AS THEY MOVED THROUGH traffic, Ahmed Bakare wondered if he was driving into a trap. Lagos was filled with chancers like this young man complete with dubious American accent. He had hesitated at the door of his car, wondering whether to get in with Fineboy or not. No one would know where he had gone, his receptionist filing her nails at the desk and barely looking up when he passed, the last person to see him alive. He could not trust any of his employees. He paid them well but not well enough for such a secret. It was a story that could turn the country upside down or at least bump sales over the ten thousand mark. Five years of the Nigerian Journal had made him increasingly modest in his ambitions. He slowed at the estate entrance for the guards to look into his car.
“Good evening, sah. You’re here to see . . . ?”
“Aniekan Isong. Kingsley Road. He’s expecting me.”
Aniekan as far as he knew was in Canada but these guards would not know. They waved him in. He drove past the large concrete mansions, built like bunkers, the pillars and trellised balconies that decorated them added as afterthoughts.
“Straight down,” Fineboy said. “Turn left . . . Turn right . . . It’s this house.”
“Here?” Ahmed asked.
“Yes.”
Chief Sandayọ living in an abandoned building like a beggar? He drove past the broken-down house and parked away from it.
“Is this the place? Are you sure?”
“Just come with me.”
Ahmed had not decided on the manner to adopt with Sandayọ. His editors told him he was too direct, too sparse in his questioning style, shunning the tangential approach that gave a story body.
“You’re sure this is the place?” he asked again when they stepped into the waist-high grass, uncut in years. If it were a trap, no one would find his body here. His mother would fret about her lost son forever. When they reached a door sunk in the ground, Fineboy stopped.
“What’s the matter? Have you told him we’re here?”
“It’s not only Chief Sandayọ living here, but you must only write about the Chief.”
“Do you want me to sign something?”
“Yeah, that’s a cool idea.”
He tore out a page from his notebook and wrote in his slanted hand, “I, Ahmed Bakare, promise to mention only Chief Sandayọ in my articles and to protect the identity of everyone else in this flat.” He dated, signed, and gave the slip to the boy.
“OK. Follow me.”
31
For our fuller-figured readers, stripes can be slimming. Just make sure they’re going in the right direction. Vertical stripes make your body appear longer and slimmer. Horizontal stripes can add pounds.
—“Fashion Forward,” Nigerian Journal
THE JOURNALIST FINEBOY BROUGHT was a well-dressed man, his suit cut to his shape, the dark fabric resting on his leather shoes. The effect was softened by his lack of a tie. His neck rose out of his collar to meet a smoothly shaven chin, the only hair on his face a clipped mustache that curved around his upper lip. Fineboy had found this elegant journalist too soon, Chike thought. He had not even had time to tell the others of the plan.
“Good evening, all. My name is Ahmed Bakare. I’m the editor in chief of the Nigerian Journal. Please may I ask where you are keeping Chief Sandayọ?”
“Wetin I tell una? Poverty no get face.”
“We are not hiding him anywhere,” Chike said. “He is in front of you.”
“Chief Sandayọ, I presume,” the journalist said after looking them all in the eye. He walked towards the Chief, his hand outstretched like a signpost.
“Who else would it be? You must be foolish if you cannot tell a minister of the federal republic from these ruffians.”
“I have some questions for you.”
“Go ahead. Who is stopping you from asking?”
Fineboy had chosen well, Chike thought. Only this Ahmed Bakare, suave and wealthy, could have drawn so defensive a response from Chief Sandayọ. They had incarcerated the Chief, seized his money, kept him under surveillance, and yet every evening, Sandayọ sat on the sofa like a lord, giving orders to Oma and complaining about her food. Only one of Sandayọ’s class could, with one innocent question, pierce straight to his pale, quivering ego.
“Ask him,” Isoken said when the journalist was seated, “ask him why my school which was built for five hundred students had over two thousand.”
“And while you’re asking,” Oma said, “in my own university, lecturers used to force girls to sleep with them or else they will fail them. What did he do about that?”
“Please, you must let me ask the questions,” Ahmed said in an accent Chike recognized as elite, a Nigerian voice diluted with a foreign crispness that spoke each word separately, consonants sounded out, none linked to the other. Ahmed brought out a notebook and a pen and then a Dictaphone, which he placed on his lap. He was neat in his movements and very slow.
“Good evening, Mr. Sandayọ.”
“Chief Sandayọ.”
“I’m going to ask you a few questions and if you would be so kind as to answer.”
“I don’t owe you any kindness.”
“You sent the young man to fetch me. I assume it is because you want to tell your side of the story.”
“Is that what they taught you in journalism school? To be assuming? If I sent the boy, why would I ask him to bring somebody from the Nigerian Journal? I’ve seen your paper. Nobody reads it.”
“All right. Did you take the money?”
“Hakim or whatever your name is—”
“Ahmed.”
“Ahmed, which money are you talking about?”
“The ten million dollars released by the federal government for the Basic Education Fund.”
“OK, Ahmed. Let’s suppose I know something about this money. Supposing I know. Suppose.”
“No be suppose anything,” Yẹmi said. “No be the money you bring come?”
“The money is here?”
“Of course not,” Chike said. “We seized it and removed it for safekeeping.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The terms of the interview,” Fineboy said. “Focus on the Chief.”
“Yes, focus on me and the money you are supposing I know something of. What is ten million dollars? I was in Aso Rock two months ago and I saw the Central Bank governor himself, taking to the president an amount of foreign currency that would make you weep for Nigeria.”
“I did not come here for allegations against Dr. Garba.”
“Why not? When you leave this place, phone CBN and tell the governor you know his secret.”
“I am not interested in blackmail.”
“You should be. What’s your circulation?”
“Eight thousand.”
“You can’t be making much from selling to your family members. That boy over there, did he tell you he’s from the Niger Delta?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with the ten million dollars that has gone missing.”
“Do you know how many of these militant groups are in the pay of the presidency? Sometimes they come to pick up the money in Aso Rock. In the middle of the night. They take it, go quiet for a while, and when they’ve blown everything, they start causing trouble again.”
“Like who?” Fineboy asked Sandayọ.
“It’s difficult to remember your strange names. Tomboy, obviously he’s the most famous. Edward Clark. Boniface. Many others.”
“Godspower?”
“Maybe. But that’s just small stuff. If you want to know about the real corruption, find out how you get allocated an oil block. The First Lady’s favorite color is purple. Very useful information.”
“The money, Chief Sandayọ,” Ahmed said.
“Your mind is too one-track.”
“So how do you get an oil block?” Fineboy asked.
“Befriend the First Lady. Buy her purple things. Purple bags, purple Benzes, purple houses in France. Depends how much you want it.”
<
br /> “Have you met her before?” Oma said.
“Yes, of course.”
“From what I’ve seen of her on TV,” Isoken said, “she’s a fashionable lady. Classy.”
“How won’t she be well dressed? There are three accounts in Dubai that you pay into if you want a favor done in Abuja. That money goes straight to her and it’s for shoes and handbags only. I can give you account details for one.”
“Who has paid into it?”
“Oh, so, Mr. Journalist, now you’re interested?”
The Chief cared what this journalist thought about him, cared enough to tarnish others’ reputations, to offer what would have been an explanation in a humbler man. If only Ahmed had stuck to his first line of questioning, Chike thought. The money, Chief Sandayọ. The money. But he had been seduced by gossip. He was a journalist, after all. Nothing more would be said of the money, hidden in parcels throughout the flat.
“I’m sorry but you’ll have to leave,” Chike said when it was midnight.
“I can’t make a story out of this. He hasn’t answered me properly.”
“You can always come back.”
32
No matter how sharp your writing or how fresh the scoop, you’ll only be producing creative nonfiction if you don’t check your facts.
—“So You Want to Be a Journalist?” Nigerian Journal
SITTING IN THAT CROWDED basement, with the Chief spewing out allegation after allegation, Ahmed had wanted to do something that would shock this very comfortable man. Tread on his foot or slap him or throw a glass of water in his face. How would he publish such a story? Aso Rock gossip. Titbits swept up from the corridors of power. There was no way to confirm anything the Chief had said.
Tayọ Cole was the only person he could call. During the early years of the Nigerian Journal, Uncle Tayọ had been his guide, from renting their office space to securing their first big interview with an opposition presidential candidate. For Ahmed, Tayọ Cole was more than a mentor. He was an ideal, down to his rheumy eyes weakened by repeat exposure to tear gas.
“Uncle Tayọ, good evening.”
“Ahmed, is this you? We haven’t heard from you in a while.”
“I’m sorry. How is Aunty? And how are the boys?”
“You didn’t call to ask about them. What’s new?”
“I have a scoop. A lot of dirt on people in government. Problem is I don’t know how to verify anything my source has said.”
“How good is the source?”
“Good. You don’t get closer to power than this.”
“Give me an example.”
“OK. The First Lady has three accounts in Dubai. Shoe and handbag accounts.”
“I heard it was two.”
“You know about it?”
“Everybody knows about it. You pick up these things in Abuja. I’ve told you severally. Activate your bush radio. Your content is good but you’re slow in getting to the story. Find the gossip. Then do your research.”
“But that’s the problem. It will take me months to research everything this man has said. By the time I finish fact-checking, these people might be dead.”
“You could do an allegation piece. Print it as he’s said it.”
“They’ll sue me.”
“Not if you’ve called already and asked for their side of the story. Then you can write: We called so-and-so over x allegation and they refused to comment.”
“And if they deny everything?”
“They won’t. They won’t even take your call. Who are you to get the First Lady of Nigeria to comment? I have to go. Someone is on the other line.”
“Wait. Since when do you know so much about Abuja?”
“Ahmed, I’m an ex-journalist. Just because I’m running a media consulting company doesn’t mean I’ve turned off my bush radio. And anyway, I have to pass through the capital sometimes. I fought too long for democracy to lose my head there. Trust your uncle Tayọ. Text me when you run the story. Don’t be subtle with the headline.”
“I won’t. Greet Aunty for me.”
Ahmed put down the phone. Uncle Tayọ’s new familiarity with Abuja was worrying. Should he have trusted him? Had he said too much? The transcript of the interview lay in front of him, painstakingly typed over two days. Ahmed had been surprised at how reedy his voice was on tape. It was not the confrontation he had hoped for, the piercing gaze of the press ranged against the dull forces of corruption. He had been worn out by the Chief’s deflections, all thirteen pages of them. The pressure of carrying such a secret was beginning to show. He had stopped sleeping and he could feel the ache in his gums that was the first sign of stress, the ache before they began to bleed.
A mask of Ọrunmila stared down at him from the wall, or at least the artist in Oogbo had said the large hollow eyes belonged to the god of wisdom. His mother would have been horrified by the serene wooden face, angered even, by what she would dub apostasy.
When he prayed, he prayed to Allah the most merciful. But what was he to do with all these gods and goddesses and spirits and ancestors that had peopled his village in Kwara before the first cleric arrived with a Koran? He did not worship Ọrunmila but he thought to him, this wooden embodiment of wisdom hung on his wall.
In the background, Ola’s distinct breathy voice came through the speakers. She was a British singer, allowed into his study on the technicality that her absentee father was Nigerian. She was singing of freedom, of breaking chains and moving walls.
Was he brave enough to run this article? Could he even imagine the consequences? The incendiary days of blowing up journalists were gone. Maybe in some obscure eastern backwater, or in the lawless Delta, such things still happened, but not in Lagos. And not when the newspaper publisher had a well-connected father. How much his father’s name had shielded him from becoming a casualty of free speech, he would never know. It was ironic. His father hated the very existence of his paper but it was his surname that had kept the Nigerian Journal open and unhampered for so long.
33
It is my belief that the corrupt in this country exist because of the goodwill, support, and cooperation of large segments of the population. It is all right to be a thief, as long as one is a thief who shares.
—editorial, Nigerian Journal
IT WAS MANY DAYS now since Chief Sandayọ’s interview with the journalist. He stayed underground, watching Chike, Fineboy, and Isoken leave each morning, marching out before the sun rose. They came back secretive, huddling to discuss the day’s work. It was his money they were using to generate all this good feeling in themselves, this confident self-righteousness reflected in the passages Chike read from each night. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.
Sandayọ worried he had been indiscreet with the journalist. He had spent his forties railing against the government, shaking his fists at the authorities before crowds who never failed to respond with their own clenched anger. And now he had joined the ranks of those worthy of denouncing, or so the journalist seemed to imply with his questions. He had found himself trying to put whatever he was accused of in perspective, sharing Odukọya’s gossip with the wide-eyed naïf claiming to be a reporter. It was justification he now regretted.
He had seen the man’s publication, with its Western layout and aspirations. Ahmed would need weeks of fact-checking, if not months, to verify what he had said. Even Sandayọ did not know if what he had said was true. He hoped this foreign attention to detail would give him the time he needed to escape.
He had considered escaping without help. During the day, there were only three: Yẹmi, Oma, and himself. Overpowering them was not inconceivable but he was naturally averse to doing violence with his own hands.
Late at night he crouched in the kitchen, reading slowly through his contacts list, charging the phones if there was power, shielding their screens with his hands so no light would escape. They did not know of his phones. He was s
till guarded but Fineboy and Yẹmi had grown lax. They fell asleep on their watch, leaving him to puzzle over who to call. He would not call Gbenga, his son in America, a doctor with a white wife and three children. They had spoken a week ago. He had climbed to the top of the stairs where reception was best, talking softly. “Dad. Thank God it’s you. They’ve been calling me. They got my house number from a phone book.”
“Who?”
“Police from Nigeria. They keep asking if I know where you are.”
“What do you say?”
“Nothing. I drop the phone. They have no jurisdiction in the United States. It’s not true, is it?”
“Of course it’s a lie.”
“I knew it. I just want you to know that I, Ruth, and the kids are behind you.”
To what purpose? Of what use to him were his half-caste grandchildren who greeted him “Hi, Grandpa,” the few times he had passed through Tennessee to spend a night in their cavernous house? On Funkẹ’s insistence, he had sent their son abroad when he was nine, funneled millions of naira into an education that had turned the boy into a stranger, a stranger he was fond of, even proud of, and whom he would never let become entangled in this mess.
Far more practical to have raised a son like ẹgun, head of his bodyguard when he was a member of the Yoruba People’s Congress. Those had been heady days. When his name was on every government list, when death threats came in a steady stream. He remembered the democracy marches, protected by the safety of their numbers, steered away from danger by area boys who flung the exploding canisters of tear gas back at the soldiers, giving the rest of them time to escape. He had been so involved in the YPC. He had even fought with their leader, Francis, who had felt threatened by Sandayọ’s growing estimation in southwestern Nigeria.
He did not know now why it had been so important. To build a Yoruba nation, to make Oduduwa’s people great, to return the western region to its glory under Awolowo, their owl-spectacled deity, who stared down at them from the wall during every meeting. And after all their rhetoric and bombast it had come to this: who to call for help.
ẹgun was still in the bodyguard business. They spoke from time to time. Sandayọ did not like the idea of men with guns knowing the location of this flat; it would mean the end of its usefulness. Others like it could be built. The squatters would not come to any serious harm.
Welcome to Lagos Page 13
