My aunt explained what was going on. Policemen routinely stopped drivers of commercial vehicles at that spot to demand a bribe. The officer who was being told off had drifted too close to his colleague’s domain. The clustering was bad for business- danfo drivers got angry if they were charged twice. All this took place under a hoarding that said “Corruption is Illegal: Do Not Give or Accept Bribes.” And how much of the government’s money, I wondered, had the contractor siphoned off into his private accounts when he had landed the lucrative contract for those billboards?Read it soon, because he's planning to take the site down at the end of January (don't ask me why).
It is one thing to be told of the “informal economy” of Lagos, and quite another to see it in action, to see the way it puts pressure on all who are involved in it. Some fifteen minutes before we reached Ikeja bus-stop, we had passed a toll-gate on Airport Road. It, too, was in the shadow of a large billboard condemning corrupt practices and urging citizens to improve the country. Toll at the booth was set at two-hundred naira: this was advertised and understood. However, enterprising drivers, such as ours, knew that they could get through the toll gate if they paid just half of that. The catch was that the hundred naira they paid went straight into the collector’s purse. “Two-hundred you get ticket stub,” our driver said, “One hundred you get no ticket. What do I need ticket for? I don’t need ticket!” And in this way, thousands of cars over the course of a day would pay toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors. The demand from the immigration officer, the toll-booth story, the Ikeja police: I had run into three clear instances of official corruption within my first forty-five minutes in the country.
-She lost her husband, Tolu said.(Here's the link, though it will only work through the end of January.)
-Oh, yes, that I think I heard about that. How sad.
-Yes, but the really sad thing is the way it happened.
Tolu then began to tell Teju what had happened. The rhetoric and rites of the introduction went on around them. [...]
-It was armed robbers, Tolu said. This was in 1998, about three years after you were last home.
The woman was extraordinarily beautiful. Her skinned glowed with warm ochre tones, and her eyes flashed intelligently each time she spoke and laughed. Teju observed her intently from where he sat. He estimated she was about fifty-five.
-The men came into their house at night, an armed gang. Woke up the parents, their children, the househelp. They have two kids.
-And they shot him?
-No.
Those home invasions had been extremely common in Lagos in the 1990s, and they still happened, though less frequently. The Coles had had two encounters with armed robbers. Once, when Teju was still home, the men had gotten into the compound but had been unable to break down the reinforced doors leading into the house. The whole family had huddled in the toilet of the master bedroom while the robbers threatened from outside. They kept at it, ramming the massive front door repeatedly, until it was almost the break of day. Only then,thwarted, did they give up and melt away with the shadows. The Cole family, emerging from behind their barricades long after the sun had risen, found drops of fresh blood on the concrete along the walls surrounding the house and near the front door. One of the robbers had been injured scaling the broken-glass-topped fence.
They, or some others like them, came back a few years later. This was after Teju had left for America. Dayo and Tolu were still at home. And this time, they got in. Mr Cole had been punched, and Dayo had been slapped. All the electronics, jewelry and money in the house was taken. For many years afterwards, Mrs Cole couldn’t sleep through the night. Mr Cole’s gun, never fired, was still never fired, but it became an ominous presence in the house.
-They cleaned out the house, but when they were leaving, they forced Mr Adelaja to come with them.
[...]
-They locked him up in the trunk of his car, and drove around to the neighbor’s house. When they got there, they dragged him out and made him speak into the intercom. “It’s your neighbor please. I need some help. Please open the gate.”
This was at two in the morning. Mr Adelaja was the kind of man you opened your gate to, at any time of day. A respectable man, well-known in the neighborhood, well-liked. And that way, the robbers gained access to the neighbor’s place, cleaned out his house. Then, they dragged him along too, left his wife and daughters weeping and pleading. So now, there are two men in the trunk of the car.
And the men in the trunk can hear the armed robbers discussing their strategy. They can hear them saying, well these guys have seen our faces and heard our voices. We’re going to have to kill them.
And then they come round, and they open the trunk, and they shoot Mr Adelaja. The neighbor, they leave alive, perhaps hoping to use him as bait for some more houses.
But not long after that, they run into a police checkpoint. Panicked, they jump out of the car and disappear into the woods. And what do the police find in the abandoned car. Two men. One still alive, his neighbor’s blood all over him.
Tolu shook his head. Teju’s eyes smarted, and he looked at Mrs Adelaja again, in whose radiance he could see nothing that looked like grief and nothing that looked like humiliation. But this was what those bastards had saddled her with for the rest of her life: a memory of the man she loved forever tied to the degradation of one night.
Teju mused on how they would have gone to bed that evening like any other aging married couple, perhaps with tender words, or perhaps in the midst of some minor tiff, with no thought of the violence that would tear them apart. He imagined her in the weeks and months afterwards, her beautiful face disfigured by sorrow. And then the gradual courage to continue, the strength she had to find for herself and for her children. Fortitude beyond imagining. And not a trace of it on her face, seven years on.
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Whoa. No kidding.
posted by Auguris at 5:35 PM on January 1, 2006