‘What time does he resume?’ I asked.
She dropped the seed between her fingers in the tray and sat up. ‘He hasn’t resumed office. None of the commissioners have resumed.’
‘It’s September,’ I said, disbelieving. Swearing in ceremonies had been held in May.
Her eyes asked me the question she was too polite to utter: Are you new here? She shrugged. The consultant hurried forward and began to make conversation, asking questions about who we could speak with.
‘Is this normal? Why is she peeling egusi in the office?’ I asked the consultant when we had exited the building.
‘This is good. You need to go to some states where they have full-blown kiosks,’ she said.
Eventually, we were pointed to a director’s office, who received our letter lamenting the underfunding of his department. On the ceiling above him, rotated a fan I’d last seen at the end of the ’90s.
In my hotel room, I called Mrs Aluko, unsure of the next step to take.
‘You didn’t tell me you were going this week, my dear. A state assembly man’s wife should not be running around like this,’ she reprimanded. ‘Anyways, since you’re already there, I’ll call the governor’s wife to see if she’s in town. You know she lives in the UK and only visits from time to time.’
35
Noble cause
Oh God of creation, direct our noble cause
Guide our leaders right
Help our youth the truth to know
To open and close the meeting, we bowed our heads as we mumbled the national prayer that served as the second stanza of the national anthem.
Political infighting within the party had erupted in the past weeks and emergency meetings were called from above to ensure calm.
The party had become the government and the government the party; two indissoluble elements such that we did not know where one began and the other ended. Power blocs had formed to take advantage and soon enough, the blocs had risen up against each other. This wasn’t the selfless service Soye had promised at the start of our journey.
‘It’s not even six months since the swearing-in and they’re already fighting over who will take over in 2023. Unserious people,’ Nzube said to Soye whilst the meeting was ongoing.
‘My brother, by the time we get to 2023, they will have finished sharing everything. Be alert, don’t be caught sleeping on a bicycle,’ Soye responded, rubbing his palms together as if in preparation for a fight.
They agreed to congregate at our house when the meeting was over.
‘Madam Adebowale is such a wonderful host,’ Nzube said – to my surprise – and their friends concurred. Soye beamed like he had been paid the compliment.
‘Hope we’re not imposing, madam?’ Yunusa asked, leaning towards me from the other side of Soye. His constant deference and effort to acknowledge my existence had endeared him to me over time, and amongst Soye’s friends, I considered him the most refined of the lot. Soye insisted Yunusa was infatuated with me, an incorrigible puppy love.
‘You’re the type of woman he would have married if he hadn’t gone ahead with the political marriage his father arranged,’ he blustered. And I could tell he wasn’t yet sure whether to be offended or flattered by Yunusa’s attention to his wife.
‘He’s just being polite. You know it’s possible for a man to be polite,’ I said.
In our larger living room, they agreed that tech was the new oil money. ‘These young boys are making so much so quickly. Just the other day, my friend’s nephew raised two million dollars for his fintech startup. Another young man sold his company for just over a hundred million dollars. Dollars o,’ Akamnachi was saying. He was from a major political family in the Southeast.
‘We have the local talent,’ Yunusa said, picking from the plate of small chops in front of him. ‘I was speaking to someone in the space and there are so many talented young men building the future of tech here, many foreign companies are even poaching them.’
‘How can we get in and take advantage?’ Nzube asked.
Soye laughed and said, ‘Ahn-ahn Nzube, government money is not enough for you?’
‘My brother, does one ever have enough money?’ Nzube returned. They all chuckled.
‘If you ask me, the government should stay out of it. They’ve been doing well without our interference,’ Yunusa said. ‘We can only flourish as a nation when the government starts sticking to the issues of governance and nothing else, the market will take care of itself.’
‘See Yunusa oppressing us with his Cambridge economics degree o,’ Akamnachi said, and they all laughed.
‘But what is wrong with the government trying to control things? Or trying to benefit from the success of companies?’ Danladi, a party member who happened to be visiting Lagos from Zamfara, asked. Soye always called him a money miss road, the type that had stumbled on wealth via government contracts and didn’t know how to comport himself.
‘The recent policies coming from the top aren’t helping the sector,’ Yunusa said. ‘If anything, they are making life difficult for the companies and discouraging investors. It’s why we’re ranked so low on the ease-of-doing-business scale.’
I thought of Ego and the several conversations we’d had about how the restrictive central bank policies were affecting Emeka’s startup enterprise. ‘We cannot keep innovating around incompetence,’ she would say. Then I’d nodded in agreement with her.
‘We should not use all these foreign scales to rate our performance; they’re biased against us,’ Akamnachi said, sipping from his whisky tumbler.
Yunusa relaxed in his seat and wiped at his lips with a napkin. ‘They might be biased against us, but we can still say the truth. We’ve carried our rent-seeking behaviour to the tech sector – this isn’t oil.’
‘Don’t be a hypocrite, Yunusa. We’ve all pocketed something at some point in time or the other,’ Nzube said.
‘Speak for yourself,’ Yunusa murmured, and the air crackled with challenge.
‘And if you haven’t, it’s because not all us are from old Northern money,’ Nzube retorted.
Danladi bit into a meat pie, the crust scattered on his lips like stardust. ‘Yunusa’s problem is that he’s read too much. He thinks this is England,’ he said.
