Reuben Ata, at the time the country’s minister for Social Issues, was the most flamboyant member of Prime Minister Askia Amin’s cabinet. He was like those rare men in the world of cigarette advertising: ruggedly handsome, with a well-groomed mustache and sharp eyes. While the other ministers tended to be married, out of shape and dull, Ata was athletic, charismatic and—in his own words—an incurable bachelor. He was always quietly smoking a Cuban cigar, which lent him an added aura of sensuousness and power.
In terms of education, Ata stood somewhere in the middle of the cabinet: neither as educated as Dr. Titus Bato, the brash minister for National Planning, or Professor Sogon Yaw, the former fire-breathing Marxist, nor as unlettered as Chief Julius Jupiter Jelowo, who held the portfolio of Traditional Matters. Ata had a number of dubious certificates from several London based institutes: fellow of the Institute of Public Relations, chartered member of the Institute of Marketing, member of the Chartered Institute of Secretaries.
Four days after I returned from my father’s funeral, I came to work and found a stylish envelope on my desk. I slit it open and read the strange message it contained:
please beer with me
any night of your choice
from 8 p.m.
Reuben Ata, Honorable Minister for Social Issues
It gave the minister’s home address. Why he had invited me, a journalist with a record of making trouble for his government, I could not tell; but I was curious and, in any case, in need of distraction from my bereavement. I decided to go that very evening.
I arrived at the minister’s home at 9:15 p.m. The gate was under siege by a crowd of women jostling to be let in. Three heavy-set men stood barring the way. These men, I quickly found out, were screeners. Now and then they pointed to one of the women and said, “You, go in.” The lucky woman then squeezed through a crush of bodies to gain entrance. Once past the gate, she stopped to spruce up, then strode up the driveway with a gait calculated to mock the unchosen ones.
I waded through the press of bodies, fished out my invitation card and handed it to one of the screeners. He examined it closely, turning it over twice.
“I’m from the Daily Monitor,” I said, hoping that information would be helpful to my case.
“Ah! You’re welcome, sir. Please go in.”
As soon as he uttered those words, I was seized by many hands as the women clamored to be taken with me. It was only with the assistance of the screeners that I was able to extricate myself and pass through the gate. When I reached the house my heart was pounding. I paused outside the door to collect myself before going in.
The room I entered was large, high-ceilinged and brightly lit. A smell of food and cigar smoke filled the air. A band was playing blues, but nobody was dancing. People sat in small clusters, one or two men ringed by several women. Most of the men were stout and middle-aged, all the women young and lithe.
A tall man came up to me—I recognized him at once as Reuben Ata—and extended his right hand. I shook it, and introduced myself.
“Welcome, my friend, welcome. I’m glad you could join us.”
“Thank you for inviting me.”
“The pleasure is all mine.”
He led me to a corner of the room where several cabinet ministers were seated, attended by a retinue of women. The women sat on the ministers’ laps or massaged their necks. The ministers drank and conversed calmly, as if the women hanging about them were natural extensions of themselves. Professor Yaw and Chief Amanka sat together, the latter sprawled on a large round pouf. Ata introduced me.
“You’re the rat who wrote nonsense about me!” Amanka shouted, bolting up like a man stung by a bee. Ata put out a restraining hand.
“Rats don’t write,” I riposted. “Not even nonsense.” But Amanka did not hear me for all his raving and ranting. The other ministers murmured and grumbled that they did not want press boys at their parties.
“He’s here as a friendly force,” Ata said, to appease Amanka and reassure the others. I wanted to shout a disclaimer, but my anger was too hot for words.
Yaw drew Amanka away. “He’s a young man,” Yaw said. “He was obviously misled. We must forgive him.”
The ministers took up Yaw’s words like a refrain. “He was misled,” they echoed, grinning contentedly.
I shook with rage, but my tongue stayed cold. Ata held me by my shoulder and, gently prodding, said, “Let me introduce you to other guests.”
Three European ambassadors cavorted with several young women who seemed engaged in a silent struggle to be the ambassadors’ native sex for the night. The two African diplomats fared rather worse than their European counterparts in the attentions of women. Then there were a number of officers from the Army, Air Force and Navy; some European and American businessmen; several senators, and a sundry assortment of lawyers, doctors, architects and contractors.
Each guest acknowledged me with a smile, a nod or a handshake. Finally Ata took me to a corner of the room where a sturdy man with carefully crimped hair sat almost isolated from the rest of the party. His female companion leant against him, both of them enveloped in the halo of smoke the man blew from his cigar.
“Mr. Stramulous,” Ata said in introduction. He then mentioned my name and affiliation. Without lifting his eyes, Stramulous nodded ever so slightly. His companion glanced up, fleetingly met my gaze, then laid her head back on Stramulous’s chest.
My heart fluttered with excitement. Peter Stramulous was a shadowy figure in Madian public affairs, a man about whom people knew little. Nobody disputed that he was the trusted confidant of Prime Minister Amin; some claimed that he was the launderer of the prime minister’s loot. He was known to be stupendously rich, a man who spent a fortune on rare sports cars, overseas villas, jewelry and horses, though the sources of his money were unknown.
“An impressive crowd,” I said to Ata at the end of my round of introductions.
“Movers and shakers, yes.”
“Every night, you have this kind of crowd?”
“Tonight is nothing. You should come when His Excellency is in attendance.”
“The prime minister?”
“Yes, he’s here all the time. In fact he would have been here tonight but for some urgent national matter that came up. To lead a nation is no joke.”
“Very true.”
“And His Excellency doesn’t joke with his work.”
“I’m sure.”
“But when he plays he plays hard, too.”
“Fair enough.”
“What do you wish to drink?”
“Orange juice, please.”
“What? Come on, be a man!”
“I need to calm down. I was mobbed at your gate.”
“Oh, those girls! Every girl in town wants to gatecrash my party.”
“It was frightening.”
“Believe me, it was nothing. Wait until midnight.”
“You mean it gets crazier?”
“That’s the buzz hour. A girl even died.”
“No!”
“Yes! This is what—August, isn’t it? Five months ago one lady died outside my gate.” The minister’s face came alive with pride. “Competition to get into Ata’s party. This is the biggest party in town.”
“But to die for a party, that’s going a bit too far.”
“The cabinet came to the same conclusion. We extensively debated the incident and decided that such a tragedy must not recur. That’s why we took the prudent step of forming the Power Platoon.”
“A military unit?”
“Oh no!” he said, laughing. “They are a number of girls—thirty in all—who are permanent guests at my party. We named them the Power Platoon.”
“Makes sense: you’re in power and they’re your foot soldiers. Sort of,” I suggested.
Ata laughed, then said, “Now how about a swig of cognac? It’s a highly recommended nerve-calmer.”
“I’m game.”
He pressed a bell. A man wearing black trousers, a white shirt, a bow tie and a black jacket appeared.
“Get a Hennessy for our honored guest. VSOP.”
“Will do, sir.”
A few seconds later the servant handed Ata an unopened bottle of Hennessy. The minister passed it to me.
“Disvirgin it,” he said. “It’s all yours.”
“A full bottle of cognac for me? I’m not really much of a drinker, sir.”
“Hah! You’re the first journalist I’ve met who frets before alcohol. As for me, I really like my cognac,” boasted the minister.
“I can see.”
“And I like cigars.”
“I guess they go well with cognac,” I said.
“Absolutely. And I love women.” He paused. “Beautiful women, of course.”
“Uh huh. The three vices.”
“Or virtues, depending on who’s speaking. His Excellency once said, in this very house, that with so many beautiful women in the world he can’t understand why any man would ever want to commit suicide.”
“I had never thought about that.”
“Neither had I. His Excellency always comes up with original thoughts.”
“Yes, yes.” I paused. “Umh, forgive me for changing the subject, but I thought to ask, what does your ministry do?”
“Oh, good question. The Ministry of Social Issues has a wide range of responsibilities. Part of my charge is to ensure the existence of social harmony in this country. You’d be surprised to learn how many disputes have been settled in this very house. I bring various segments of this country together. I also see to the welfare of my cabinet colleagues. It’s not easy being a minister. You carry a lot on your shoulder. Members of the cabinet must have a way to cool off. That’s why the cabinet gave me the mandate to throw parties. My colleagues come here to forget all the problems in their ministry. And to recharge their batteries. There’s also a diplomatic dimension to the parties.” He moved closer to my ear and whispered, “The ambassadors you see here will never send home a negative report about Madia. I make sure of that by giving them the most beautiful girls.”
“Sounds like a lot on your own shoulder, sir.”
“Yeah, but I enjoy my work.”
I nodded.
He said, “As the air of this party I must circulate more. I’ll find one or two girls to keep you company and help cut down your cognac. Don’t hesitate to draw my attention if you need anything. Anything. Enjoy yourself.”
He went and whispered to two unattached girls. Smiling, they came over to me. Both wore mini-skirts and high-heeled shoes that accentuated their shapely, strong legs.
“I’m Susie,” said one, with a leer.
“Lucie,” said the other. They sat down on either side of me and began to chatter away. They rolled their eyes and laughed too easily. Then the one named Susie put her head on my shoulder and nudged her breasts against my back. A dengue-like heat overcame me.
Madia was in the stranglehold of the most vicious kleptocracy anywhere on our continent—a regime in which ministers and other public officials looted whatever was within their reach, and much that wasn’t. In comparison with the thefts committed by many of these crooks, Ata’s passion for cigars, cognac and women seemed relatively benign peccadilloes. Everybody who knew him agreed that he was not a thief. He liked a good time, and he indulged himself at the expense of the nation, that was all.
Ata telephoned me the day after the party to apologize for Amanka’s conduct. I went to his parties again from time to time. Gradually, he and I became close friends. He asked me to call him Reuben, saying that the title Honorable Minister sounded too staid and silly. “It’s one of those anachronisms we ex-colonials love to borrow from the English,” he laughed. “And yet, I could not name two honorable things most of us ministers do in the course of a day.”
I was at my desk one afternoon writing an editorial when my phone rang. I picked up the receiver and muttered a weary hello.
“Hallo! It’s Reuben.”
“Hi Reuben,” I said, mustering more warmth.
“You sound awful. Are you sick?”
“Only of writing.”
“What are you writing?”
“An editorial. On corruption.”
“Can it wait till tomorrow?”
“Why do you ask?”
“My father is in town. I called to invite you to dinner tonight. You two would get along quite well. After dinner, I will clear out of the way and let you and the old man exchange views on corruption. How does that sound?”
“You always make these irresistible proposals.”
“Let’s say 6 p.m., if that’s okay with you. We’ll have one or two drinks before dinner.”
Like his son, Pa Matthew Ileka Ata was tall and imposing. Despite his eighty-three years there were no physical signs of ageing, none of the sags and droops that point a life in the direction of a grave.
A slight stammerer, Pa Ata spoke with deliberate slowness, in a tone that was perhaps a carry-over from his days as a school headmaster. He had been dismissed from the post and had spent two years in jail for assaulting a white superintendent of schools, a man who loved nothing more than to put natives in their place.
Over dinner, the old man recounted the incident. He told of the callow young man’s penchant for rebuking teachers in the presence of their pupils, and recalled how surprised the puppy was when Pa Ata punched him. “Are you aware you have just assaulted a representative of His Majesty, the King?” the boy had cried. In response, Pa Ata tackled him to the ground and proceeded to pummel his imperial person with more punches. We laughed over the story, but the consequences for Pa Ata had been serious. He was arrested within an hour. For the next two years, in detention, he was not permitted to see his family.
Was it this experience that had soured him towards the English, accounting for his insistence that Britain was responsible for Madia’s problems, past, present and future?
After dinner we sat pouring ourselves tea from a pot. Pa Ata said, “Reuben told me you’re writing something on corruption.”
“Yes. And I hear you’re an expert.”
He shook with laughter. “Well, I hope he told you my expertise is in the theory, not the practice. But I once attended Reuben’s party and shook hands with some of the most corrupt people in this country. It was like being in a den of thieves.”
“Father!” cried the minister in mock reproach. “Your own son’s house, a den of thieves?” Smiling, he rose from the table.
Pa Ata grinned. “You didn’t hear me suggest you’re one of them. But you must also be mindful of the saying about the company one keeps.” He winked at me as Reuben left the room. Then he asked, seriously, “Why do you think we have such pervasive corruption in our country?”
“I’ve often asked myself that. I wish I knew a simple answer.”
“But do you not sometimes think it might be in the nature of our people? That we are born with itchy fingers?” Pa Ata’s gaze was penetrating, daring me to lie.
“In moments of great despair, yes I have thought it,” I confessed. “You hear all these stories about ministers using public funds to buy cars for their mistresses. Or acquiring European castles for themselves. How can you not think it? You go to any village and you’re shocked by the squalid life there. The dust roads. Hospitals that have neither drugs nor doctors. The polluted stream water the people drink. The lack of electricity. Then, as you’re trying to come to grips with a reality that seems to belong in the Middle Ages, up comes a Rolls Royce carrying some minister to remind you that you’re not in the sixteenth century after all but in the twentieth. Then you’re faced with the pathetic irony of the villagers lining up to hail the nabob in the Royce—the very man who’s plundered their country. When you see things like that, how can you help despairing?”
Pa Ata said, “You have spoken quite well about what one’s eyes see in this country—though it’s even worse than you think, believe me. Do you know why I asked you the question?”
I waited in silence; the old man continued.
“I asked because some of the things I read in our newspapers enrage me. Some of your colleagues talk the foolish language of the whiteman. I actually read a columnist who argued that we are born thieves, there’s nothing we can do about it. And I ask, this thieving, when did it become part of our blood? In the old days, before the whiteman came and stood our world on its head, no man who was given something to hold in trust for the community would dare steal from it to serve himself. But today what do we see? Exactly what you described. I say, let’s look at it and ask ourselves what has changed. There are two major things, if you think hard about it. One has to do with what white administrators did in the colonies. They stole, that was their main work. They were officially licensed to pilfer our treasures in the name of their monarch. They taught our present leaders all the tactics of stealing. The only difference is that the whiteman stole for his country, our people steal for their pocket. That is one.”
I tried to interject with a question.
“Wait, let me finish,” he said. “The other thing—which is more dangerous—is that whitemen came here and threw together all kinds of odds and ends and called it a nation. None of us was ever asked if we wanted to belong to this new nation, or on what condition. We were all simply herded together into this huge compost, then misnamed a nation. We slowly began to forget how our ancestors had husbanded their souls before the whiteman arrived.
“Today, we’re a people out of touch with our ancestors, a people who belong neither to the sky nor to the earth. So let me complete your picture of what goes on in our villages. The man in the Rolls Royce flaunts his loot because he believes it is his legitimate spoils. He has not stolen from those he considers his people, but from strangers. The poor people singing his praises don’t believe that he has robbed or disinherited them. They admire him because he has made his way in the territory left to us by the whites and has won his fortune.”
“Isn’t it a sign of weakness, after several years of independence, to continue to blame the whiteman for the mess we’re in?” I protested.
“If somebody deserves blame, you should blame them for a thousand years if you so wish. But, yes, you have a point.” He paused, as though thinking what the point he had just conceded was. Then he continued.
“I shudder at the behavior of our so-called leaders. It’s hard to believe these were the same leaders who asked us to drop to the dirt and fight the whiteman. Peasants and workers alike answered the call. Then, when the whiteman left, what did these leaders do? They took the owner’s corner in the pleasure cars abandoned by the whiteman. They ran into the mansions the British left behind and barricaded themselves there. Then they began to remind us that we were not one people, after all; that we are Hausa or Yoruba or Igbo or Ibibio or Kanuri or Nupe or Edo or Efik or Fufulde or Tiv. Like the British they discovered they could rule if they divided the ruled.
“We began to fight among ourselves. They laughed and began to eat and drink. At Reuben’s party you see ministers from different ethnic groups. But you never hear them exchange one harsh word among themselves. Why? They are united by their bellies, that’s all.
“Is that what we all fought for? So that a few of us can eat and have swollen bellies while the rest of us go to sleep with hunger ringing in our stomachs?” He looked at me, the skin beneath his eyes sagged with sadness.
“Can anything be done?” I asked.
He sighed. “Yes. First, we must ask ourselves, what is the identity of this space called Madia? Why does our present bear no marks of our past? What is the meaning of our history? These questions can only lead us to one truth, namely that we live in a bastard nation. Then we must decide what to do with this illegitimate offspring. I know this will sound radical to you, but the first step is to turn it into a completely different nation. Not by means of violence but symbolically, through our constitution. We must be ready to say two things. One, that any section of this country is free to leave. Two, that other people not now within our nation can become part of us. That’s the only way of making our nation a living organism, one that can grow and contract.”
“I’m afraid such a transformation would be impossible to achieve.”
“Oh no,” he replied calmly. “It could be done. Reuben must invite you to dinner again before I leave. I’ll make it all clear to you.” He looked at his watch. “I must retire now. Reuben’s party will soon start, and I’m in no mood to shake the hands of thieves tonight.”