Welcome to Lagos

by Chibundu Onuzo

  His father brought the bottle on a tray to him with a slim glass, setting it on a side stool.

  “Dearest, what about you?”

  “Orange juice. You know we shouldn’t be drinking so close to Ramadan.”

  “Live and let live, Mariam.”

  They drank in silence, his father tapping his feet as he sipped his port. When their glasses were empty his father stood.

  “Right. Lunch should be ready. Let’s not keep the newspaperman waiting.”

  As always, there was too much food. The table was heaped for guests that would never arrive: his dead sister, her imaginary husband, and their six obese children. The chairs were stiff-backed, with wrought copper arms uncomfortable to rest on. On the walls were paintings, trite European landscapes in greens and blues, and in the corner an aquarium bubbled softly, the pale fish darting behind its glass walls. He would have preferred to eat in the living room but his mother liked to create an occasion, complete with gold cloth napkins and heavy silver cutlery brought from storage each month.

  “You remember Layọ Adenuga?” she said when they had begun eating.

  “No.”

  “You do. You went to primary school with her. Short, a bit chubby, very light-skinned.”

  “Vaguely.”

  “She got married last week. Such a beautiful wedding. Her colors were burnt orange and magenta. It was so difficult to find matching shoes. Your wife better pick simple colors.”

  “Who will let their daughter marry this newspaperman? He’s not trained for this. He’s an amateur and it damn well shows.”

  Ahmed would not let himself be goaded today.

  “When is your next wedding, Mum?”

  “Da Silva and Ajayi. Hundred thousand naira for five yards of aọ ebi. These people want to empty our bank accounts. But you know how close Mrs. Ajayi and I are. I can’t refuse.”

  “Yes, this is what your mother spends our retirement funds on.”

  His father seemed relieved that he had not risen to the bait. For the next hour, conversation continued with little to disrupt it. At five o’clock Ahmed pushed his chair back from the table.

  “Until next month, then,” his father said, shaking his hand and leaving the room. His mother walked him to his car, his trunk full of yams and plantains from her kitchen. He would give it all to his neighbors once he got home.

  “Don’t mind him. He just wants you to do well.”

  “Yes. I understand.”

  “Will you come with me to the Ajayi wedding? You know your father always leaves me to go on my own. And you never know, you might meet someone.”

  He had been stunned by these society weddings when he first moved home, dazed by the towering cakes, free champagne, fresh European flowers, chocolate fountains, and ice sculptures as cold as the unmarried belles, aloofly desperate, sitting stiffly in their new clothes and lacquered faces, waiting for a “hello” from a prosperous-looking, preferably unmarried man before they would let themselves thaw. And when you stepped outside for a smoke or a phone call or to talk more deeply to the pretty bridesmaid, you would see the small economy that had grown around the spectacle. There would be beggars waiting for crumbs, touts watching your car, photographers pointing out your pictures taken that day, men selling money in bundles, freshly minted naira to spray on the couple, cash littering the dance floor, the happily ever after turned into a capitalist boom.

  “I can’t make it. And you won’t be on your own, Mum. You’ll have all your friends around you.”

  “You’re a snob. That’s your problem. Why can’t you marry one of my friends’ daughters? Poor people’s children marry themselves all the time, so why shouldn’t rich people do the same?”

  “We don’t have the same interests.”

  “What interests? Is it newspaper? I’ve told you, Rẹmi Okunọla’s daughter has moved back and started a magazine. Let me introduce you. Her mother can bring her to the wedding.”

  “You didn’t like my last girlfriend.”

  “She had dreadlocks, for goodness’ sakes. And she was Igbo and you could hear it when she spoke.”

  “Don’t start that.”

  “I don’t have anything against Igbo people. Mrs. Eze is a perfectly charming and—”

  “Drop it, Mum.”

  “Well, even if it’s the gardener’s daughter, just bring someone soon. All I ask is she has a degree and knows how to handle a—”

  He opened the door and got into his car. Disdain from his father and this biting prattle from his mother. Sometimes his one visit a month felt too frequent.

  “Wait, before you go, how are things at work? You know we can never talk seriously when your father is around.”

  “Fine, thanks. We’re trying to see how we can monetize our website. Traffic on there is encouraging.”

  “Just make sure there’s no accident.”

  “Where?”

  “In the traffic that you’re talking about.”

  “Yes, Mum. We’ll try to keep away from accidents.”

  “You had better, ọkọ mi.”

  “Your husband is waiting for you inside the house.”

  “Then hurry up and bring our wife so I’ll stop calling you that.”

  “I’ll see you soon.”

  10

  THE PAPER WAS DYING. Advert subscriptions had dwindled since the Journal’s honest coverage of the last election. There had been eyewitness reports of ballot boxes stuffed like birds, bursting with voters that did not exist. Long after civil society voices had fallen silent and President Hassan had been sworn in, Ahmed’s editorials continued to call for a rerun.

  Eventually they had moved on but the damage was done. No one would advertise in a paper that was rumored to be unpopular with the First Family. In a way it was flattering. It meant the politicians in Abuja were reading. president calls for national day of prayer: this was the headline his editorial team believed would turn their fortunes.

  “But it’s not news,” Ahmed had said in that morning’s meeting.

  “We need advertising.”

  “It’s not news,” he said again.

  “It’s midweek paper. There’s no news midweek. Just let it pass. His boys will see it. They’ll start buying our pages. We need a positive story about the president.”

  “And when you find one, we’ll publish it.”

  Prayer was all the recommendation he heard for Nigeria these days. For every crisis, eyes were shut, knees engaged, heads pointed to Mecca, and backs turned to the matter at hand. He did not remember the country being so religious in his childhood. Faith used to be a part of the landscape, glimpsed in wax rosaries and white celestial robes, in wooden prayer beads and the vivid scarves his mother wore when she went to the mosque. None of this obtrusive proselytizing, loudspeakers on every corner, blasting calls to prayer and songs of praise.

  It showed a certain tolerance that his street in Surulere should boast both a church and a mosque, tolerance from his neighbors, with whom he should have long since banded to demolish both buildings. He had chosen Surulere because it stood in opposition to everything he had known of Lagos as a child. He had grown up in Ikoyi, an island physically and metaphorically cut off from the city, a quivering bubble of privilege that he had burst out of once he returned to Nigeria.

  Surulere wasn’t quite a ghetto. His street was affluent, with high walls and rosettes of barbed wire, but close by lay a grittier Lagos that on occasion spilled into their world in the form of armed robberies. The few times his mother had visited, she offered the boys’ quarters of their house, done up and ready for him to move in.

  “You’d never even have to see us. You’d have your own entrance.”

  “But what of my own pride?”

  There was always traffic on the way home, as constant as the sunset, a swarm of engines throbbing heat and irritation, the strain of clutch control, poised on the biting point, starting and stopping until his shoulder ached from changing gears. He refused to get a driver, re
fused at his age to become an oga giving orders to a man who would glance in the rearview mirror when he thought Ahmed was not looking, eyes filled with hate.

  Once he got home, he ate his dinner over the sink, his fork clinking against the ceramic, the lonely chime of bachelorhood. Then he began an editorial, congratulating the president on his new role as spiritual adviser to the nation. He wrote in his study, a converted bedroom with wood carvings on the walls and an adirẹ cover for his desk. Only a select few were allowed to sing through his complicated sound system. Fẹla he played when the comfortable, cud-chewing life in England began to look attractive. Makeba’s voice was a running stream he slipped into after meetings with the paper’s accountant. And Ndour was his personal gateway into the spirit world, into a trance where ideas moved easily into sentences. There were books everywhere, spines facing outwards, Fanon and Tolstoy, Achebe and Maupassant, piled eclectically on top of each other. It was the study of a modern Pan-Africanist, a room that Nkrumah would have relaxed in, he liked to believe.

  The rest of the flat was spacious and bare. It would have been minimalist in England, a glass coffee table, a white sofa, a pine chair, and a long flat-screen TV. In Lagos, the room looked like a cell. A cleaner came once a week, sweeping, mopping, and polishing, down to the security bars on the windows. Only the study was out of bounds. He sometimes wished for a woman to interrupt his work and drag him to bed.

  He had found many women to sleep with in Lagos but none to split his life down the middle for. He ruled out the mercenaries fast, women who approached men like prospectors, striking for rent money, fuel money, weavon money. As for those left, who found his work meaningful and shared his love of black-and-white films, would these slim compatibilities last them forty years? Perhaps his mother was right. He was not looking hard enough. He was too obsessed with his paper. And to what end?

  He would not bring down the government with the Nigerian Journal. Those days were gone, when newspapermen were feared and hounded and despised and worshipped for their recklessness. When a headline could force a paper underground and audiences risked much to read an editorial. He could no longer be a scourge to the Nigerian establishment but he could be a thorn, a brittle thorn in its buttock. The article on the president was ready. It would run on the weekend. The paper would lose more subscribers. He would run the Journal into the ground before he let it become popular reading in government circles.

  11

  Abuja

  CHIEF SANDAYỌ, THE HONORABLE Minister of Education for the Federal Republic of Nigeria, slid up his drooping agbada sleeves and glanced at his Rolex, gifted to him by his late wife, Funkẹ, a twenty-year-old watch, still telling accurate time. Two hours gone already. On the podium, the minister of health droned on, stuck on a slide about malaria prevention.

  Each minister would give a special presentation to the president in this dome-ceilinged hall with low-hanging chandeliers that caught the sparkle from rings and chains and bangles. The room was cold, the air conditioner set to chill, transporting them to a region where scarves and thick socks were necessary. The president was flanked by his predecessors, four former heads of state, all human rights abusers, lined like sphinxes, inscrutable in their chairs. They had been defanged now, overthrown by one coup or the other, paraded in the capital once a year as “elder statesmen.” Chief Sandayọ turned his eyes to the rest of the room.

  You could not speak when a minister was presenting, but nothing stopped them from looking, sizing one another up, going over the battle lines in their heads. It was like the polygamous household he had grown up in, except the stakes here ran to billions. His late wife would have mocked him for how fast he had learned to play Abuja politics. He bobbed a greeting to the Senate president, who had just walked in with a cloud of assistants.

  As well as the ministers, the room was choked with their ambitious aides, men and women in sharp suits. The aides held files for the ministers, they straightened the folds of their clothing, and if necessary, they presented for them, careful to ascribe credit where it was due.

  Chief Sandayọ had come with two assistants of his own, Harvard MBA and PhD from Warwick. The agriculture minister had brought seven to bolster her. She was a new appointee, rushed into a job she had scarce qualification for. During each presentation, her lower lip disappeared into her mouth, emerging more mangled as Petroleum, Defense, and Tourism gave their reports. Finally it was Agriculture’s turn. “Your Excellencies, Former Presidents of Nigeria, His Excellency the Senate President, Honorable Ministers, Honorable Chair of the House Committee on Agriculture, Special Adviser to the President on Performance Monitoring, distinguished ladies and gentlemen, all protocols observed.”

  She was trembling, her knees touching and untouching like the wires in a faulty cable. Her makeup was bold, provocative even, her lips too red for this hour of the morning. Her fellow ministers were either plain, potbellied men or motherly women, past makeup and seduction. Who had she slept with to get her job? Rumors were flying around already. Sandayọ’s bet was on President Hassan himself. One of her aides stood and whispered to her.

  “Forgive me, Mr. President. I omitted you in my opening address.”

  She looked ready to display the contents of her breakfast to the room.

  “Your Excellency, President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, Commander in Chief, GCFR—”

  “Perhaps we will hear from the Honorable Minister of Agriculture another time,” the president said, cutting her off. “My honorable predecessors and your brother and sister ministers will agree that it is not fair to expect a presentation at such an early stage of your new job. Chief Sandayọ, if you will proceed for us.”

  His ministry, the Ministry of Education, was of little interest to his present audience. A small budget considering the army of teachers, professors, and vice chancellors that fell under his command. Education was of importance only when university staff went on strike, demanding higher pay for their worsening services.

  Sandayọ breezed through the introduction: observing all protocols, naming all names. The ministry had begun implementation of its five-point agenda on toilet provision in northeastern Nigeria to increase female pupil attendance. The ministry had made a detailed plan of a three-tiered approach to combating the increase in adolescent dropout rates.

  The jargon came easily to Sandayọ now, each technical phrase linked to another, forming a chain of incomprehensibility that passed as knowledge in front of this crowd.

  “And what of the Basic Education Fund?” the president asked.

  “We are beginning a strategic positioning of how best to direct this new resource.”

  “I have high hopes for you and your team. I hear you have done good things in basic education for the Yoruba people. Now I want you to do the same for the rest of Nigeria.”

  The president was speaking of Sandayọ’s time in the Yoruba People’s Congress over a decade ago, a time that Chief Sandayọ seldom remembered in the whirlwind of meetings and gala dinners that was Abuja.

  He had joined the group at the invitation of its founder, Francis Ifaleke, a charismatic, simply dressed man, compelling with no manic fundamentalist air around him, the opposite of all he had imagined the YPC to be.

  He still remembered the first meeting he attended, brimming with skepticism, ready to walk out at the slightest provocation. YPC members were rumored thugs, gullible in their violence, obsessed with invincibility charms and amulets. He discovered that first night a mini utopia, it seemed, bricklayers and doctors, vulcanizers and bankers all gathered for the good of the Yoruba race. They were committed to education with the zeal of their guide, Ọbafẹmi Awolowo. He had been honored to accept Francis’s offer to become the group’s education officer.

  That was over fifteen years ago, a time of slimmer waistlines and larger ideals. As he swung the sleeves of his agbada onto his shoulders, he wondered what most of his former comrades would think if they could see him now.

  12


  “MR. WỌLE ODUKỌYA IS here to see you, sir,” Chief Sandayọ’s receptionist said into the intercom.

  The ministry waiting room overflowed with teachers, students, widows, pastors, marketwomen, journalists, Student Union presidents, principals sacked for indecency, parents with photos of sons expelled for hooliganism, daughters dismissed for pregnancy. Yet no matter who was in line, Wọle Odukọya must be shown through.

  Sandayọ knew Odukọya from his YPC days, when the latter had been one of the younger members, flashy but earnest, eager to please.

  “Great Yoruba people,” Odukọya said when he swaggered into Sandayọ’s office. It struck him anew each time he saw Odukọya how tasteless the man was. Rhinestones glittered down the seams of his agbada and his shoes shone a patent red. Sandayọ did not rise to greet him. Godfather or no, the man was still more than a decade younger than he was.

  “I hope I’m not disturbing you. The work of a minister is not easy.”

  People said Odukọya made his money from drugs. He also dealt in philanthropic causes: widows and young girls who couldn’t afford their university fees. People said he slept with them. Sandayọ had wondered what Odukọya would demand for passing on his name to the president. A year had gone by and still no requests, not even for one of the smaller ministry contracts. All the man wanted to do was play this “do you remember” game.

  “Do you remember when we went for adult education in Kwara and they didn’t want us to enter because some of the women were wearing jeans?”

  With the YPC, Sandayọ had set up classes in village clearings, evening schools for city workers, language courses for the culturally estranged children of the rich, children like his son in America who stumbled over the simplest of Yoruba phrases. He had not known himself to be an organizer or a public speaker, gifts hidden from him and all who knew him.

  “I was speaking to Mallam the other day about giving my friend an oil block.” Mallam was their code name for the president. “I know Mallam wants to give him, but that witch he married is stopping the deal. Between the First Lady and the new marabout Mallam has hired, I don’t know who is running this country.”