The Not-So-Secret Lives of Nigerian Politicians

I stared at my boss’ gluttonous cheeks as he dictated his to-do list for the day, a litany of pointless tasks for an equally pointless man who did not deserve even the air in his lungs. He was the local government chairman for Kosoe Local Government and today was his courtesy visit to his constituency. Shayo and I, his personal assistants, sat with our legs to one side, squished together really to accommodate the fat man at the back of his government issued Prado Jeep. One large black hand, bedecked with gold rings lay on Shayo’s yellow, relatively bioluminescent thigh. She scribbled on the notepad trying her hardest not to visibly bristle. I had seen her stumble out of his office many late nights, disheveled, like a rat that had fallen in water and word on the street was that when he was tired of her, I would be next. I was just his type: baby face, thin waist, fat ass. Ha! I didn’t plan to work here that long.       

“Remind me,” he said. “I want to see Asiteyin on our way back from this place.”

“Yes sah!” We crooned.

We drove to the community borehole water project we had commissioned just one week before and watched the crowd of locals fetching water. There were a few children playing in the brown pool of water that collected around the taps. My Oga tucked a napkin in the open stitchery of his agbada. I wondered why they always bothered with the napkin when they wanted to feed. These politicians. Perhaps, these were vestigial sensibilities from a saner time. He opened the door and stepped out, the car jumping from the ground as the shock absorbers stretched, free of this weight. Oga was surprisingly fast for an obese man. He lunged and grabbed one of the children, who screamed in a mixture of surprise and horror. He was a thin boy, a snack really, and with one hand, Oga swept him up to his mouth and buried his teeth in the boy’s neck. There was an explosive pop as the artery burst under grinding incisors, a fountain of blood sprayed on the car window, and the boy went limp. People scattered, running this way and that, stumbling over buckets and pails and 25 liter kegs. Oga stood in a pool of water that was rapidly swirling red, the boy between his teeth like a rodent between the teeth of a cat. 

Only the boy’s mother remained, too stunned at first to speak and then her shock wore off and a heart rending scream tore out of her mouth. Oga stared at her with red rimmed eyes but continued to eat, tearing reams of flesh and sinew from bone and wolfing it down. In the distance, people gathered, arms folded across their chests, they shook their heads, murmuring: At least it’s just a local government chairman. What if it was a senator? Thank God for little mercies.  

When he had had his fill, our boss was back in the car with his quarry, the shock absorbers flattening under his weight. He looked at his soiled agbada ruefully. The napkin was an indiscernible red towel plastered on his chest. He removed the agbada in the car, elbowing Shayo’s glasses from her face in the process. The boy’s mother staggered to the window and looked in, her mouth agape. The driver started the car. 

“Where are we going now,” Oga belched. Shayo passed him the satchel of DenTek Comfort Clean floss that we kept in the car. 

“Thank you dear,” he said, picking one gingerly so as not to soil the others.

“You said we should remind you. You want to visit Asiteyin.” I piped from the corner. 

“Ah, yes, Oya Driver, to Bourdillon.”

The driver switched on the abominable child-like wail of our official siren as we drove down the busy Agege motor road. Our military escort, Abu, hung out one un-camouflaged arm holding a horse whip and we slid through the traffic like a parting comb through thick 4c hair.  I kept my forehead on the window, looking past my reflection and thinking of my plan. My goal was simple: I had applied for this job only to enact revenge on Oga. Revenge that was cold and flat like three day old Eba that had been refrigerated by a stupid wife. When l slept at night I had an image of Oga burned into the inner surface of my eyelids—a much younger, slimmer image of him; he had only been a councillor when he wronged me and my family, and I a child. 

The common sense senator was on the small television screens behind the car headrests and Oga increased the volume, excited. Senator Ten Oraifo was his close friend: “I for one will stop eating people,” Senator Ten said earnestly. “I wish my colleagues will do the same and stop feeding on the people. We can survive on livestock like the rest of the world. Who would be left when we eat them all?”

“Look at this idiot,” Oga said, slapping his knee. “Why are his children overseas?” Oga looked to us as if we were accomplices and we smiled sheepishly.  He continued, “If you want to change the country, bring your children here, then we know you are serious. Ode!”

The car slowed at a police check point near Walter Carrington and the windows wound down.  The officers saluted when they saw the insignia of the federal republic on the plates.

“Oga sir!” They said. “Anything for the boys?” “Happy weekend, sir!”

“Officers of the federal republic,” Oga drawled in that nasalized big man voice that all politicians used to address cronies. “I go do weekend for una, no worry.”

They beamed, stamped their feet and adjusted the straps of their guns. Oga pulled a filleting knife from the car door storage pocket where he kept the medications for his hypertension and high cholesterol, and cut a thick slab of flesh from the buttocks of the dead boy on the floor of the Jeep. He tossed the mound of meat to the officers who fought over it like ravenous wolves.  

“Thank you o, Oga!” The lead officer said, a piece of meat disappearing between his teeth. “God bless!” He waved us along. There was a thin fillet of meat left on the knife. Oga pulled it off and tossed it to me. 

I tucked it in my mouth and pretended to chew.  It would have been disrespectful not to eat. 

* 

Oga was trusting me more and more and my responsibilities increased in the household: I was allowed into the main house; I picked the grand children from piano class when they came for holidays, and I started working for his wife, Madam, on alternate weekends. 

Madam was a beautiful older woman with regal white hair blossoming around her temples and she spoke with a lisp like someone whose mouth couldn’t carry water. She ran a poverty alleviation program for pregnant market women and we spent weekends in the community distributing Pears baby oil, Dettol, pom poms of cotton wool, baby bibs, methylated spirit, and soft baby sponges to rotund bellied women who clustered around our van and stretched their arms in tireless supplication.

Like clockwork, Madam would start to salivate half way through her donations, her lips retracting from her teeth revealing the fangs of a baboon: sturdy pale gums plastered around sharp keratin tusks that only moments ago were small dainty canines. Madam would feed every other weekend but the pregnant women were seemingly unable to resist these ‘poverty alleviation’ gifts, and they clustered around the van like moths to a flame.

On one of our weekend trips, we saw Wosore, the  revolutionary, chanting ‘revolution now’ with a handful of half-hearted youths. He came up to us unafraid of the government plates on our vehicles, unafraid of madam’s icy cold stare and low rumbling growl. He looked slightly older than he did on TV, or maybe his revolution was aging him rapidly. 

“Won’t you rise up?” He asked us, thrusting a flyer of his manifesto in our faces. “When will you rise up and fight those holding us down in this country?” He pointed at Madam: “These vampires are sucking us dry! Eating our young! Why can’t you all see!?” And before we could answer he was gone, chanting: “Revolution now! Free Nigeria from these criminals called leaders!”

He gave his fliers to a market woman who quickly used leaves of his precious manifesto to bolster cairns of her tomatoes before he even left her stall. He shook his head at her in genuine pity. His revolution was as potentially fiery as any flint but the people he hoped to ignite were as wet as the finest firewood soaked in rain water. 

I was a believer in his cause but I pitied him because he did not seem to see that the people were completely lost, that they were as part of the problem as the politicians themselves. I saw in him a kindred spirit but my own revolution was different. My own was localized like a laser; I was going to purge the country not of all politicians but just one. And that would be my contribution to his revolution that might never ignite. 

I couldn’t wait for the day when the poor would rise to eat the rich as Jean-Jacques Rousseau had said. I know it would be a glorious day: millions of the downtrodden stampeding bare feet through Victoria island and Lekki and Ikoyi in Lagos, overrunning Aso Rock in Abuja, and all the government houses in all the states, sinking brittle but potent teeth into the soft flaccid bellies of these politicians who were dyslipidemic on the commonwealth. I know on that day, even the middle class wouldn’t be spared. 

On the day I planned to kill Oga, I had sharpened a kitchen knife and tied it to my thigh, hidden under my skirt. He threw parties every Friday night and his political friends came one by one in gleaming Ferraris and brightly colored Porsches, scantily clad women hanging on their arms like symbiotic remoras on sharks. I knew that at the end of the night when he was half drunk on Hennessy, he would retire to his office to smoke a cigar. He would call me to come massage his legs and proceed to stare at me through white and viscous plumes of smoke. He was yet to pounce on me but I think for men who have always had everything they desired there was some value in anticipation and we were at that stage of our dance. He was beginning to tire for my colleague Shayo, see. He snapped at her when she asked him to repeat some nonsense he had dictated, yesterday. And it was only a matter of time. 

So, that Friday night, we were in his office and I was smiling while massaging his huge ugly feet that looked like the tree trunks of a dying baobab tree. I could feel the blunt edge of my knife digging into my thigh and I was trembling with anticipation. I was already basking in the mental image of burying my blade in the fat folds of his neck. I would tell him as the light dimmed from his dirty brown eyes of the night he broke into my home many years ago, that election year, with his cronies. He would not remember, I know. In the wake of many dead victims, do parasites like malaria or cholera remember their victims? I don’t think so. But I would try to remind him: how he grabbed my mother while we watched, horrified, and consumed her. How his friends held my father down for him.  How I and my brother had only been left alive because they’d been full, unable to eat more. 

He lit his cigar and blew circles up to the glittering chandelier on the ceiling. 

“What do you think of me,” he said suddenly. 

I think you’re a monster. You and all of your kind. I think you should all be rounded up, all you politicians, and be burned in a fiery pyre. 

On the large, gold television screen in his office, the news was going about Wosore. He’d been arrested. And the president was making a statement about his arrest. He had committed treason because he was calling for a revolution. Did he not know what war would do to our people? The president was saying. He must have been young in 66, probably why he couldn’t remember the horrors of the Biafra war. To make a scapegoat of him and to strike terror in the hearts of all those like him, the president proclaimed that he was going to eat him on live television. No one had ever really seen the president feed. The higher government officials all had a higher appetite than the lower ones: it was rumored that the senate president gorged on seventy adults every night, that they were delivered by the constituency and party faithfuls to large arenas in their lavish palatial homes and the feeding was more for sport than for sustenance. 

“I think you’re a good boss.” I said, keeping my eyes on the ridges and knolls on his blackened knee. “You are very loving to your wife. And your children adore you. You do not let your family lack anything. And your grandchildren call you Big Daddy and they love you with all their hearts.”

“No, that’s not true,” he said. 

And when I looked up at him, he was looking at his resplendent reflection in the misted glass door of the bathroom, tears hanging on his lower lids. 

“You think I’m a monster.”

“Ahh, no Oga.” 

“I know I’m a monster.” 

And without asking, he plunged into a sorry tale of his life and how he had come to be the way he was. I was trapped, massaging his thigh, and had no choice in the matter but to listen. Perhaps this was the night he was going to attempt to touch me. All the better. It would be easier to stick the knife up his throat. 

“Did you know that I grew up just there in Alimosho.” He pointed, as though Alimosho was not a hundred or more miles away from Banana island. “I haven’t always been wealthy, you know.”

I did not know that. I assumed he had inherited his position like many of them. 

“My parents were civil servants at the federal ministry of agriculture.” He pulled back one leg and replaced it with the other one. “My father had a PhD in botany, can you believe that? This was during the military regimes. You think things are bad now for the Nigerian people? Ah. It’s only because you were still a child in 1985. During the time of Abacha...” He laughed pityingly at the memory of the people who lived and died in those times. “At least you have democracy now.”

He paused and took a deep breath. The inebriation seemed to be dissipating from his eyes and he looked more alert with every passing minute and I became worried that he would put up a fight if I didn’t catch his artery on first try. 

“I lost my parents on the same day.” He said. “Back then, there were large feasts. The military liked to do these retrenchment exercises to reduce government spending. Apparently civil servants were the easiest prey. They came to the offices where both my parents worked and that was it. Just like that I was an orphan. I could no longer go to school or feed. I took to the streets and lived there for years until I started going for these rallies and there I had my enlightenment.”

“But if you’re just like us, why did you not do something different when you came into power.” I blurted. 

“There is no beating them, my dear, don’t you understand? And if you cannot beat them, then you must join them.”

My finger was on the bounding femoral pulse in his left thigh and when he put his glass to his mouth, I pulled the knife and pushed it into his skin. There was a moment when there was nothing, no blood, even though I had broken his skin. My heart fluttered in my chest. Then I twisted the knife deeper before he could jerk away, crying reflexively. I felt the give of his artery and dark red blood bubbled out.

He jumped up from his chair an incredulous look on his face, he staggered around for a bit, his hand pressing down on this artery. I waited for him to fall but a large man has a lot of blood and obviously I had miscalculated: I should have stuck to my plan of going for his neck. 

“You’re dead,” he said. 

I leaped on him, wrapping my legs around his torso, and delivered a series of rapid stabs to his head and face. “Do you not remember,” I screamed. He fought back, pummeling me with his fat fists but my legs were wound tight around him and we stumbled across his office, upturning the large mahogany desk, shattering the elegant decorative vases that usually stood sentinel by the door. We broke through the bathroom glass door and he fell backwards on the brown and red terrazzo floor. On the bathroom floor, he was finally beginning to lose speed, but I continued to flail with the knife like a mad woman. The police would later say I stabbed him a hundred and sixty two times. And in my picture which grazed the front pages of all the major newspapers in the weeks to come, I would look like a rabid child covered in moist, squelching red with only the whites of my eyes and the whites of my grin as startling highlights.  

As the blood drained from him, he gasped, why? 

And I told him of that night he came to our house, when he was still a councilor, how he sunk his teeth into the nape of my writhing father. 

“Teeth?” His eyes rolled up in his eyes. “I don’t…understand.” Those were his last words. 

*

I did not know where they fished my brother from. I had not seen him in years. He sat to my side and placed an arm around my shoulders. He smelled of shea butter, of our childhood, of a house that was filled with laughter till it wasn’t. Across the table from us was a man in a white coat and a tape recorder on the table. 

“How did you lose your parents?” The man in the white coat asked, clicking the red button on the tape recorder. 

My brother responded, “We lost our parents to typhoid. My sister was only a small child at the time. We rushed them to our local clinic that had just been commissioned by our then councilor.”

“The man she murdered.”

“Yes,” my brother looked closely at me with a tenderness. He brushed a lock of hair from my brow. “See, the clinic was a scam. It was just a cardboard building with nothing inside. No beds, no staff, no nothing. My sister was only a child at the time and she couldn’t understand it. She would ask how could there be a clinic and no clinic at the same time. I tried to explain to her how the political class worked, that the monies allocated for the clinic had been stolen by the people who commissioned it and that the councilor had eaten it.”

“So in her mind—“

“She spiraled into this elaborate delusion that these politicians ate our parents. There were vivid hallucinations.” He shuddered.

“Well…” the psychiatrist said, leaning back in his chair and regarding me, “in essence, didn’t they?”

I adjusted in my white strait jacket. Of course I did not believe a word they were saying. And neither should you.