Moreover,
since it soon transpired that his aspirant never actually paid him for his
services (a common enough practice with many Nigerian employers, as I came to
understand), and there wasn’t in any case very much for him to do, he was
forever on the lookout for other means of getting by. As it also happened, I
needed someone to visit all the registered party offices to collect whatever
literature they had that I could use. Moving around Lagos was difficult enough,
then as now - too many vehicles, too few roads, no alternatives despite the city’s
extensive waterways - and there were twenty-six of them altogether, although
they were eventually whittled down to three in order to satisfy so-called
national spread, meaning that they had to have a presence in two-thirds of the
thirty-six states, plus the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, where they were
also to have their head office. In a country with too many languages, too many
ethnicities and too many religions this meant, in effect, that the minorities
and special interest groups who between them comprise half the total population
were excluded from representation by the so-called Big Three, much to Prince’s
approval. ‘The minorities will have their say but the majorities will have
their way,’ was how he put it and laughed when I muttered something about
fascism. Prince was nothing if not reactionary, in politics as in everything
else.
Prince is dead now. It seems he had a heart
attack in the middle of the night and it took too long to get him to the
hospital. I wasn’t surprised when I heard. He would have been about sixty then,
the same age I am now, and I hadn’t seen him since he had become a nuisance in
his own turn but it was perhaps a wonder that he lived as long as he did. He
was just above middle height, with the physique of an athlete - he told me he
had been an amateur boxer in his youth - but for his stomach, which was the
biggest I have ever seen on anybody. Whenever he exerted himself - and he
wasn’t one to do things by half: ‘What is worth doing at all is worth doing
well,’ was one of his popular refrains - his laboured breathing pointed to the
problem which killed him. Not that he was disturbed by what some might have
considered a self-inflicted deformity. On the contrary, he lolled about bare-chested
whenever he was indoors and I never had the impression that he thought it a
sexual turn-off, if only because he regarded the women he openly salivated over
- which is to say, almost any woman who crossed his path - as sex objects and
nothing more.
‘Look at
that, the devil walking on hind legs,’ he once said with sudden fierceness when
a comely woman strolled by as we sat drinking beer on the front balcony where
Ngozi had once kept her generator that she refused to move. His vehemence took
even him by surprise because he suddenly giggled and said something to the effect
that he hadn’t had a screw in ages, although he needn’t have worried on my
score.
Prince
was also reliable, if expensive. He liked nothing better than a clear brief,
although a good number of the party offices he visited when he embarked on the
first of the many assignments I gave him over the years that we were together turned
out to be either bogus - a rented room where nobody ever turned up after the
registration exercise and the landlord looking for the balance of his rent - or
were reluctant to part with their manifestos (assuming they had one) because Oga
was not ‘on seat’. At the end of each day, he would fetch the beers from the
woman down the road - ‘You can send an old man a message but don’t tell him to
run,’ he would invariably quip - before settling down to read all six
newspapers I bought every day as I worked away on the balcony overlooking the
school in the adjoining compound where the young male teacher took erotic
delight in spanking the bottoms of his adolescent female charges. By and by, I
felt confident enough to entrust him with extending my Nigerian passport.
‘They
thought you were a Lebanese,’ he said when he returned some hours later and
told me how he had found someone in the office who spoke his language and all
was sorted. It also happened to coincide with the day Ngozi was supposed to
have been evicted and he could see that I was agitated so I brought him up to
speed. He was shocked when I told him that the Alhaji was also a tenant.
‘The
Alhaji!’ he exclaimed. ‘But I thought he was the owner of the building. That is
what he has been telling people.’
‘Which
people?’
‘Everybody,’
he said. ‘He is a big man, you know. He used to be a socialite. Whenever he
went to a party he would spray more than anyone else, although they didn’t know
he was using condemned money from his office that should have been destroyed
but which he packed into his house in beer cartons. Chief Ebenezer Obey even
wrote a song about him. I have the cassette; I’ll bring it for you to listen.’
He shook his head. ‘He is a big man,’ he continued. ‘Whenever he threw a party
in those days he would block the entire close and nobody could complain. He has
many houses. I know of at least one in A_.’ He mentioned a place where the
gutters overflowed whenever it rained because the state government was tardy
about clearing the canals, which invariably filled up quickly with the
household rubbish which the state government was equally tardy about
collecting, although it should also be said that Lagosians, many of them from
other states come to make money in one of the world’s fastest growing cities,
were careless of their surroundings, careless about littering the already dirty
environment.
‘So he
can move into it whenever he wants,’ I said.
He shook
his head emphatically. ‘Alhaji can’t go and live there,’ he said, making a
face. ‘The place is too far and there are too many armed robbers. He is only
renting it.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, the building has no bathroom or toilet. He
wanted to save money. The tenants have to go and shit in the bush behind.’ He
paused. ‘And now he’s gone and fallen on bad luck,’ he added dramatically.
‘How?’
‘Haven’t
you noticed that he no longer has his official car?’ I had noticed – one
vehicle less was cause for celebration – but hadn’t thought anything of it.
‘They
sacked him,’ he added.
‘Why?’
‘They
said he tried to embezzle five million.’
‘When?’
‘Just
before you returned from England.’ He shook his head. ‘He was due for
retirement soon. Now he has lost everything – gratuity, pension, everything. He
should have got at least one million handshake after all his years of service.
They say he is going up and down to Abuja begging them to turn his dismissal
into retirement but they will never do that. Government doesn’t change its
mind. I should know; I was in the system for nineteen years.’
©
Adewale Maja-Pearce
Adewale
Maja-Pearce is the author of several books, including Loyalties
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and Other Stories, In My Father's Country, How many miles to Babylon?, A
Mask Dancing, Who's Afraid of Wole Soyinka?, From Khaki to Agbada,
Remembering Ken Saro-Wiwa and Other Essays, A Peculiar Tragedy, and
Counting the Cost, as well as the 1998 and 1999 annual reports on human
rights violations in Nigeria. He also edited The Heinemann Book of African
Poetry in English, Wole Soyinka: An Appraisal, Christopher Okigbo:
Collected Poems, The New Gong Book of New Nigerian Short Stories,
and
Dream Chasers.
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU
Click here to see Maja-Pearce's amazon.com page: http://www.amazon.com/Adewale-Maja-Pearce/e/B001HPKIOU
No comments:
Post a Comment