Fatboy and the Dancing Ladies

by Michael Holman

  They broke up, but not before a brief and inconclusive exchange about the difference between the per diems provided by the World Bank, the UN and their respective employers.

  Mullivant looked at his watch.

  “I’m off. Want to get a seat for the opening. Gather Hardwicke is in good form. Apparently his speech will shake up things in our business. Not before time . . .”

  The hot water system at the Hotel Milimani was not working.

  The room steward summoned by Pearson shrugged his shoulders.

  “It is World Bank, suh.”

  Much of Kuwisha, it seemed, was “World Bank”, thought Pearson.

  So why should the hot water system at the Milimani work when the state-owned electricity company operated well below capacity, and the railways did not run on time, and the primary schools overflowed with pupils? They were all “World Bank”, the term that in Kuwisha had become synonymous with nonperformance or inefficiency.

  He had a shave, did not spend long under the cold shower, welcome though it was to wash away the traces of prison, and decided he would walk to the office.

  The journey from the hotel to the Financial News office at Cambridge House took little more than fifteen minutes, and was safe enough during the day. Nevertheless, Pearson took off his watch, and put it in his briefcase, along with his wallet, and set off.

  It was a journey he enjoyed.

  Halfway down the hill, he bought a cob of sweet young maize, roasted over a charcoal brazier, and read the papers while having his shoes polished; and he fended off the good-natured efforts of the curio vendor to get him to buy one of the animal carvings on display.

  As he made his way along the boulevard into the city centre he felt that something had changed in the way he saw Africa. He had been held by the police for a short time, yet somehow the experience had both brought him closer to the country, and created a sense of detachment.

  No, “detachment” was not the right word. Perspective? That was it. He had acquired a sense of perspective. He was still thinking about this when he rounded the corner of Kaunda Street and went through the lobby of Cambridge House, the press centre for foreign hacks.

  Pearson had to remind himself that he had been away from his office – his former office – barely three days, yet Africa already seemed to be reclaiming its urban territory.

  The lobby was being retiled; a restaurant had just opened up on the floor above his office; and the drab grey building was getting its first coat of paint for years.

  The lift took him up to the third floor. Although the Gents toilet on the press-centre corridor was a good thirty yards away, the sweet-sour whiff from the combination of Jeyes Fluid and male urine climbed up his nostrils like a homing pigeon into its roost.

  For the first time, he took a close interest in the notice-board on the right as he went in. It had been something he had taken for granted before his arrest, seeing it as no more than a source of second-hand Land Rovers and other four-wheel drive vehicles, of radios and CD players, flat screen televisions, iPods and DVD players, all for sale by departing expatriates.

  Now Pearson read the ads differently, looked at them in a new light, paying more attention to accompanying notes, handwritten and typed, that were sprinkled between photos of TVs for sale, or houses for rent.

  The notes seemed like haikus on themes of loyalty and service. There was Anna, “a first rate nanny, loves children, references from BBC and VoA”; and Shilling, “a brilliant cook, loves catering, great references”; and “Blessing, hard working maid”; and Loveday, “excellent driver and first class mechanic”; not to mention a dozen “superb” gardeners and “reliable” askaris.

  For all of these citizens of Kuwisha, the departure of their employers was a cataclysmic event. Not even the promise – which often would be kept, at least for the first year and sometimes even longer – of help with school fees, or a parcel of old clothes, or settlement of medical bills, would ease their anxiety.

  But for the owners of the goods on sale, however, their departure was a financial bonanza, thanks to the sale of their stereos or their four-wheel drives, or TVs, at the market rate.

  As workers for foreign non-government organisations they were allowed to import their possessions, free of tax. And when the goods were sold, when the owners left Kuwisha, they were entitled to remit the proceeds, through the account of the aid organisation that employed them, at the official rate of exchange.

  It was a financial bonus, and in the views of the recipients, well deserved recognition of their commitment and dedication to the welfare of the people of Kuwisha.

  Pearson continued on his way down the passage to his office. Apart from the hardworking and conscientious correspondent for the Japanese news agency, no-one else was in.

  Some things didn’t change.

  28

  Podmore continued with his efforts to light a cigarette, hoping against hope that someone would come into his office in the drab barrack-like building that was the British High Commission.

  It took four matches. The first spluttered and then died before a flame could appear. The second broke off at the head. The third lit immediately, but the top of the match spun across his desk onto the office carpet, already pockmarked with tiny brown indentations.

  The fourth attempt was successful, though someone initiated in the behaviour of Kuwisha’s matches might have been fooled into flicking it away as another dud. An old hand like Podmore wasn’t deceived. The half second of apparent inactivity was accompanied by a barely audible fizzing and the match head burst into life.

  But it had been a damn close-run thing.

  Podmore reached into the desk drawer, and pulled out a well-used blue notebook marked “Political risk”.

  The correlation between an African country’s political and economic health, and the quality of its matches, had not struck him until he had attended a meeting of regional aid secretaries in Johannesburg. During his stay he noticed that the locally manufactured match lit first time, nine times out of ten. Comparing notes with colleagues from across the region, Podmore realised that he had stumbled across one of Africa’s laws: the worse shape a country was in, the more matches were needed to light a cigarette.

  Only South Africa met the one matchstick test. If two matchsticks were needed, there were grounds for concern; three indicated that decline was under way; while if it took four attempts, matters were perilous. Five matchsticks and you were living in a failing state; six matchsticks, and the state of collapse was so advanced that locally made matches were unavailable and all matches were imported.

  Ever since that epiphanic insight, Podmore had kept a record of the outcome of attempts by him and by other smokers to light their cigarettes using local matches, which he meticulously inscribed in the notebook.

  He checked his entries. For the third successive month, Kuwisha had been a four-matchstick country. “So much for those who think this country is turning the corner,” he muttered.

  Podmore’s spirits rose. He would present his findings at the next session of the European Union delegation’s economic appraisal unit.

  He returned the notebook to the drawer.

  It was not, he told himself, that he disliked Pearson. Or at least, he claimed to dislike him no more than he disliked any hack. But when pressed hard by colleagues he would confess a particular animus against the FN’s Africa correspondent. “He is a bloody know-all, and cynical to boot, one of those buggers who turn native – and don’t realise that the natives cannot stand them.”

  And there was a personal element in Podmore’s relations with Pearson. The “little shit”, as he now called him, had jotted down Podmore’s rules of Africa, ten in all, which had been pinned to the notice-board in his office. And then – “Can you believe it?” Podmore had asked his wife, “He turned them into a piece for the Weekend FN. The little shit!”

  He took a long pull of his cigarette, and lifted the UK press summary for the last twenty-four hours from h
is in-tray. The Clarion’s story had been highlighted by his secretary, with the word “Visa” scribbled opposite the paper’s announcement that it would sponsor a street boy from Kireba. He was about to ring the consular section when the new First Secretary (Political) put his head round the door.

  “High Commissioner is asking you to look in – she wants to be brought up to speed on the Clarion story . . .”

  His nostrils flared as he sniffed the air.

  Here it comes, thought Podmore, here it comes.

  “Thought there was a no-smoking policy . . .”

  Gotcha! Podmore looked at his colleague with barely concealed smugness. He pulled the notebook out of the drawer and waved it triumphantly in the air.

  “Research, old boy, research.”

  The door closed.

  “Tosser,” said Podmore.

  The day was looking up.

  “Off to Harrods,” he called out to his secretary. “If Pearson rings, tell him I’m tied up, meetings, all day. And give Lazarus Mpofu in foreign affairs a call – remind him I need a travel document for a 14-year-old Kuwishan . . . chop chop.”

  29

  World Bank president Hardwick Hardwicke was a great believer in making promises, even though experience had shown him there were usually more good reasons to break them than to keep them. But on his last visit to Kuwisha, he had made a promise to himself that he was determined to keep.

  Never again would he allow himself to be in a position where he could be managed and manipulated by President Nduka. Were it not for his own shrewd understanding of what made the country tick, of its strengths and weaknesses, its promise and potential, his first visit could have been an embarrassing failure.

  In his original schedule, the leader of the world’s most important development agency had been due to call in at Kuwisha for a second visit, en route to Washington after a three-day visit to Ethiopia. And when the invitation had come to make the opening address at the annual meeting of aid donors, it had been accepted with enthusiasm.

  It was his spin doctor, Jim “Fingers” Adams, who had come up with a suggestion that was simple and effective.

  “You’re not getting any younger,” Fingers had said. “Everyone knows you have a dicky ticker. So let’s put out the story that you had a nasty spell in Addis, and the quack told you to go straight home, rather than return via Kuwisha.

  “The rest is easy. We’ll put you in a wheel chair, to convince any doubters. I’ll do a decent speech; you can deliver it live on a video link, and Bob’s your uncle.”

  Pearson, who had arrived just in time for the official opening, sat along with local reporters, most of whom were taking the chance to have a square meal at somebody else’s expense.

  He looked around for other foreign journalists but there were none to be seen. Pearson felt disappointed. He had decided that the best line to take on his troubles should be dominated by a magnanimous and modest response, in which he appeared to dislike publicity.

  He had gone so far as to scribble a few lines in his notebook. Just in case . . . Meanwhile he looked forward to writing a story which would certainly appeal to the Financial News.

  Lights in the conference hall dimmed, and a single beam focused on a huge screen which dominated the stage. From his Washington office, President Hardwick Hardwicke was about to address the delegates. The video link established, the camera homed in on the wheel chair, opening up to show Hardwicke, clenching his teeth to accentuate his jaw line, as Fingers had suggested.

  Delegates gave a low murmur of sympathy, which was the cue for Hardwicke to start.

  He began by saying how sorry he was not to be there in the flesh; and how much he missed the opportunity to learn from President Nduka, the Ngwazi, whose experience of the highest office never broke his contact with the people.

  Pearson smirked. The coded reference to corruption would be missed by most. But by World Bank standards, Hardwicke was being pretty outspoken.

  Pearson particularly liked the “never broke his contract with the people” – a Fingers line if ever there was one. He translated it silently: “The president has his finger in every commercial pie there, and never misses a chance to milk the country.”

  Then, as Hardwicke got into his address, Pearson began taking notes: “Being in this contraption,” Hardwicke was saying, “gives a bloke time to think. But I did not need much time to realise that when my mates see me sitting in it, they feel sorry for me. I tell them why I am in this wheel chair, and were it not for this dicky heart I’d be with you in Kuwisha.”

  He paused, giving the assembled delegates time to applaud.

  “The problem about the chair . . . it seems to attract more comment than my heart. As I say, when my mates at home saw me sitting in the chair, they could not take their eyes off it. Yeah, they said all the right things – sorry as hell, and so on – but they kept looking at this bloody wheel chair. Distracted by it. Got me thinking. About words, and aid and wheel chairs. And then I realised the mistake. Why call this a wheel chair?”

  He took a sip from the glass of water Fingers had provided. “I ask you. Seriously. Why call it a wheel chair? Very demoralising word is wheel chair, got a defeatist ring to it, if you ask me.”

  Delegates shuffled their feet. What was he on about? A rumour that Hardwicke had suffered a stroke which was far more serious than he had let on, and which had left him more damaged than he cared to admit, began to seem all too credible.

  “All this talk of wheel chairs,” he continued, “it did my morale no good. So I sat thinking. Why call it a wheel chair? And I answered my own question. I do not sit in a wheel chair. No sir! I do not sit in a wheel chair. No sir!”

  He spun the chair round in a pirouette which he had been practising for the best part of the morning, and faced the audience again, 16,000 miles away from the bank’s headquarters in Washington.

  With voice lowered to a near whisper, he said again: “I – do – not – sit – in – a – wheel chair.”

  Delegates looked at their feet. Had the poor man completely lost it?

  Hardwicke paused, and then, with a voice so loud it made several delegates jump, he declared: “That is defeatist talk. The fact is, I enjoy enhanced mobility in a seated position! Enhanced mobility in a seated position.”

  Delegates stood as one to applaud the man and his indomitable spirit.

  Hardwicke raised and lowered his hands unconsciously mimicking the gesture President Nduka used to restore order at party rallies, when gratitude for his leadership threatened to get out of hand.

  The applause subsided.

  “The point I want to make,” said Hardwicke, “is that words shape our reality. And some words distort it.”

  In a few succinct sentences Hardwicke went to the core of the issue that, he argued, had limited the effectiveness of the World Bank in Africa.

  Aid itself – or rather, the use of the word ‘aid’, he had come to realise, was at the heart of the problem.

  “Language shapes reality, and reality shapes our language,” Hardwicke told the conference. “Poverty in Africa,” he went on, “does not give us the right to impose Western solutions. Poverty is a problem that can be solved. We should consider the implications of the language we use. ‘Poverty alleviation’ and ‘the poor’ are terms that are loaded with meaning and heavy with historical baggage.”

  Representatives from the twenty United Nations agencies based in East Africa listened intently, together with the leaders of the heavyweight private agencies – WorldFeed, Oxfam, Christians Concerned for Africa, Save the Children, and AidConcern. Even the all-powerful state-funded donors – UKAID, Noraid, and USAID – had sent some of their most senior executives, having been warned that Hardwicke was going to deliver what Fingers called “a corker”.

  “Let me give you an example of what I mean.” He wiped his brow, and continued. “Words can cripple as well as liberate. Words and phrases like ‘structural adjustment’; ‘enhanced concessionary lending facil
ities’; ‘low interest loans’; ‘conditionality’; and the word ‘aid’ itself.”

  His voice took on a tone of evangelistic fervour.

  “Aid – a simple word, made up of three letters. Sometimes I think ‘A’ stands for Africa; ‘I’ is for Indigent, and ‘D’ for Dependent.”

  A ripple of amusement ran through the audience, and there was a brief outbreak of clapping from where the Scandinavians were sitting.

  “‘Aid’ – a word that above all other has distorted our thinking; ‘aid’, the word that has distorted and contorted our relationships.”

  For years, he reminded his rapt and attentive audience, nongovernmental organisations, civil society, lobbyists, pressure groups, pop stars and economists, all had called for faster, more radical, quick-delivered support to countries in Africa that had failed to realise their potential.

  “There are many explanations as to why aid has not transformed Africa, recipient of billions of dollars. But we have overlooked the most obvious explanation, my friends.

  “There is a word that has become the development millstone of our time. That word is ‘aid’!

  “To use the word ‘aid’ is patronising,” said Hardwicke, “for it divides the world into givers and receivers, into lenders and borrowers.

  “ ‘Aid’ ” – he shook his head – “We at the bank must take our share of the blame. We used that word, ‘aid’, without consultation with stakeholders.

  “Mea bloody culpa, my friends, mea culpa.”

  This time the applause was prolonged, and the Scandinavians were on their feet, hooting their approval.

  “Ownership of the concept of ‘aid’,” he continued, “has been entirely in the hands of the Western agencies. Consequently,” said Hardwicke, wiping his now perspiring brow, “the word inhibits the reappraisal that is long overdue.

  “I urge you to reject this word if you believe, as I do, that it cripples the efforts to redress the biggest development deficit of our time,” he declared.