A Squatter's Tale, page 11
With only one day left of Sawa’s one-week ultimatum, I reminded Philip that our time was almost up. There was nothing to worry about, Philip said; he would handle Sawa. It was the most confident I’d seen him in a very long while, and I allowed myself to grow a little reed of hope: that maybe Philip would dip into those BTF investments which he had kept to himself so far and pay Sawa his money or at least a good part of it.
On the appointed day I came to the office early. Sawa called at eight a.m. to say he would be there by ten. By nine Philip was not yet around. I called his house, the phone kept ringing, no one answered. I figured he was out of his house and on his way to the office. But Philip was still not in by nine-fifteen, nor by nine-twenty, nor by nine-twenty-five. Panic seized hold of me by nine-forty. The last thing I wanted was to have to face Sawa and his armed policemen alone. Asking Yemisi to come along, I set out for Philip’s place. Before we left I asked Mrs Ofulue to call Sawa and tell him that Philip had not come in and I had gone to search for him.
The sound of the doorbell travelled again and again all over Philip’s house, a big two-storey building ringed by trees in the snug, upper-middle-class Alaka Estate, and returned to us empty-handed. An unthinkable thought, which I had refused to allow into my mind on the drive from the office, now took front seat—that, like many other MDs of distressed finance companies and banks, Philip might have absconded.
I tried the door and it opened into the living room, which was empty except for a few old yellowed newspapers and strips of twine. My heart shuddered like a light aeroplane encountering severe turbulence. Yemisi and I wandered around the house like lost sheep. We walked into the master bedroom where Philip had left behind an unopened packet of condoms on the floor and an old YSL T-shirt. In the bathroom empty cologne bottles and cans of shaving foam and bottles of shampoo and conditioning lotion were scattered all over the ceramic floor. In the kitchen there was a stack of dirty dishes in the brand-new light blue sink and two empty bottles of Hennessy on the floor. Four tall plastic dustbins were piled high with old papers and more empty bottles and cans. Had he moved his things out gradually, or had he done it in one go, maybe the night before? I wondered. When had he started planning to go? Where had he gone to? England? The States? South America?
‘What are we going to do?’ Yemisi asked.
I didn’t have any answers. The phone, which was lying in a corner of the living room, still had a dialling tone, and I called Mrs Ofulue and gave her the news in a flat voice. She began to gasp, as though she had suddenly become asthmatic, and I asked her to close up the office and to remain at home till I sent a message to her. I dropped Yemisi at her place and I went home.
*
Sawa and his five armed policemen grabbed me from my house three days after Philip had fled, while I was still wondering when to get in touch with him and what to tell him. Fortunately my parents were at work and did not see me being pushed into the back of a new grey GM pick-up truck which bore the logo of one of Sawa’s companies. The sergeant with the skin-diseased face got into the cab with the driver, the others piled into the back with me, and we took off with Sawa’s Mercedes trailing us. People, among whom I recognised a few faces from the neighbourhood, gaped at me from the surrounding streets, gaped with their mouths and noses wide open. We were soon out of the quiet streets around my house and in the full glare of the crowds on Murtala Muhammed Way, and the crawling, bad-tempered mid-morning traffic. While caught up in traffic, I had often seen people in the back of police vans; some I had observed laughing and chatting with their captors, waving their handcuffs about gaily; others had stared morosely into space, miserable and bitter. I lowered my head and examined the floor of the van, trying to hide my face without making it obvious. The ride to the police station at Alagbon stretched through several millennia.
It was my first visit to a police station. The scurrying about and whispering and the disorder and squalor around and inside the old unkempt colonial-era bungalow, the huddle of victims in various stages of misery and resignation and the horrible, pervasive smell of faeces and urine, suggested that this was not a place where wrongs were righted but one in which they were multiplied and then multiplied again. The inspector in charge of my case was called Philibus. He was a short man with a wide, tough muscular body like a tightly packed bag of yams. But his face was not tough at all; it broke easily into smiles—a face of genial corruption. When we got into the station, the sergeant in the lead, I and the other four behind him, with Sawa bringing up the rear, Philibus abruptly dismissed a small crowd of arguing and pleading supplicants standing in front of him and led us to his office off a filthy passage. He had a jerky walk as though an invisible person behind him prodded him in the back to move him on. He carried a sheaf of files rolled into a pipe under his left arm.
Sawa, in a huge, billowing mauve babanriga, launched into his usual tirade about how Philip and I had defrauded him.
‘Now their plan is that the other one will run away and go and keep the money in their bank account abroad and after, this one, this thief, will go and get his share,’ Sawa said. ‘I made big mistake of being good to this people, I suppose to arrest them the other time, but I am just too kind.’
Philibus and the others commiserated with Sawa, cursed all the finance company thieves who had stolen hard-working people’s money to buy new suits and flashy cars and promised him that everything would be done to teach me a lesson I’d never forget. But as soon as Sawa and his mighty babanriga disappeared from sight, the policemen began to abuse him in unison: ‘Thief, bastard, greedy man, dirty mouth,’ they called him, ‘you steal our money with your army friends and go and put in finance house to make hundred per cent profit. You don’t know that God is watching you, that He knows the bad things you did to get that money, that it is God that is punishing you now by making the money run away. Idiot, useless man, bastard, you come here to give us order with your dirty mouth smelling like gutter as if we are your houseboy.’
Philibus, beaming like a fluorescent bulb, then offered me a deal. Upon payment of a lump sum fee of ten thousand naira, I would be allowed to go home and thereafter report to the station five days a week, a few hours each day. In the meantime, he would give Sawa the impression that I was being held in the station. If I didn’t have any money on me, he would send one of his people with me to collect it. If I declined the offer, he would regretfully have to put me in a cell, which, as he put it, was ‘not a good place at all’. I wasted no time in accepting the offer.
*
We hung around the station all day, those MDs and managers of failed banks and finance companies who had not fled abroad, with murderers, armed robbers and con men. We watched Philibus come and go, tightly packed but highly mobile, cutting deals, smiling all day long, the roll of files always under his left arm. Some among us still clung to their designer suits and carried themselves with a full measure of corporate self-importance; others, like me, wore faded jeans, crumpled shirts and old sandals. Some made plans for the future, reminisced about old triumphs; I and many others listened wearily and said very little. Around the station the smells of various designer eaux-de-toilette combined with the police station’s smell of old faeces and urine to produce a horribly repellent odour. It was as if two of the worst kinds of putrefaction in the nation had joined forces, which in a sense was true, for behind the veneer of fashionable suits and the spouting of fashionable finance industry words (like ‘arbitraging’, ‘intermediation’, etc.), our class of young and not-so-young bankers (and probably my entire generation of Nigerians) harboured a monstrous, vicious corruption and greed that matched and perhaps even exceeded the age old corruption of the police.
It is the kind of greed that builds nations, builds what mankind sometimes calls civilisations, and we all agreed, as we lolled about the station aimlessly, that we had possessed enough greed among us to transform our country, to make it nearly as ‘civilised’ as the wealthy nations of the world. But it was a greed that had turned inwards, like acid biting the walls of an empty stomach, because there had been too much greed prowling about and hardly any worthwhile controls. Unharnessed, that greed had gone berserk, had eaten up all the integrity in the financial system of which we’d lately been a part and earned us a multitude of enemies baying for our blood like wild dogs.
Sawa came to the station two or three times a week to make sure I was still being kept in custody. Once I overheard Philibus telling him about the ‘thorough investigations’ being made into the case, the ‘serious interrogation’ I was undergoing. Sawa nodded his big head with satisfaction and his pea-like eyes lit up sadistically. It took a lot of effort to restrain myself from bursting into laughter.
Idejo, a plump, slow, unkempt fellow with a loud, raucous voice, was the most notorious member of our group. He had been MD of one of the flashiest finance companies, called something like Hibiscus or Jacaranda or Magnolia. All his marketing officers had been very light-skinned women, shapely and gorgeously dressed, and at one time he had employed ten of them. Before he fell he had been offering interest at ten per cent a month (BTF never went above sixty per cent per annum) and had accumulated deposits of more than two hundred million. The police had seized sixteen top of the range cars from his place—Mercedes Benzes, BMWs and Lexuses—and he boasted that the fleet at his London home was even more impressive. He had taken down with him more than twenty other finance companies and five merchant banks.
One day, about three weeks after Sawa had arrested me, Idejo, who was being vilified in the press as the Lucifer of the financial industry, the avaricious, ruthless, heartless destroyer of the Nigerian financial system, walked on to a plane at Murtala Muhammed International Airport and flew away into exile. The news came to us through an agitated man of about forty, with the stomach of a heavily pregnant woman, the MD of one of the hapless finance companies who had fallen victim to Idejo. This man came into the station, breathless, at nine a.m. to report to Philibus that he had heard from a friend that someone who looked like Idejo had boarded a Swissair flight the night before. In reply, Philibus told him that Idejo had not committed any crime and was free to go anywhere he wished like any other citizen.
‘I will quote for you the exact section of the criminal code which says that any matter of business arrangement is a civil matter not a criminal offence,’ Philibus said to the MD in an uncharacteristically harsh voice.
‘But you told me you were holding his passport,’ the poor man said. ‘Don’t you have a conscience? How can you talk to me like this after all the money you took from me?’
‘Who did you give money to?’ Philibus demanded fiercely. ‘If you are not careful, I will arrest you for making false accusations. Go and ask people. I don’t fear anybody.’
The executive walked out of the station with a painful limp as though the bad news had hit him in the leg like a bullet. About five of us had listened to this exchange, standing along the passage outside Philibus’s office. A few minutes later the inspector strutted past us triumphantly, even more muscular than usual. His fellows near the counter, who had also eavesdropped, congratulated him with smiles.
‘Foolish man,’ Philibus said, ‘imagine him coming here to tell lies against me, that he gave me money, coming here to show me nonsense second-hand coat and ashawo perfume. I did not want to disgrace him, but he was the one that brought the disgrace on himself. You give money to somebody, the person invest the money, the money is lost, what is the criminal offence there?’
‘Don’t mind them,’ said one corporal, ‘they are all tief.’
The policemen laughed with a lot of joy: they had triumphed over a member of the annoyingly affluent class who owned nice cars, suits and perfumes.
‘Let him report me anywhere,’ Philibus said. ‘I can defend myself any time they call me. It is not a criminal offence.’
There were no stable categories in that world: legality and illegality mingled freely, as did cruelty and farce. If you paid a high enough bribe, a civil matter would become a criminal offence; if your victim paid a high enough bribe, the criminal offence would become, once again, a civil matter—like a seesaw.
After one more month, Sawa finally lost all interest in Philibus’s circular burlesque of thorough investigations and serious interrogation. The police had handed over to him my official Nissan Sunny, which they’d seized from my house, and had let him carry away all the equipment in BTF’s office. After that he no longer came to the station. Philibus offered ‘to close my case file’ for a fee of ten thousand naira. Having acquired some experience in police station culture during the preceding weeks, I counter-offered one thousand.
‘I cannot believe you are arguing with me over money after everything I have done for you,’ Philibus said, looking pained.
But it was all part of the ritual, and after we had haggled for a while and settled on four thousand, Philibus threw me one of his fluorescent bulb smiles.
‘We don’t pray for trouble in this world,’ he said, ‘but the country is too bad now, and if you have any police problem anywhere, come and look for me and I will see if I can assist.’
‘I will always remember that,’ I said.
*
For a few months I suffered from the illusion that I could put my bone-splintering fall behind me and resume my interrupted life of upward mobility, though I accepted that it would probably have to be at a reduced speed. I called up colleagues who had not been claimed by the crash and asked them to let me know if they heard of any job openings. I dry cleaned my designer suits and drove into central Lagos on most working days, and though I no longer had a gleaming Nissan Sunny and had to make do with my father’s Peugeot 504, I still thought I cut a fine figure.
At my first job interview I came upon a buzzing sea of young men in ageing undersized suits and young women in fallen-apart formal attire, penned into the cavernous auditorium of the Law School—more than six hundred of them—for an aptitude test of four parts. That was only the first step in a tortuous process to fill two entry level positions for university graduates in a merchant bank. I walked back to my car and drove away, saying to myself that to bring six hundred people together to compete for two jobs was heartless. A friend who worked for an American-owned management consulting firm said his firm couldn’t hire me because I had a second-class lower degree and the minimum they took was a second-class upper, but that if I went to the University of Lagos and got an MBA, he would get me into the firm. Two more years back in school, lectures, exams and all that, for a job that would pay at most seven thousand naira a month (less than two hundred dollars at that time, less than ninety as I write in the autumn of 1995), about a tenth of what I had made in some good months at BTF. I didn’t give the idea a second thought.
That offer of a job two years and an MBA away was, however, the only one I got. The already depressed state of the banks was worsened by a new military government—the third government we had in that unforgettable year—which, afflicted with economic illiteracy among many other serious illnesses, fixed the interest rate on deposits, by decree, at fifteen per cent. Inflation at the time, even by the extremely conservative estimates of the Central Bank, was above fifty per cent, and in a matter of days the government had succeeded in wiping out what little business was left to financial institutions. My mother, scared of my growing desperation, offered to lend me money to start a small business of my own, but I knew I wasn’t cut out for tramping around Lagos begging for orders; buying and selling was even more horrifying. And so, like a cube of sugar, the illusion that I would soon be back on my feet dissolved.
By brutal coincidence, my father’s civil service career of more than thirty years ended abruptly at about this time. The head of his ministry, freshly appointed by the latest government, had set up a panel of inquiry into a government company with a retired brigadier as chairman and my father as secretary. My father had been very impressed with the brigadier, had gushed about how trim he was, lean as an electric pole, one of the few soldiers around who looked like a soldier. The brigadier, my father said, woke up at five-thirty every day and jogged five kilometres, was one of the finest squash players in the country, had a reputation for honesty, was a straightforward, humble man. With his many years of experience in the civil service, my father knew that the first thing you did when you were asked to be part of a panel of inquiry was to find out the kind of conclusion the person setting up the panel wanted, and then go ahead to reach that conclusion. But the brigadier, who played squash better than anyone else in the country, who jogged five kilometres and was honest and straightforward and so on, affected my father’s head like marijuana. Instead of checking to see what the minister wanted, my father began to talk of digging for the truth. Warnings were whispered to my father by two people planted on the panel to ensure it made the right findings, but the warnings could not penetrate his narcotic haze. Led by the brigadier, he went on to write a report in elevated prose which praised the managing director of the government company for transforming it from a subvention black hole into a profitable concern—perhaps the first person to do so with a government company anywhere in the country in more than twenty years. What my father had foolishly failed to realise was that it was precisely because the company had made profits that the panel was being set up: to find the managing director guilty of all the crimes in this world and the next, to get him out of the way, and put in someone who would be less interested in making profits and more concerned with seeing that the relevant pockets were stashed and stashed until they burst. Whenever my father told the story afterwards he would repeat that point over and over again: ‘My crime was saying that an innocent man was innocent, that was my crime, that was why they threw me out,’ until an old man from our hometown who had come to commiserate with him retorted angrily, ‘Is there a little child in this country who does not know that a man is only innocent when those who hold power say he is innocent; if they say he is guilty, then every fool knows he is guilty. Is there any child who does not know that?’
