Doing Dangerously Well (29 page)

“Oh,” he tutted dismissively. “That idiot! Nothing you tell me about him could shock me.”

“I, too, at first thought he was just a fool. But after I heard this information, I said, ‘No, Aminah, this is not an idiot. This is a madman!’” She sat back to watch Nzekwu’s reaction.

He sat as still as a lizard, eyes bulging, body rigid. “And?”

“He’s planning to …” She paused as if thinking better of it, then leaned forward in a confidential manner. “He’s planning to build the biggest dam in the world at Kainji.”

“Walahi!” He clapped his hands slowly, bowing his head. “The people will suffer-oh. The people will suffer!”

“There’s more.”

“Yes?” He became the lizard once more.

“To pay for it …” Aminah picked her nails, heightening the tension, “… he is selling the water rights to the Niger River, licences for the direct purchase of Nigerian water, and ownership of the Nigerian power supply.”

Nzekwu’s mouth opened. Flies entered. There was nothing that could be said.

Finally, he shook himself back to reality. “No. It’s not true.” He stood up and almost fell, reaching out to steady himself on the side of his desk like the greatest stage actor. “No, no, no, you’re crazy.”

“Here is a copy of the preliminary plans.” She slapped them on his desk.

He threw them on the floor. “No, no, no, you’re lying.” He raised his hands to the skies. “It’s not true-oh!” He turned to
Aminah, looking forlorn, lost. “Why are you lying to me? Wicked woman. Why are … ?” He rushed to the door and opened it. “Tunde! Monday!” he called. The two assistants rushed to his side. “Hold me back-oh! I’m going to strangle Kolo today! With my own hands, God forgive me.” He lunged out the door and the two had no trouble holding him in place by the gentlest of grips at his elbows.

“Ah-ah, sir!” they yelled. “Calm down! Calm down! He will kill you-oh!” Their faces betrayed little concern that their editor would follow through on his threats.

“Tunde! Go and bring a bat!”

“Sir! But—”

“Bring a bat and hit me. Yes,” he cried, “hit me! Strike me down!” He sank to the floor. He shook his head, weary. Then he perked up. “Does anyone else have this gist?” he asked Aminah.

“No, but—”

“It’s our story. We’ll pay you for this story.”

“That’s fine. But once you have published, I have to go to the other outlets.”

“Just give me twenty-four hours.”

As is the custom for affluent Nigerians, Kolo built a grand house in his home village far from its centre in order to name the road leading to it after himself. In the same locale, he also erected monuments celebrating its most famous son, and diverted funds from the national coffers to build a new school, a small airport, and sanitation facilities-all of which bore his name–but more was expected of him. Piles of papers lay in his in-tray. He flicked through them, disconsolate.

On a national level, vast feats of engineering, giant edifices, large-scale construction had been temporarily shelved after ministers insisted that additional financial aid be directed to flooded
areas for medical assistance, food, basic shelter, kickbacks and other ephemera. Therefore, he had focused on renaming key sites: the Chief Ogbe Kolo International Airport in Lagos, the Ogbe Kolo Highway in Abuja, the Alhaji Ogbe Kolo Waste Disposal Unit in Kaduna.

Despite these small successes, he had not achieved any major goal. Most importantly, his ultimate dream of building the biggest dam in the world had been slow to come to fruition. It had grown increasingly obvious to him that the Kolo River, rather than the Niger River, should flow from Nigeria’s north to its south, impeded only by the Chief Ogbe Kolo Dam at Kainji.

The intercom buzzed.

“Yes?” Kolo answered.

“Papers,” the new minister of information replied.

Kolo’s heart thumped. This was the worst meeting of his day.

“Bring,” he ordered.

A flash of lightning whitened out the entire room as the minister arrived. Almost a minute later, a crack of thunder rocked Kolo’s chair. He jumped up with a screech. It sounded like gunfire.

“Close the curtains!” he ordered, his voice many octaves higher than the majestic bass of his presidential speeches.

The minister of information strolled to the curtains, amusement etched on his aging face. “So, you are scared of a little lightning, sir?” he chuckled.

“Certainly not! I simply insist on a consistency of illumination, that is all.” Kolo resolved to replace this recently appointed advisor in the shortest possible time with a much weaker, slightly dim-witted confidant.

“How are you today, sir?” The minister bore down on Kolo in paternal enquiry.

“Very well indeed. And yourself?”

“In good health, glory be to Allah, of whose favours nobody is deprived.”

“Allah is most great,” Kolo said distractedly as he flicked through the newspapers. He tossed aside all those owned by his staunch supporter Ikene. He checked the
Popular Star’s
headlines. “Kolo’s Killer Idea!” Under a graphic design that perfectly depicted plans for the new Kainji Dam, a caption read: “No barrier to a torrent of greed.”

Blue fingers of panic tightened around Kolo’s heart. He read on.

His plans to rebuild Kainji, as well as the deal to sell water rights to TransAqua, were laid out in explicit, florid, though not necessarily accurate, detail. Activists-or, as the paper reported, “Nigeria’s true patriots”—were vowing to stop the plans “through any means necessary.”

He felt a stabbing pain in his arm. “Heart attack!” he called out. “Heart attack!”

As the minister chuckled again and wandered out to call some aides, Kolo checked his chest and could not feel his heart pumping. “My heart has stopped!”

An aide ran to check his pulse. “Your pulse is fine, sir.”

Kolo slapped him. “How can it be fine if I’m having a heart attack, you idiot?”

“Heart attack don finish, sir.”

“Get me some aspirin! And call the doctor!” After waving away his ashen aides, Kolo scrambled to lock the door behind them. He stumbled back to his desk, his blood racing around his body so fast that his heart pounded like a talking drum and the squeezed strings of his temples ached in a frenzied summons. He no longer knew who to trust or where his enemies hid-whether they passed him in the halls, sat with him at meetings or swept his floors.

He understood more than ever how his brother had felt as the water engulfed him, choking and alone. The sound of water behind the walls, rushing too quickly through pipes too narrow, assailed him.

“Who is behind all this? It can’t be happening all by itself.” He wheeled a velveteen chair around to face a portrait of himself in his presidential finery. “I need to get some infiltrators-but where do I start?”

He wrote a list of ten prominent activists and circled three. He arranged for a radio broadcast that evening. He offered one million naira for the capture of these anarchists who apparently wished the nation to live without the benefits of electricity.

The next day, Kolo greeted his new confidant, the ineffective and feeble minister for the environment, with a feeling of liberation. “How are you today, minister?”

“Dangerously well, sir,” the minister hee-hawed in reply. “Dangerously well.”

Such bombast irked Kolo but he quickly forgave the probable plagiarist. Like a talisman, the minister’s very presence presaged better times ahead as Kolo read more optimistic headlines with pleasure: “In deep water without President Power!” “Kolo: Nigerian power source!”

Some journalists, however, focused on the negative: “Activism bobs to the surface!” or, worse still, “Kolo’s presidency drowning!”

Many new members had joined Femi’s group in recent weeks, and most of the original members had now regained their sanity, filling the air with their usual jokes.

“Mamadou, why is your skin shining all the time? Bring my shades so I can sight you! You’re a human mirror-oh! Come here. Let me check my new hairstyle.”

“Allah pity you, why bother? You’re still bald.”

Only a few remained in a stupor. Femi’s great friend Ubaldous still shuffled around the hut with his stiff gait, bundles of grasses in his ears, talking to unknown enemies. It brought tears to Femi’s eyes. This man had once been one of the strongest advocates within their group, a lawyer with years of experience.

Igwe fed Ubaldous personally and, after doing so, sat at his usual spot, squeezed next to Femi. He leaned over him to grab some water, resting a hand on Femi’s thigh, causing gentle friction. Femi felt a rush of pleasure. His friend sipped slowly from a gourd. Femi concentrated on the sounds, hearing each tiny gulp as Igwe swallowed the liquid, watching his friend lick his bottom lip, his tongue sliding to catch each drop.

“I have to go tomorrow,” Femi whispered. “You know what I have to do.”

“Be careful. I’ll be waiting here for you.” Igwe quickly averted his eyes, though the worry etched on his face did not escape Femi.

Without hesitation, Femi pulled Igwe closer to him, unconcerned about how the others might interpret this intimacy. He put one arm around Igwe as they gazed at Ubaldous-a man still waiting for people who would never return.

The mirrored building that rose out of the southwest desert blazed in the summer sun, burning its presence on the retinas of those who set eyes upon it. Mary walked from her car towards her office, squinting behind her sunglasses. Hot breezes wafted past her, and tumbleweed-that ever-present symbol of the desert-flitted into the distance, with each blink farther away. She disliked its disarray and its freedoms. It reminded her of Barbara. Mary’s perfect bob flew in all directions. She tried to anchor it behind her ears.

After a long trek through the glass temple, Mary entered her
office and sat down, a bony knee jigging up and down. TransAqua’s confidence in her had waned. Disruption to the schedule through sabotage had lost them millions of dollars. She was near failure, and Cheeseman had questioned the wisdom of doing business with such a complex and unpredictable people.

A pile of newspapers lay neatly on Mary’s desk. As she read each one, she threw it straight into the recycling bin in order to preserve the environment-one of TransAqua’s top concerns. Kolo had assured her that the US media’s sympathy for the “activists” would change. Dotted among a few reports of anarchism from comic book hyper-conservatives, the media still backed the radicals in various ways: through interviews with ordinary farmers, pictures of devastation set right next to images of rich politicians and, most damaging of all in an image-conscious country, photographs of the handsome face of the “rebel leader,” Femi Jegede. Obviously, publishers had handed down specifications that editors had not quite carried out.

She felt the hollow of her stomach implode, punched with impending ruin. How had Jegede reached this level of prominence so rapidly? She had no idea how to persuade Cheeseman to keep her in on this deal. And at this rate, she thought, Kolo would want even more support from TransAqua–either a list of names for extermination or, worse still, financial assistance.

As she walked towards the boardroom, she found she could no longer camouflage herself; the transparency of the building, with its glass stairways and tensile handrails, only served to emphasize this fact. She tried to gain strength from the architecture, from its artifice: its play of power and light in a world ruled by secrets, its misrepresentation of space, the seeming fragility of its tough glass skin. All trickery. Well, she could play tricks too.

She adopted the paradigmatic garb of the non-entity. She could supply Kolo with names of her own choosing rather
than bother with Sinclair’s contacts. If he needed anything, she could delay or ignore his requests entirely, pretending they had been actioned. As for Femi Jegede, as usual, camouflage served as her best weapon. She could hire area boys, gangs of armed thugs, the most ruthless militia in any city-they would deal with Jegede. After all, she would only be asking them to do their day job.

She opened the boardroom door a sliver, just wide enough to slip into the room, and stole to her seat, far away from the ebullient Beano, the company charity case.

According to the blueprints, the territory to the north of the new dam construction would be flooded. So Femi worked this area, where farmers would be concerned about plans to extend Kainji Lake, their lands appropriated without compensation.

He came to some small farm holdings of circular mud houses, surrounded by towering sorghum and smaller rows of other vegetables. From a distance, the scene looked like a picture postcard of the rural beauty of a bygone era, yet any Nigerian knew that life on the farm teetered on the borderland of survival, with rats and cockroaches scurrying around in the darkness, hunting for scraps in the dust.

He heard a camera click in his mind and cursed the memory of Barbara.

The air was so thick with moisture that it was hard to gain enough oxygen. It was a demanding air whose moisture clung to his skin, creating an unseen weight that he had to carry as he pushed his way through it.

His irritation intensified with every step and Femi’s jaw ached from constant clenching.

“This woman has already shaved half an inch off my teeth,” he grumbled to himself. “Look at me-an action hero in a dashiki!
How is it possible that her terrorist self has thrown every last stick of dynamite in my hands when I repeatedly told her to go away?” He pondered, trying to work out a sequence of events, growing increasingly muddled, a sensation he often associated with thoughts of Barbara. “I thought I was leading this thing. But no. This grass-eating guerilla is actually leading me!”

Exhausted, he stopped to watch some women as they worked the land. They grunted out songs in time with the strokes of their hoes, though some looked sick-water in this region had been heavily contaminated. Other women, with tin cans on their heads, containers in their hands and babies on their backs, walked in haphazard lines on their endless journeys to Kainji Lake. Luckily Barbara had not seen them or she would adopt the same behaviour.

Kolo’s voice crackled through the radio.