by Leye Adenle
‘Get into the car. We are leaving. It is an order,’ Ibrahim shouted.
Hot-Temper stepped forward, his AK47 still trained on Malik who had gone silent and was watching with as much surprise as the other officers. ‘Oga, na who phone you?’ the sergeant asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. We are leaving him here. Let’s go.’
Hot-Temper jumped in front of Ibrahim and levelled his gun at his superior’s head.
‘Hot-Temper!’ Ibrahim shouted but the sergeant wasn’t looking at him. Ibrahim turned to see one of the officers pointing his weapon at the back of his head. Hot-Temper’s weapon was aimed at the man’s face. One by one the officers took sides with their weapons, Ibrahim in the middle, Malik behind them all, laughing maniacally.
104
Amaka placed her knife and fork on the empty plate, stained red from the rare steak she’d just finished. She drank the remainder of her Coke, picked the napkin from her lap and dabbed her lips. Her date, the Lagos State gubernatorial candidate, was standing by her side in white agbada and blue hat. He held her purse. She looked up and smiled. He offered his hand and she let him help her up and he waited as she straightened her blouse. Then as she reached for her purse, he slid a hand round her back and pulled her close to his body. Her hands went up around his neck and she closed her eyes as his lips touched hers. She slid one hand down his back and pushed the fingers of her other hand into his hair beneath his hat. Their heads alternated directions as their lips remained locked and their tongues entwined.
They kept kissing, their hands exploring each other’s bodies, until someone started clapping and all the other diners in the restaurant joined in, clapping and cheering. Still in Babalola’s embrace, Amaka looked about. Children, parents, couples, waiters and waitresses, were beaming at them; some were taking pictures and recording the little tryst on their mobile phones. She sank her face into his neck and he patted the back of her head.
Babalola waved as they left the restaurant, his right hand over Amaka’s shoulder, her left hand on his back, a 24-carat Tiffany diamond sparkling from her ring finger.
Ambrose looked at the pictures on a tablet. Amaka sat beside him on the sofa.
‘You did your part of the deal,’ he said. ‘Now I’ll do mine. I just don’t understand why it is so important for you to still do this. You have already done more than enough to earn my trust.’
‘Because I cannot afford for Ojo to become Governor of Lagos State,’ Amaka said.
Ambrose nodded. ‘And you do not trust us to carry out our own rigging?’
‘A wise man once told me that rigging is a leaky business. Every naira spent must count. All I’m asking is that I be a part of it. Call it monitoring. To make sure Ojo doesn’t win.’
‘And to make sure you know our secrets and you can use them against us. Or if we do win, to play the ‘I did my part to win this election’ card and demand favours from us.’
‘I don’t want any favours, and I’m not gathering secrets to use against you or Babalola. I’ll be complicit in whatever criminal activities I witness. You said it was important for me to compromise myself to gain your trust. Well, I will be doing just that.’
‘I know, and that is what bothers me. You are assured of our protection, you have already done us a great service, you can ask for anything, but you ask for this, why?’
‘Oga Ambrose, you just have to trust me.’
‘Me myself, I trust you, but it is my mind that does not trust you. Don’t take it personally, but I do not trust anyone; even the people I trust.’
Ambrose placed the tablet on the cushion between them and lay back on the sofa.
‘There are many ways to rig an election,’ he said.
105
‘Every registered voter has a voting card. On the day of the election, they go to their polling stations to be accredited. During the accreditation process, an official uses a card reader to check their biometric data. If this is fine, the voter goes to another official who checks for their name on the voters’ register sent to the polling station and he ticks it off. The voter’s hand is then imprinted with indelible ink and they can return later to cast their vote.
‘At each polling station there will be INEC officials, opposition agents, international observers in some cases, ad-hoc staff working for INEC, and supporters of each party, not to mention soldiers and police. The opposition agents will be watching you closely, and they know what to look out for because they are doing it too. The days of snatching ballot boxes are over. We have to be more creative.
‘Rigging starts long before the election. It all starts with the polling stations. There are some remote, unknown polling stations. Some of them are in people’s bedrooms. You can do whatever you want there. We have some; the opposition also has their own.
‘One of the first things to do is to reduce the votes of your opponent. You do this by buying voter cards from the opposition’s registered voters.’
‘How will you know they are opposition voters?’
‘Simple. You go to their strong base.’
Amaka sat in the middle of a shallow, narrow, carved-out canoe. Behind her, the single oar in the hands of a young boy in tattered brown shorts, dipped into the inky black water of Makoko. Dirty plastic waste bubbled around them in hilly masses that stretched for metres. Sitting inches away from the water, the stench of the lagoon - excrement, decay, and death – was suffocating. Behind, another canoe ferried a party official; a thirty-something-year-old man with both his hands resting upon a twelve-gauge shotgun on his lap. Ahead, standing on the edges of wooden shacks on stilts, dozens of men and women, children and adults, held up their voting cards waiting to exchange them for a portion of the money in the bag in Amaka’s lap.
‘Next is the ad-hoc staff. INEC recruits them from the ordinary citizenry. Anyone can apply. On Election Day, it is the ad-hoc staff that will cause commotion, do abracadabra, and dabaru everything if need be.
‘When illiterate voters ask for help identifying their choice, the ad-hoc staff will show them who to thumbprint. You want to buy as many ad-hoc staff as possible from as many polling stations as possible. The opposition will also be buying them, and they will collect money from both of you; you just have to figure out a way to pay more than them without paying too much.’
‘How do we do this?’ Amaka asked.
In a hot room with unpainted walls and closed wooden shutters, three men in Ankara sat on a low, narrow bench. They fanned their faces with folded newspapers wet with sweat and disintegrating where they held them.
In the sweltering, dusty room, Moses stood in front of the men. He was fixated on the shotguns on the laps of the ones who flanked the one in the middle. An Ankara curtain over the door behind Moses blocked out the rest of the queue waiting their turn in the sun. Moses presented his papers to the man in the middle of the bench - the one with a beer carton of cash in front of him.
The man took the paper, glanced at it, turned it round, and returned it. Moses folded his document along its existing lines and returned it into the breast pocket of his chequered yellow short-sleeved shirt. The man dipped his hand into the box, counted off some notes from a wad of thousands and held the money out to Moses. Moses in turn looked at what was offered, then gazed at the wall to his left.
The man kept his hand and the money up for a moment, then he put his hand back into the box and counted out more thousand naira notes and held the thicker offering up to Moses.
Moses looked down at the man’s hand. The men with the gun looked at him.
‘Fifty K,’ Moses said.
The man in the middle rested the money on his leg. ‘We are paying twenty-five,’ he said.
‘The other party are paying forty,’ Moses shot back.
‘Go and join them,’ the man said, and threw the cash onto the pile in the box.
‘Forty-five,’ Moses said.
‘Are you still here?’
The ones with guns straightened their backs.
Moses swallowed. A bead of sweat ran down the side of his face by his ear, curved under his chin, trickled down his neck, and straight down the middle of his chest. ‘Forty or nothing,’ he said.
The man in the middle and his armed guards all stared at Moses. Moses did not move.
‘Thirty, or leave,’ the man said.
Moses turned.
‘Wait.’
Moses stopped. He listened to money being counted.
‘Take.’
Moses turned around to even more money being held up to him.
‘Forty. But don’t tell anyone how much I gave you,’ the man said.
Moses took the money and tucked it down the front of his trousers. He turned and left, letting blinding sunshine into the hut as he parted the curtain.
He walked past the row of men mopping their faces and necks with handkerchiefs that had become transparent with sweat. The line was kept straight and orderly by men holding shotguns and pacing about. When he had passed the last of the ad-hoc staff waiting to sell their loyalty, Moses sent a message on his phone.
Amaka pulled back the dusty curtain that had once been white. The mosquito net beneath it was thick with dust. Her nostrils twitched. Outside, under the brilliance of the midday sun, a long silent row of people had formed, stretching from around the corner of a similar bungalow whose yellow walls had chipped and faded, across the narrow once-upon-a-time tarred road, to the door to the house.
She let go of the curtain to read the message that had just made her mobile buzz. ‘40K.’ She tucked the mobile into the edge of her skirt and went to the middle of the room where there was a carved wooden stool, about a foot high, between two men standing with AK-47 assault rifles. A large, black Nike travel bag lay in front of the stool. She sat down, unzipped the bag, and spread it open to reveal the cash.
‘Let them in,’ she said.
‘Now, this is more risky. We will also get the voting forms in advance. We thumbprint thousands overnight and stuff them into ballot boxes. Now, listen carefully; this is very important. Every polling station only has five hundred registered voters. When we are filling our ballot boxes, we cannot fill them with more than five hundred votes. And even then, we cannot give ourselves all the votes. Remember this. The difficulty is how to switch the boxes with the original ones from the polling booths. There are ways, but at the end of the day it boils down to money. You have to bribe everyone at the ward, from INEC officials to soldiers, to opposition agents.
‘Lastly, and we only do this as a last resort, if all else has failed and our permutations indicate that we are losing…’
‘Permutations?’
‘Yes. We do our own exit poll. We will keep a tally of all the centres where we’ve been successful at manipulating the vote. If we see that we are losing a ward that we should be winning, maybe the opposition have gained advantage over us, we just dabaru everything. Stabbing, shooting, burning, bombing. We stop voting at that centre and make sure they do not take any voting materials away. We burn everything there.’
106
The night before the election.
Someone had fitted the ceiling fan directly over the only light bulb in the room. With every oscillation of the fan, flickering shadows swept over the people, the boxes, and the surfaces cramped with ballot papers. Outside in the night, generators with various capacities rumbled from different distances, and the wind, on occasion, carried the cymbals and singing of a Pentecostal church’s night vigil.
Amaka stood by the closed door, her back against the wall, and fanned her wet face with a campaign flyer. Before her, sitting or kneeling on the floor, sharing the edges of a stool or standing over a table, were women of varying ages, all pressing their thumbs into blue ink pads and onto blank ballot papers. Other women gathered the thumb-printed papers and stuffed them into ballot boxes marked with the INEC insignia.
Amaka’s phone buzzed. It had been in her hand all night. She looked at the screen and answered.
‘Amaka, where are you?’
Amaka kept her eyes on the old women pressing their thumbs onto ballot papers. ‘Where I should be, Ambrose,’ she said.
‘We have been compromised. DSS has picked up ten of our men.’
‘Where?’
‘Where they should be. Someone must have tipped them off.’
‘And the material?’
‘Nothing will happen. They are working for the other party. They will keep our men till elections are over. Someone has given the names and the movements of our people. They are simply neutralising our assets. You might have been compromised too. You have to leave where you are, now.’
‘How many people do we have?’
‘Doing what you are doing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fourteen. Fifteen.’
‘And ten have been arrested.’
‘Detained. They will be released without charge.’
‘Only you know my name and location. If ten of us have been detained, it makes the job of the remaining five even more important.’
‘I am not the only one that knows your name and location. Just like you, the others may know where we sent material tonight. Someone within has compromised us.’
‘But if I’m detained, I’ll be released without charge. It’s a risk I’m willing to take.’
‘No. Not you. Your father’s name will make you a big catch for the government. You can’t risk it. Get out, now.’
Amaka tucked the phone in her skirt and looked around. The women, none of whom spoke English, continued thumb printing and stuffing INEC ballot boxes. An old woman with grey cornrows was holding a ballot box steady as another pushed folded ballot papers into it. She looked up at Amaka and gave a toothless smile, her face glistening with sweat.
107
Election day.
The white Toyota bus had stopped at a checkpoint with police officers and soldiers in camouflage gear, nets stretched over their helmets. In the back seat of the vehicle, Amaka took a call from Ambrose.
‘Amaka, we are losing badly. We need the material in your car.’
‘How will I deliver it?’
‘Go to Sule’s ward. Park and walk away from the vehicle. He will provide another one for you.’
A soldier knocked on Amaka’s window. She held up the observer card on the lanyard around her neck. The soldier’s smooth black face cocooned within his helmet was the face of a boy; he must have been twenty or younger. He leaned in to take a closer look at the card then turned to other occupants. The driver kept his hand on the steering wheel; the woman in the seat beside him was also holding up her own observer card, as was the man in the row behind them. In the back row, three men in orange vests sat shoulder to shoulder. The one in the middle had a camera around his neck. They all held up badges that read: PRESS. The young soldier walked round the car looking in through the windows, then banged on the boot of the van. The driver moved his hand to the door handle. Amaka placed her hand on his shoulder to stop him. ‘He means we can go,’ she said.
The driver looked at her, then in his mirror for the soldier and saw that he had turned his back to them.
As they pulled away, Amaka watched the soldiers in the rear-view mirror. The one who inspected the interior hadn’t noticed how the men in the back criss-crossed their legs to hide the fact that the floor was higher than it should be.
The bus stopped next to some other cars that were parked between two bungalows where voters lined up in the middle of a sandy field surrounded by abandoned classroom blocks. Soldiers and police officers stood around. Amaka got out, followed by the others. They gathered by the side of the vehicle. A group of soldiers watched them. In the middle of the field, on both sides of those waiting to cast their ballot, soldiers, INEC officials, observers, and police officers stood in groups, talking and mopping sweat from their foreheads, and watched the voters. Some of the officials and most of the voters held umbrellas over their heads - umbrellas with Chief Ojo’s smiling face on them.
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br /> ‘Did you leave the key in the ignition?’ Amaka asked.
The driver nodded.
Staring ahead, Amaka said, ‘Now, we all walk away.’
She looked down at the card hanging from her lanyard, spun it around so it showed her face and the word OBSERVER in bold, then she pulled her sunglasses from her blouse and put them on. She walked straight ahead. The soldiers parted for her. She kept her head high and continued walking as the military men watched her bum from behind.
108
Election night.
Ambrose’s living room heaved with party officials, many on their phones, talking or listening, pacing the room. The few men and women who were talking to each other were doing so in hushed voices, as though they were at a funeral. Babalola was alone on a sofa, his face glistening. He tried to listen to the conversations around him and attempted to read the lips of people chatting to each other across the room. His eyes darted from person to person, often returning to Ambrose who was dwarfed by two men whispering into his ears and showing him things on their mobile phones.
A large man in Ankara entered the parlour and looked about. He made his way over to Ambrose who raised his hand so the man speaking into his ear would pause. ‘Oga,’ the fat man said, ‘Iná ti jó wa. We have been burnt.’ He showed his phone to Ambrose.
Ambrose flicked his finger over the screen and looked up. Babalola was looking at him.
‘Sule, Sule, Sule,’ Ambrose said. ‘Didn’t you use the ballot papers from Amaka?’
‘Oga, I delivered them myself. In fact, only the one meant for Banana Island is remaining in the car.’
‘So what happened? The INEC boys betrayed us?’
‘Oga, I don’t know what happened o.’
