10

In a room in a white mansion on Banana Island, in pitch darkness and near total silence, a man shouted, ‘Nobody move!’

A dog barked outside in the distance. Inside in the room, somebody coughed, cleared their throat, and coughed again. A phone began to buzz and then stopped. Outside, a generator roared before a metallic lid closed with a clank, reducing the noise to little more than a murmur. Seconds later the lights in the room came on and the air conditioner hummed back to life and its vents resumed their slow oscillations.

‘You can continue now,’ Prince Ambrose Adepoju said.

It was a large parlour with eight two-seater sofas arranged in a square. Men in native outfits were seated and other men in casual clothes stood behind the sofas. In the middle, on the Persian rug, two men in white kaftans sat in front of three large Ghana-must-go bags so full with bundles of naira notes they could not be zipped shut. Another man knelt by the money while a fourth, similarly dressed, sat with his legs to one side of an open briefcase that had neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills in it. By his side he had a stack of more dollars and he picked out another bundle from the briefcase, held it in his left hand, licked the thumb of his right, and with his fingers, began counting the money. He went through the wad in less than twenty seconds, placed it on the stash by his leg, and went for another bundle.

Ambrose was sat leaning forward on a sofa directly in front of the man by the briefcase, keeping his eyes on the counting through thick-rimmed glasses with lenses that made his eyeballs look twice their size. He was in his sixties. He had a large grey untameable beard and his Afro grew out around a gleaming bald patch in the middle of his head. He puffed incessantly on a pipe clamped between his in-turned lips and with the fingers of his right hand, he counted the blue coral beads of the bracelet round his left wrist.

The double doors to the room opened. Ambrose looked over the rims of his glasses as Yellowman and Dr. Adeniyi Hope Babalola walked in. Babalola, the party’s candidate, looked around at the men, the ones on the floor, the bags of naira notes, and the briefcase of dollar bills. His uncertain eyes settled on Ambrose. Nobody spoke.

The man on the floor counting the money picked the last bundle of dollars from the briefcase and flicked through the notes in seconds. He placed the rest of the money by his side and straightened his back.

‘Is it all there?’ Ambrose asked the black market money changer.

‘Yes. You want to count?’ the Hausa man asked, gesturing to the bags of naira.

‘No. You may leave. Same time tomorrow, come with double the amount. Only big notes.’

The money changer and his colleagues shared the dollars amongst themselves, hid the money under their clothes, and left, leaving behind the bags of naira they had brought.

Ambrose stood up from his chair. He was a little over five feet tall. The other men stood also. He walked to Babalola and Yellowman.

‘What is this?’ Babalola asked.

‘An emergency party meeting. Haven’t you heard what happened?’

‘Did we have anything to do with it?’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘But what’s all this money for? Where is it from?’

‘Mobilisation. You don’t need to know where it’s from.’

‘With all due respect, when I agreed to run, I made it clear that it would have to be a clean campaign. What do we need mobilisation for? Who are we mobilising?’

‘Everything has changed, my boy. For one, you need protection. They are saying you killed your opponent. You are staying with me from now on. Come with me.’

They walked out of the room into an adjoining parlour also full of party members, then into an unlit corridor with a window overlooking the front of the compound. The curtains were open, allowing moonlight to pour in through the glass.

‘Before tonight,’ Ambrose said, ‘I had more chance of becoming the next president of America than you had of winning the election. You know it too. You are a divorcee. We have never elected a divorcee in Lagos. And you are from abroad. An outsider. But still I said I would support you. You know why? Because I have a vision.’

Yellowman walked behind them.

‘You were just not eligible. You were not right enough or popular enough to rig the election for you. Yes, you heard me. I agreed that it would be a clean campaign, no rigging, because there was no point. No matter how much we spent, you were just not well known enough.’ He stopped in the middle of the dark corridor, in front the window.

‘You see, rigging is a necessity. If you don’t rig, your opponent would still rig, so you have to rig just to counter their own rigging, and in the end, one person wins and the other goes to court to challenge the outcome of the election.’

‘But you can only rig an election if the candidate is popular in the first place. Or at least more popular than the opponent. If you won against Douglas, may his soul rest in peace, the amount of people that would riot would be enough to convince any judge to declare a rerun without even looking at the evidence. You just wouldn’t stand a chance. The plan was that by the next election you would have become a known name. We would have had to rig even if you were the people’s popular choice. Do you think the opposition will just sit down and watch you get all the votes? They will do something, so we also have to do something, so that at the end of the day, their ojoro and our ojoro will cancel each other out and the real votes of the people would count. That is how democracy works.

‘But all that has changed. Now we have a real chance at this thing. You can really be the next Governor of Lagos State.’

‘You really think so?’

‘I know so. This close to the election, they won’t have time for primaries. They have to announce a candidate very soon.’

‘Alhaji Hassan?’

‘No. Douglas beat him in the primaries. It won’t be somebody who already competed and lost in the party primaries. They have to choose someone new; someone who can claim the votes that would have gone to Douglas. Someone close to him. Someone popular.’