waiting for all of us on the Day of Judgment, you will ensure that you do not fail the nation at this critical moment.” Abdulsalami's face appeared to weather the onslaught like that of a trained soldier who finds himself unexpectedly under fire, nodding from time to time in subdued agreement.

Julius followed, albeit in a different mode. Methodically, he outlined the position of the joint opposition movements over the period of transition. From his briefcase, he extracted copies of the memorandum from the conference of both internal and external groups that had been rapidly organized after Sani Abacha's death by the Centre for Development and Democracy, headed by Kayode Fayemi, one of the few structures that had emerged from and survived the democratic struggle. That meeting had been marked by a vastly different atmosphere from earlier encounters—for the first time, participants had not been obliged to sneak out through secret routes and return the same way, every step fearful and anonymity rigorously maintained. Now all was in the open, and while apprehensions remained about the intentions of the new regime, it was impossible not to be infected by the euphoria that clearly had enveloped the gathering.

Julius handed over the document. Its conclusion could be summarized in two central demands and read as the defining statement of the opposition: a transitional government of national unity to take over from the military and, simultaneously, the summoning of a sovereign national conference to debate and decide the future of the nation—its structure if it must continue as a federation, and its constitution.

Abdulsalami listened carefully, but it would appear that he had far more modest pursuits on his mind. “When are you coming home?”

We responded that certain conditions still needed to be fulfilled, and we enumerated them. Abdulsalami took notes, promised to look into them. He played the role not only of a good listener but of one who enjoyed listening to others talk—or maybe simply enjoyed letting others provide some earnest-sounding noises as background to his private thoughts and already decided intentions. I had the impression that nothing in the world could ruffle this man. We had spent nearly an hour together already. All had been said that we had come to say, and the encounter was now over, at least from our side. Each had sized up the other beneath the courteous exchanges. The general had kept his part of the bargain; he had received us alone, except for his ambassador and someone who appeared to be his secretary. He appeared to have no secret agenda, nothing outside his main commitment to supervise the transition to a new government and embark on whatever retirement plans he had worked out for himself. He did not divulge any hint of what path he and his military colleagues would take to achieve that goal, nor was there any glimmering on his placid face of his reaction to our proposals for taking the nation back to democratic rule. In the little that he said, he
appeared
convincing, but we had not come this far to take any politician or “militrician” at face value. Sola Adeyeye summed up our response to him in the same preacher accents, his keen-edged trowel of a beard aimed, it seemed, at Abdulsalami's heart: “You will be judged by your actions, not by your declarations.”

Abdulsalami did not seem anxious to bring the meeting to a close. It was evidently his last engagement of the day, and I suspect that he was fascinated by the small group. I wondered if his thoughts strayed to the publication of our Walter Mitty, Jude Uzowanne; as the top soldier, he must have been compelled to address contingency plans in case of the genuineness of the alleged guerrilla threat. Whatever the rest of the military thought about our effectiveness, all sources—from visiting ambassadors to domestic servants—testified, both during and after Abacha's reign, that the dictator believed that we commanded the forces of hell, all of which had joined hands with hitherto unheard-of monsters from outer space to destroy him! Abacha's exceptional interview, perhaps the only one with a foreign newspaper (
The Washington Post
) was marked by an obsessive devotion to his favorite monster—“That Wole Soyinka, he is supposed to be a poet, to be writing poetry, but what he does is throw bombs all over the place, is that the function of a poet?”—all rattled off in his reedy voice. As Sani Abacha's chief of staff, Abdulsalami must occasionally have been witness to Abacha's famed paroxysms that had the opposition—and W.S. especially—as their trigger.

There were thus moments during our meeting when I felt that this soldier was sizing us up, wondering if this trio represented the forces that he must contend with if he succumbed to the temptation to cling to power. A quizzical look would pass over his face, and then he would seem to engage in a keener inspection of the team than was warranted by the subject under discussion. He had one of those faces that did not readily smile, simply because it was so relaxed that the entire head constituted itself into one simple, understated smile. It broke its mold only when we came to the subject of victims—both military and civilian—who had been framed by Sani Abacha and were still held in jail, a full month after Abdulsalami had taken office.

Why, I demanded, had General Olusegun Obasanjo been released from prison but not Generals Diya and Adisa, Colonel Gwadabe, and others? Abdulsalami replied that their cases were being closely studied. That was clearly evasive, and I insisted that the continued denial of their freedom was illogical, an unwarranted endorsement of the process that had landed them in prison in the first place.

General Oladipo Diya, Abacha's former second in command, whom Abdulsalami had replaced, was widely believed to have been framed, just like Olusegun Obasanjo. However, the conduct of some of these soldiers during trial had been far less than soldierly. The nation had been treated to video clips of the whimpering generals, secretly filmed by al-Mustapha, Abacha's chief security officer. Confronted with evidence of their alleged complicity in the coup attempt, a number of them had fallen on their knees, sobbing and pleading for forgiveness. In one scene, Abacha contemptuously handed his former chief of staff his handkerchief and gestured that he should wipe away his tears.

“Look, General,” I protested, “there is no justifiable reason for their continued detention. What I propose is this: set them free immediately and reabsorb them into the army. Then you can legitimately court-martial them for cowardice under fire, and then—shoot them if you like. I won't complain.”

Abdulsalami nearly fell off his chair as, for the first time, his placid mask cracked and he doubled over with laughter.