Doing Dangerously Well (2 page)

“Sold? To who?” Amos kept staring at the riverbed.

“Sold to Kolo’s companies, of course.”

“What does he want with our water? How are we to bathe or drink? Even, how are we to plant seeds or fish?”

“You didn’t get gist about the sale?”

“Lagos rumour. Village complaints. Dry season. I thought that was all. Can any man believe a sight like this?”

Amos looked from the river to Gambo and then back to the river, as if refreshing his view might take away the terrible sight. Its banks were parched and cracked, littered with plastic bags, rusted mufflers and excrement. This place of idyll, where Amos and his brother, Femi, would scramble and giggle, jumping off ropes or tires tied to trees, somersaulting and water-bombing into the cool, playful water. This place of history and ancestry, where the local priests would hold rituals and ceremonies in honour of the spirits; this place of worship, where the evangelical churches would baptise their fervent newcomers; this place of passage and fruit, where boats and fishermen could ply their trade, was now nothing but a stinking vessel, witness to man’s defiance of nature and the basest evidence of his existence.

“Anyway,” Gambo cut into his reveries, “we have to pay.”

“Pay for what? Pay for water? Pay for our own water? For a loan? Yaaay! That President Mu’azu.”

“No, not the president. Kolo! White Mercedes-Benz himself. He told that idiot president that Nigeria needs another World Bank loan. Then the IMF said we have to pay for our own water as part of its restructure this and redevelopment that before we can get any loan or grant. While the president is talking to the World Bank, Kolo is already running to write up the contracts so his companies can receive the financing, buy our water and then sell it back to us.”

Amos was flabberwhelmed. “So Kolo is going to the World Bank for extra aid to buy water that we already have? Doesn’t that man already have enough money? How much can one man want?”

“Kolo?” Gambo cut in. “Greed can never quench for that man. He will just institute another National Frugality Year. Do you think he’s going to reach into his own pocket to finance his own ventures? His hand couldn’t even find his pocket. His hand has never seen the inside of that place. Never! He’s just living with his nice helicopter pad, wearing his gold agbada, driving his white Mercedes-Benz and his this and that.”

“Can you imagine?” Amos raised his voice a few notches. “The World Bank. Can you see how the World Bank’s hands will shake when they write the cheque to ‘Government of Nigeria’? They know they will never see the money again. They know it!”

“The oga writing the cheque, he knows he will never write another cheque again in life. That is his last day at the World Bank. What can he do? Joh, nothing. He can just take his pen and go. Finish.”

They walked past the river as quickly as they could.

“Don’t worry.” Amos’s voice filled with confidence. “Femi will go to Abuja to protest.” He smiled, a feeling of pride banishing his gloomy thoughts. Femi, his elder brother, could inspire confidence in the most hopeless of causes.

“He’s already on seat there.”

“What? About this small village?” Amos’s eyes twinkled with admiration. “Is he trying to kill us all? What’s the problem with him?” Fierce in defence of his idol, he waited for Gambo to contradict him.

“He won’t rest until the river is flowing. Even if he has to pump it back himself,” Gambo exclaimed, indignant.

“Femiiiii …” Amos chuckled and shook his head, smiling as he visualized the reaction of his parents. Femi the Activist. Femi, the bane of his village, who thought he had wasted his hard-won education on such fruitless quests. Although he had become one of Nigeria’s most prominent activists—a legend to other humanitarians—he had wasted his legal education on protecting others, rather than enriching himself and his clan. But to Amos, Femi was the man who would meet his death throwing off his blindfold, grinning like a lion eyeing an antelope.

They made their way past palm trees to a short road, at the end of which sat a small house. Initially white, it was like all other houses in these parts, covered almost entirely in the red sand whipped up by the wind. That fine silt seemed to creep into every corner of life—inside the leaves of every book, the holes of every transistor radio and the straws of every mat.

Amos could tell his parents were in—oblivious to the heat, goats were sitting on the car, so the hood must still be warm. He opened the back gate, making sure not to grip too tightly lest the rust crumble into splinters in his hand. Passing the smell of pepper soup, he rounded the house to the front steps and shouted his welcome through the open windows. His skin
prickled in excitement as he heard feet running.

As his anticipation reached its height, as the door opened, as Gambo turned to him with a smile of encouragement, as his mother’s kind eyes opened wide with surprise and her lips parted to mouth the word “Amos,” it happened.

First, the sound of the sky exploding, the ground quaking past its point of integrity, then, arching over them, a huge darkness. And finally, as high as the horizon of the human eye, a wall of water. Not a cleansing, sharing, pure water, but water of rage, of greed, of death.

Kainji had burst.

The water dammed up for over fifty years had exploded. It travelled, blundering at first and then with greater assurance and intent, smashing everything in its path, destroying lives within seconds. Almost half a million lives. Lives of texture and flavour, lives of promise and purpose, lives of caretakers and listeners, advice-givers and guides, scoundrels and thugs, emotional, volatile lives as well as lives of those most given to contemplation and quiet tenure. In one instant, all was gone. Amos, his parents, Gambo, Mama Tela, the market, the oranges, the village. All gone.

Waves punched through waves, the swells growing even more immense, throwing a monstrous night upon the landscape. The quaking ground exploded, flinging trees upwards like tiny twigs, leaving them spinning in the air before plunging back into the rushing currents. Houses and factories cartwheeled alongside them. Humans, too, shot up and out of the torrent, small specks spiralling in erratic arcs, and then flopped downwards like thousands of fish. Others, spared the indignity of such an end, were merely slammed into the surge, flattened and crushed. Everything in the water’s path was razed.

Once the turbines burst, the country was plunged into darkness.

The river stormed right down to the Niger Delta on the coast. News of the catastrophe surged into every village, each city, through words, through images, through touch. Nigerians went into deep mourning. The boisterous fell into silence. Those who walked stopped, swaying in place as if rocking their own cradles. Hands became numb to all sensations, unable to distinguish between one object and another. Eyes lost focus and vision turned inwards to the past. Some grieved over the death of family or friends. Others wept over the loss of homes, businesses or farms.

There were others, however, hidden like the sand in the darkest corners and crevices of Nigerian society, who felt not only grief but passion.

Loss can always be transformed into profit for those able to envision reconstruction. Indeed, the greater the calamity, the more seductive the prospects. Old arrangements are washed away and new opportunities surface. To direct the flow of such blessings, it takes not only a thirst for acquisitions but a certain gift for deal-making. And in areas of contract and negotiation, Chief Ogbe Kolo, minister for natural resources, was not just a master craftsman; he was the pre-eminent artist of Africa’s greatest nation.

U
naware of Kainji’s struggle to hold back the waters of the Niger, a group of concerned activists from around the country congregated in Abuja, the titular capital of Nigeria. This important but isolated hub had been placed in the alleged wilderness of the country’s geographical centre, an act that had made billionaires of many government ministers.

The group met in a crowded municipal conference room, trying to make headway with the issue of water provision in their hometowns. The heat lay heavy in the room, with one aging fan struggling to provide air for over two hundred bodies.

Femi Jegede sat in the middle of the room, listening as one person after another tried to explain to a particularly never-plussed official the absurdity of taking water and then selling it back to the communities that originally owned it. One woman, who had spoken with the sequential logic of an elementary schoolteacher, finally sat down in defeat.

Then Femi’s comrade Ubaldous, a robust and brilliant lawyer, took the floor for the fourth time. His voice sounded weary from debating. “Why should taxpayers subsidize big business in order to privatize our own water? We will be making these companies richer and ourselves poorer. We will not only pay higher taxes to support this initiative, but the cost of water will triple, so who will be able to afford your precious water?”

The official, wearing shoes with the backs trodden down so that the soles of his feet could be better aired, fidgeted in his chair poised on top of a small dais. He restated his position: “Em, it costs money to make good water.”

“But we cannot afford the water you’re selling us!”

“Em, the government is concerned that all Nigerians can drink good water.”

“Good water!” Ubaldous exploded. “How do you know it will be good water? Every disease you can think of sits in American water yet which idiot is going to try and sue a multinational?”

The official giggled. “They drink water from the tap, my friend.” He shook his head, as if speaking to an imbecile.

“And where do they get E. coli from?”

The official tilted his head in bewilderment. “What kind of cola?”

Ubaldous kissed his teeth for a good ten seconds. He attempted to compose himself, then inched his argument along at a more restrained pace. “The government will drain away all we have to sell to the highest bidder—and it is guaranteed,” he pointed at the official, “guaranteed that Nigeria will not be among that select group, my friend.” His hands trembled as he held on to the chair in front of him, a tactic he often used to evoke sympathy in a jury.

“How can you move water from one country to another?”
The official chuckled again, nodding with mirth into his crotch.

Ubaldous’s eyebrows shot into their highest position, unable to believe the man’s idiocy. He stumbled onto the person seated next to him to attract the official’s attention once more. His voice grew hoarse and cracked, sounding as if he had crossed a desert free of all liquid. “Water is traded already. Have you not read of environmental degradation?”

“No, no. That is global warming.”

The group issued a long groan. After an hour of circular debate, they had made no progress with this coconut-for-brain official. An irate and weary Ubaldous collapsed back down onto a wooden seat.

Femi Jegede stood up, scraping his chair so loudly that all eyes rotated to him. He waited in position for a few moments for the full effect of his presence to be felt. The official’s eyes turned to him and bulged. His left heel started to jiggle up and down.

Here was one of the great orators in Nigeria, who could make the ears and eyes of even his most radical opponents prick up like an antelope’s. Femi possessed wit and style, backed by strong legal training, and so could make pounded yam out of the most logical argument. Added to this, his exchanges had an air of theatricality to them, his greatest prop being his ever-present agbada—a voluminous tunic that expanded his physical presence and gave weight to his authority—though certainly no item was too minor to employ.

However, more than this, he had that one gift that makes even the listless adjust their clothing in anticipation. He was a beautiful man, with skin as soft as Guinness beer and gentle, transcendent eyes. All in all, he was a very qualitative guy.

Femi started as usual, slowly, shuffling papers in his hands. “Does a man whose house is on fire worry whether his floor is clean?” His eyebrows raised in question.

The official looked at him in total and unconditional incomprehension. Femi let the effect of these words sink in and then bob up again. Silence. He waited for an answer.

“Em …”

Femi continued, louder this time. “If our throats are on fire, can we afford to worry about whether the water is clean?” He turned to the other delegates, astonishment on his face. He hitched his agbada onto his shoulders.

They erupted in raucous response. “Of course not!” “We would be crazy!”

After some time, the official replied, “No man can quench his thirst with poison, sir.” Satisfaction was positioned on his face. He was barely heard above the din.

“Does a river flow with snake venom?” Femi roared. “Do we wash our faces with hornet poison? Are we drinking scorpion stings today? Does a river not flow with water?”

“It flows with water, of course, but this water is not clean.”

“Exactly. So, if a man does pee-pee in my beer, why should I have to pay for another bottle? It is not for me to pay! Is it not for the man with the bladder of a field mouse to come and pay me?”