Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  Corruption in Kuwisha was a tangible presence, like a flatulent dog in a small room on a hot day, and the people battled to overcome the noxious stench that permeated their lives. Nothing and nobody could escape it.

  You could certainly smell it in the mounds of uncollected rubbish that grew larger by the day, piling up on the street corners, monuments to the venal incompetence of the city council and Mayor Guchu. Goodness knows where the city taxes ended up. Not in providing salaries for honest workers. No wonder many of the city wards were refusing to pay their rates, and were instead spending residents’ rates directly on local matters, such as filling the potholes in the area roads.

  You could always read about corruption: there were stories in the papers every day, revealing kickbacks to ministers, cuts on contracts, and letters from parents who complained that teachers were demanding money or sexual favours from their pupils, as a condition of passing their exams.

  And you could experience it at first hand on every journey in a matatu when you encountered a police road block. Either you gave what they asked for, “a little present”, or they would discover that a headlamp was defective, or the tyre tread too worn, or seat belts were unfastened.

  Sleaze permeated life, eroded values, all around, every day, day after day.

  The road project, backed by UNDP and a group of non-government aid agencies led by the Oxford-based WorldFeed, would be an acid test of the government’s commitment to probity.

  In theory it would be part of what planners called “an integrated development project” – which would include low-cost housing, a primary school and a clinic.

  It seemed a fine scheme, and tenders were coming in from construction companies in Europe, South Africa and Kuwisha itself.

  But many residents suspected it was a way of driving them from their homes in the name of “slum clearance”. Once out, they feared they would never be allowed to come back, and the new flats and houses would be sold to middle-class supporters of President Nduka and the ruling party.

  When completed, the highway would cut through the slum, effectively dividing it in two. The road itself would be as effective as the Berlin Wall, with six-foot ramparts on either side and with no provision for pedestrian crossing.

  “Stop the Kireba ring road!” and other slogans were appearing more frequently on the sides of the shanties that lay in its path.

  And who could explain the mysterious stand-pipe business? For the first time in its history, Kireba had sources of clean water in the form of stand-pipes.

  With much fanfare and jubilating, the first six taps had been turned on by Mayor Willifred Guchu, who thanked UNDP “for acting like fathers” in the course of his unctuous speech. But within weeks water was emerging at a trickle from the taps in eastern Kireba, the section which was to become the area for the promised ‘low-cost’ housing, yet the water flowed powerfully from the taps located in western Kireba.

  Charity would eat her hat if this was a coincidence.

  She should not have let Lucy, articulate, persuasive and ambitious, a veteran of the aid business though still in her early thirties, overcome the reservations Charity had voiced from the start.

  “Why punish the people for the faults of the politicians?” Lucy had said, with a passion that infused her and infected anyone who listened to her. “We know the government people all chop, but that’s no reason to stop helping the wananchi to help themselves.”

  And so Charity had allowed herself to be persuaded. True, she did not actively support the project, even though there were promises to build cheap but decent homes, and provide water and electricity. That would have been too much. But she had agreed not to oppose it.

  Clean water, decent toilets and lessons in basic hygiene would do wonders for Kireba, yet somehow these simple needs were not big enough for the foreign non-government agencies that had proliferated in Kuwisha.

  Charity went into the bar’s kitchen and turned up the gas flame under the vat of water, already close to boiling, and set to work preparing the avocado soup.

  There had been few takers for the full breakfast that day. On most mornings she could go through as many as ten tins of condensed milk as orders came in for sweet tea and a dough ball.

  But times were getting harder. Fewer and fewer people could afford a decent breakfast, not even ugali and relish, the cheapest way to fill a hungry stomach. For some, times were so hard that they were lucky if they could afford one meal a day, not even a slice of corn-bread and a cup of tea. These were the customers that Charity feared for. And every now and then, she would pop into the kitchen and emerge with an oily brown paper packet in which she had wrapped a couple of fried chicken necks, left over from the night before, or a maize meal bun, hot from the oven. She stuffed the food into the coat-pockets of the young, or the sick, or the elderly, and those with child, and do it so efficiently and swiftly that few of her customers noticed, while the recipients of her decency were never embarrassed.

  Most days Charity was on hand, behaving like a cross between a maître d’ and a grandmother, patting backs here, shooing there, admiring one man’s outfit and frowning at another’s, backslapping encouragement to all. Stick together. Life out there in the city was tough, really tough. If you fell by the way, there was no-one to pick you up – unless a fellow resident of Kireba took pity on you.

  With the help of the duty Mboya Boys, preparations of food for that day’s lunch had gone well. There was time for Charity to consider a kernel of unease, gnawing away somewhere in the pit of her stomach, as if she had eaten one of her dough balls too quickly, and it had not been properly digested.

  She could no longer avoid a confrontation with her dear English. For nearly a month Edward Furniver had been behaving oddly. He would find a reason to disappear for a few minutes, always taking his briefcase. A few minutes later he would reappear, looking a bit dishevelled, distinctly pink, and with a faint smell she could not quite place.

  Unlike many of her friends, Charity had no time for astrology; but she seldom missed the agony aunt column in Kuwisha’s leading daily newspaper. The subject raised that very day was so pertinent, and the advice so blunt, that she cut it out.

  Aunt Mary, of ‘Ask Aunt Mary’ fame, had posed three questions:

  Does your man regularly slip away for few minutes without explanation?

  Does he return very talkative?

  Can you smell drink on him?

  If the answers are yes, said Aunt Mary, run for your life! He is a secret drinker, and one day, sooner or later, he will surely beat you.

  Charity had started to notice that when Furniver did this disappearing act, he nearly always had his briefcase with him. The prospect of going through his briefcase made her feel deeply uncomfortable. Never in a thousand years would she have intruded on his privacy for any other reason. That would have been dishonourable.

  But this matter, it involved his health, and ultimately her health. She had seen the consequences of too many drunken marital conflicts to doubt that.

  She had tried checking with Didymus Kigali, but had made no progress on that front. Kigali’s loyalties were to Furniver. That was fair enough. Standards may have fallen with the new generation of stewards, but Kigali treated any information he might gain from working for Furniver like a priest respects the confessional.

  Yes, Boniface Rugiru, the bar steward at the Thumaiga Club, was probably her best source, and he had reported that Furniver had gone into the Gents the other night, and emerged smelling “like aftershave”.

  Indeed that very morning Furniver had turned up as usual for a cup of coffee and true to form, after a few minutes he went away; and once again, when he returned he was looking a little bit crumpled . . . Charity could not quite put her finger on the subtle change in his appearance.

  It was time to investigate.

  His briefcase lay temptingly close, on a nearby table, and was not locked.

  “Furniver,” she had said, in between cleaning her teeth with
the chewed end of a mopani stick that served as a toothbrush, “I cannot get the gas cooker working properly. Is it leaking?”

  “I’ll take a dekko,” he replied, and ambled to the kitchen, and out of sight.

  Feeling ashamed of herself, Charity had looked inside the case. Her stomach churned as she encountered a bottle, the size of half a litre of gin, filled with a colourless liquid.

  Hearing him returning, she replaced it. But not before a sniff had confirmed her worst fears. She would demand an explanation later. It was a prospect she dreaded . . .

  27

  Like schoolboys returning from summer holidays, delegates from the international aid community were gathering in Kuwisha for the World Bank conference, many having arrived on the same flight as Japer. They greeted each other with easy familiarity as they lined up at the conference registration desk in the lobby of the Outspan Hotel.

  A cynic would have seen the venue as appropriate to the event, likened by a local newspaper columnist to a meeting of neocolonialists in a hotel as old as colonial rule itself, built around an oasis of green lawns and flowerbeds, an implicit challenge to an independent Kuwisha.

  Ghosts of long-departed settlers patrolled the wooden-floored corridors, decked out with the same Christmas decorations, brought out by the same staff, year after year. Yellowing framed photographs of the colony’s first farmers lined the walls. They sat in stiff poses, a Remington rifle by their side, dogs lolling at their feet, and servants on hand, in front of thatched homesteads named after the British counties from which they and their families had come.

  A dapper, well-spoken government delegate, wearing a plastic accreditation card marked “Official” was holding court in the hotel’s lounge.

  “First, your people came with the Bible. When they arrived, we had land. We started reading the Bible. A very, very good book indeed. But when our forefathers looked up from reading, the settlers had occupied their land.”

  His audience of half a dozen or so delegates listened respectfully.

  “Then we fought for our independence. But you people had not forgotten your magic. You gave us independence. And when we looked up from our celebrations, we found that we had debt to your banks. Forty years after independence you give us what you call debt relief. Too late! You call it commerce, I call it exploitation.”

  The speaker smiled.

  “In fact, it is what the Good Book calls usury. You people from the World Bank and from Europe, you see yourselves as our benefactors. But we see you” – he prodded a delegate from Sweden who was nodding approvingly – “as members of the new generation of colonisers.”

  With that salvo, Newman Kibwana, lawyer and former opposition leader turned senior civil servant, bellowed with laughter, slapped his thighs, and got up. “See you at the conference.”

  Before he could leave, however, the UKAID minister had a question for him.

  “How are things at Lokio?”

  The aid base in northern Kuwisha was Africa’s biggest such centre.

  “Fine! Keeps me busy, too busy to make trouble,” grinned Kibwana, before striding away with a retinue of officials, supplicants and kinsmen, escorting him to the hotel entrance like tugs around an ocean liner.

  The UKAID minister could not contain his enthusiasm.

  “Impressive. Bloody impressive.”

  His colleagues rumbled their assent.

  “Do you know,” he asked the group, “that Kibwana flies to Lokio every weekend? Back and forth to that godforsaken place. Week in, week out, he monitors the UK aid shipments. No picnic, I assure you . . . Looks certain he’s going to get a cabinet job. And we will really miss him.”

  Just then their order arrived, and Noraid, who was about to ask a question about stakeholders and ownership, was distracted.

  “Bloody starving,” he said apologetically, tucking into a toasted cheese sandwich.

  UKAID continued: “We’ll really miss him. Pay his air fare to Lokio, plus a per diem. And by golly, we insist on receipts – and to be absolutely frank, he comes up with them at the end of every month, like clockwork. Everything from petrol for his Land Rover to the weekly flight.”

  Most of the listeners agreed. Newman Kibwana set a good example. And sharp though his comments were about the role of the donors, he had a good case. Even the Germans and the Japanese were prepared to concede that there was much in what he said.

  While their visits to Kuwisha would last a mere three days – less in the case of those who had to get to Maputo for the opening of the UN preliminary conference on climate change – the decisions they took had an impact on the lives of the people of Kuwisha that would be as far reaching as those taken by their colonial predecessors.

  In the meantime there was much to be done.

  Wearing expressions of harassed concern, the delegates lined up for their identity badges, signed for their per diems, enrolled in workshops and seminars and breakaway sessions, and slung over their shoulders the conference bags packed with learned papers, engraved pens, key-rings, and a T-shirt which declared: “Kuwisha, Home of Hope”.

  “Any spare T-shirts?” asked the representative from DANIDA.

  “No,” firmly replied the young lady from Kuwisha who was responsible for their distribution.

  DANIDA gave her a sceptical look. He was about to say something to her when an angry exchange at the hotel reception caught his attention.

  A delegate from UKAID was complaining that the hotel’s email system had collapsed, and that the business centre was to close at eight o’clock that evening, despite assurances that it would be staying open until ten o’clock.

  “Typical, bloody typical,” he was saying.

  “I don’t believe it! It can’t be . . .” exclaimed DANIDA.

  Adrian Mullivant looked up.

  “Yes, yes . . .” said DANIDA. It all came back to him now. “It was at Naivasha, that conference, what was it called? . . . ‘Managing good governance in post-authoritarian transition’.”

  Mullivant’s irritation about the emails lifted from his features as he matched memory with the enthusiastic face in front of him.

  “Good Lord! Surely not! Noraid?” He looked surreptitiously at the identity card which hung around his greeter’s neck. “DANIDA, yes of course, DANIDA . . . was it at Lake Naiva? Or Nairobi? Yes, Nairobi . . . ‘Conflicting paradigms in multiethnic communities’.”

  The two men embraced, foot soldiers in an endless battle against poverty.

  “You’re right, absolutely right,” said DANIDA. “It was Nairobi. But wasn’t it ‘Transparency and good governance – the challenges for Africa’?”

  “Didn’t you chair the breakaway group?”

  “The workshop, actually. Called ‘Monitoring resources . . .”

  “. . . without conditionalities’.” UKAID completed the sentence, adding: “Bloody marvellous it was, too. Great presentation.”

  “Someone had to say it,” said DANIDA modestly.

  “Gather you got a bit of stick when you got home?”

  DANIDA nodded.

  “The usual suspects. The NGOs . . . Gave me a hard time. Local rep. of CCA said I was patronising . . .”

  His voice trailed off. Christians Concerned for Africa was one of the heavyweights in the aid business and any government agency that took them on had to be sure of their ground.

  “Claimed that I had failed to adapt to a stakeholder agenda. Sods! What about ownership, I asked . . . they just ignored that.”

  Mullivant sucked in air through his teeth, and wished he had not raised the subject.

  “The old stakeholder line, eh? Must have hurt.”

  DANIDA nodded again. “We do so much for them. Pour funds down their throat. Without our support, where would they be? Half their programme is paid by us. And do we get any thanks?”

  Mullivant slapped his colleague on the back. “Won’t seem so bad after a gin and tonic, old boy,” and he marched DANIDA off to the bar where they were joined by two delegates fr
om Scanaid, who were ending a grim account of their money-changing experience at the airport.

  “. . . so instead of selling ngwee at whatever it is to the pound, he was selling at the euro rate, and pocketing the difference.”

  The others murmured commiserations.

  “Place is full of scams,” said Mullivant. “Getting as bad as Lagos. Take what happened to me this morning.”

  Colleagues around the table looked expectantly at Mullivant.

  “I was sitting in the back of this taxi, just this morning, on my way here, from Kireba.”

  The very word Kireba was enough to move the listeners. To have actually gone there . . . there was a satisfying murmur of respect for a man who had braved the horrors of the notorious slum.

  “I was reading a rather good paper on the role of women in semi-arid areas. We were stuck in a traffic jam, crawling along, when there was a thump, and the face of a young lad was pressed against the right-hand window.

  “Seems that a retarded boy had deliberately fallen under the wheel, a common ploy, it appeared, and his companion had threatened to call the police. You know what that means?”

  His audience had not a clue, but nodded nevertheless.

  “Under Kuwisha law, anyone who witnesses a vehicle accident is obliged to go to the police station and report it. My taxi driver was terrified. Kept saying how terrible the police were. One of us had to go. Meanwhile my briefcase had disappeared, presumably lifted when my head was turned. Then the driver said he had to go to the cops, and I got pretty concerned. He warned me, pathetic really. Said he had no choice. Had to go, because the boys had his taxi registration number. ‘Please, suh, don’t come with me. You are a friend of Kuwisha who helps us with aid. But these police, they are always chopping . . . They will want you to give them presents. Let me go’ . . . So off he went, poor sod; he’ll be lucky if the police don’t hold him. Anyway, I gave him $100 for his trouble . . . the police may leave him with half that. D’you think I paid too much? Would hate to be taken for a ride.”

  “Cheap at the price,” said DANIDA.

  “Lucky escape – would have done the same thing,” said Scanaid. “Bastards.”