Doing Dangerously Well

by Carole Enahoro

  “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.

  “Yaah!” the farmer said. “That Kolo na go kill all of us. He go finish this country patapata. Him and him Swiss bank account.”

  “Is his father not ashamed?” another woman asked.

  “You think his family know shame?” Femi interjected, his eyebrows rigid with astonishment. He waited for a rebuttal.

  The women stopped working, his dramatic outburst pinning them in place.

  A farmer clapped her hands. “His father with his gold under-pant, wiping his nyansh with gold toilet paper, sh
itting gold money?”

  “I beg!” Femi roared, as if in a courtroom. “Make him do jiggy-jiggy with Swiss bank manager. Him pikin be bank account.”

  Some of the women in the nearby fields barked with laughter, slapping each other on the back. However, amongst all this movement, Femi noticed one girl of gaunt features, standing immobile. She did not laugh, only scrutinized him with an intense concentration. He glanced at the rows of sorghum struggling to hold on to their healthy green rather than succumb to a flaccid brown. The colours shifted in erratic patches, a chaotic pattern reflecting the unpredictability of water supply. He could try to escape, running zigzags amid their soaring leaves, but the women would know the region better. So instead, he returned the woman’s gaze with a playful air. “Are you staring at me or,” Femi looked around, “have I entered the exact position where you were staring prior to my arrival?” Though in many ways he welcomed death, he wished to be the agent of his own departure, not the target of a murder.

  Her eyes did not blink. She continued to scrutinize him. Finally, she spoke. “Femi Jegede. You are Femi Jegede.”

  Femi waived this aside. “Nonsense. Jegede is always surrounded by his militia. What would I be doing here alone if I were such an important man? Ah-ah!”

  “We are poor people,” she continued as if she had not heard him. “Farmer no dey get money; we be poor people. We waka half day to go get water. Now Kolo come, he say make we pay for water. Police dey charge money. Now, no money for chop food.”

  “We no fit even collect rainwater,” another added, striking her hoe on the ground with a whack. “Or police dey come.”

  The emaciated loner spoke once more. “Why are you here?”

  He decided to trust the girl. “Em, well I work for the power company. You see power line?” Femi pointed to the far distance. “They go for dam. Me, I go quench power line, jus’ for small-small time.”

  The large woman grabbed his arm in alarm.

  “No!” The young woman’s voice stayed steady. “You no go touch power line!”

  The other women thrust him to the ground, surrounding him so that little light was visible above his head, machetes in their hands. In this tight circle of emotion, heat and rage, the girl spoke. “Show us power line. We don quench am for you. Let your mother rest in peace-now! You be Femi Jegede. I know you. We don wait for you long, long time.”

  One woman ran for palm wine, while another returned with gari and stew. “Ah-ah,” another woman yelled, hovering over him. “Look at you. You need woman to feed your belle! Woman no go marry oga wey thin like palm leaf. Come chop food.”

  Femi sat like a child in the middle of this circle of human compassion, and tears softened the contours of his vision. He detected the fury he felt reflected in the eyes of others. This small act, this emotional transfer, allowed his anger to float away, taken by the heavy air and deposited in the breasts of the land’s mothers-mothers, he knew, who would fight with the strength and cunning of tigers to protect what little they possessed.

  And so as news of Femi’s presence in the area spread, the local farmers destroyed infrastructure crucial to dam development. When questioned by the police, they adopted a mien of shock and dismay that such violence could have been perpetrated so close to their property. They screamed for husbands and sons, slapped them in front of police, furiously demanding to know if they had been involved in such wanton sabotage of public property.

  Likenesses of Femi’s mother and grandmother circulated in the region, even in those households struck by water blindness.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Face of Gold

  Although the Dam Division had deployed key staff to Kainji, surrounding themselves with a preponderance of American construction crews, Beano suggested that he assume the mundane task of visiting the area, chiefly as a courtesy, in Sinclair’s stead. Dam Div could be unusually sensitive when TransAqua put their lives at stake.

  At Kainji, the project had fallen behind schedule as expected, but Beano’s dimples managed to secure a loyalty that Sinclair’s dazzling width of teeth and Glass’s linear slash could never have achieved. He stood with a project manager in a Portakabin, watching an artillery of rain smash down to earth, pummelling the ground so hard that stones pinged and flipped.

  “Wow! It really pours down here, huh?” Beano shouted over the rain’s booming.

  “No protection against it, sir,” the man shouted back through the dank air. “Wish they’d invent an umbrella made out of Kevlar.”

  Beano released a ripple oflaughter. “Project going well despite?”

  “Yes, sir. We’ve had to build infrastructural support-roads, bridges, you name it-and fly in all the equipment.” He wiped the sweat from his face and forearms. “Some shipped in, of course.”

  Beano flashed a bashful glance of adulation at this item of burly masculinity. The project manager might find it unsettling, Beano knew, but he would also appreciate the acknowledgement that only the tough could survive Nigeria’s rigours.

  “Any problems from saboteurs?”

  The man’s chest puffed out. “Nothing we can’t handle, sir.”

  His fingernails shredded to non-existence with the anxiety wrought by three months of indiscriminate destruction in areas north of Kainji Dam, Kolo once more called for the newspapers. He had moved his desk behind a pillar that separated two large windows, in order to hide from potential snipers. To reinforce his authority, however, he also ordered that his portrait hang behind him, even though its frame jutted out slightly into the window casings.

  The minister for the environment entered. Although the man was one of the least powerful ministers in government, Kolo enjoyed his confidant’s company, if only to assure himself of his own worth-a particular humiliation inadvertently meted out to his hidden opponent.

  “Good morning, Mr. President. How are you, sir?” The minister’s manner seemed skittish.

  “Well as can be, under the circumstances. And yourself?”

  “Dangerously well, sir,” he smiled at this phrase. “Dangerously well.”

  Kolo jerked up at the faint echo of a similar phrase, but he quickly discounted such trifles and furrowed back down into his despair.

  “The news is not good. What has this country come to?” The minister bowed and handed Kolo the papers with trembling hands. “Explosions everywhere. No one knows where Jegede will strike next. We cannot find where his militia is based.”

  Kolo waved for the minister to sit down.

  “You need to increase your protection. I can organize greater security for you,” the minister said.

  Kolo slumped in his chair, gave an absent-minded nod and scanned the headlines: “Opposition to the Dam Grows.” Under a picture of broken power lines, the caption “Power to the people.”

  His heart began its erratic drumming once more, beating messages of warning. “Who can believe it?” he demanded. “In a country that has fought unification since the day Europe carved it up, suddenly all these competing mishmashed people are uniting?” His threw the papers on the table. “What the hell is going wrong?”

  “I myself cannot understand,” the minister responded. “It is a calamity of monstrous proportions.” He drew out a long, laborious tsk.

  “And who is this Jegede? What makes him so special?”

  The minister had no answer.

  “Here I have been trying to encourage government to work together my entire adult life and they can’t agree even on one point of policy-not a single policy! Meanwhile, within a few months, this nincompoop with no effort or background whatsoever has drawn together every flotsam and jetsam of society!”

  Frantic to annihilate any whiff of heroism that might attach to another human being, Kolo scrambled to deal with the situation. He waved away his minister and called Mary Glass at TransAqua. He pictured her as a beautiful woman, large, with huge breasts and an extensive backside, even though he knew she looked more like a strand of barbed wire.

  “Mary Glass, TransA
qua.”

  “Hello, Ms. Glass. President Kolo speaking. Do you have a minute?” He knew she would make one, or he would not have asked the question.

  “Yes, sir. Just a moment, I’ll get a pad and pen.”

  This was what he liked about her: efficient, ambitious, conversations pared down to their bare essentials.

  “Yes, sir?”

  “I am calling about the situation at Kainji.” He opened his box of Quality Street and started feeling for a strawberry centre. None left-he must have finished them. He opted for hazelnut caramel. “I will be instituting a state of emergency.” The caramel slid smoothly down his tongue, tickling his throat. “The US ambassador has suggested that TransAqua deploy its own security forces to protect its interests.”

  “Our own security forces? Like a private army?”

  She had no idea, he thought. Of course it would be a private army.

  “Certainly not!” he replied with indignation. “My dear Ms. Glass, that would be illegal. I’m referring to security forces to accompany your personnel and protect your infrastructure. The Nigerian Army is, of course, at your disposal. Many of them freelance after their shift. You may wish to contact your oil companies in the region for more information on structure and pricing. The embassy here could arrange recruitment for you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  She really was as green as an unripe banana. And once matured, who knew? He enjoyed doing business with her. He found it so easy to motivate her, unlike dealing with his countrymen.

  They signed off. He took his phone off the hook for a couple of minutes of quiet reflection. Surely the experts from the West would capture the madman at the helm of this disruption, put the entire situation to rest and allow Kolo to resume his role.

  He swivelled around to look at the trees, now being blown by the wind.

  Kolo’s car pulled up to the American embassy, accidentally splashing the Marine guards with mud. He took an air-conditioned elevator to the ambassador’s office.