Every Day Is for the Thief: Fiction (2 page)

Disembarkation, passport control, and baggage claim eat up more than an hour of our time. The sky outside fills with shadows. One man argues with a listless customs official about the inefficiency.

—This is an international airport. Things should be better run. Is this the impression visitors should have of our nation?

The official shrugs, and says that people like him should return home and make it better. While we wait for the luggage machine to disgorge the bags, a white man next to me makes small talk. He has a brogue, and I ask if he is Scottish. “Aye,” he says, and he informs me that he works on the rigs.

—Got drunk in Paris last night, and got robbed. Firkin’ frogs lifted me credit card. But the Champs-Élysées was something! Aye, pissed out me mind. Skunk drunk.

He grins. His teeth are studded with metal. He wears an earring and sports a ginger-tinged five-o’clock shadow. He is not Europe’s finest, but he’ll earn well here.

—Won’t get a flight to Port Harcourt till tomorrow. Staying at the Sheraton tonight. That’s where the air hostesses stay, if you get me drift.

I nod. My bags finally arrive, damp and streaked with dirt. I lift them onto a cart. On the way out, an official in
mufti motions me to stop. He is seated to the side of the door, and doesn’t really appear to have any actual function. He’s just there. He asks if I am a student. Well, yes, sort of. I figure the lie will speed things along.

—Eh ehn, I thought so. You have that student look. And where do you study?

NYU, I say, the answer that would have been correct three years ago. He nods.

—Well, in New York, they spend dollars. You know, dollars.

A meaningless silence passes between us. Then, sotto voce, and in Yoruba, his demand:

—Ki le mu wa fun wa?
What have you brought for me for Christmas? Because, you know, they spend dollars in New York.

I have brought only resolve. I ignore him and roll my bags out to where Aunty Folake and her driver wait for me. When we unlock from our embrace, there are tears in her eyes. A scene out of the prodigal son. She hugs me again and laughs heartily.

—You haven’t changed at all! How is that possible?

Outside, the airport looks finer, more regal than it did on approach. The entrances are clogged with passengers’ relatives and, in far greater number, touts, hustlers, and all sorts of people who are there because they have nowhere else to be.

THREE

O
n the way home from the airport, at the roundabout of Ikeja bus stop, where the late afternoon rush makes the traffic snarl, we come to a complete standstill. Not more than twenty yards away from us, under the overpass, two policemen bicker. “Go away,” one yells at his partner. “Why you always dey stand here? Why you no go stand that side?” He points to the far side of the roundabout. For a moment, it seems as if the other officer sees the sense in the suggestion, but he is slow about carrying it out because the disagreement has by now attracted stares from pedestrians. He is reluctant to lose face. Both men are slim and dark, in gray-black uniforms, with machine guns slung over their shoulders. They stand confused and silent like a pair of actors
who have forgotten their lines. A crowd of commuters gawks at them from a safe distance.

Aunty Folake explains what is going on. Policemen routinely stop drivers of commercial vehicles at this spot to demand a bribe. The officer being told off has drifted too close to his colleague’s domain. Such clustering is bad for business: drivers get angry if they are charged twice. All this takes place under a billboard that reads “Corruption Is Illegal: Do Not Give or Accept Bribes.”

And how much of the government’s money, I wonder, was siphoned off by the contractor who landed the contract for those billboards?

It is one thing to be told of the “informal economy” of Lagos, and quite another to see it in action. It puts pressure on everybody. 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. The toll at the booth was set at two hundred naira: this was advertised and understood. However, enterprising drivers, such as ours, know that they can get through the toll gate if they pay just half of that. The catch is that the hundred naira they pay goes straight into the collector’s purse. “Two hundred you get ticket stub,” our driver says, “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 the toll at the informal rate, lining the pockets of the collectors and their superiors. The demand
from the immigration officer, the Ikeja police, the toll booth story: I encounter three clear instances of official corruption within forty-five minutes of leaving the airport.

Even before I get home that night, though, I see other ways of thinking about these exchanges of money. We stop at Ogba to buy bread. Ogba is some way past Ikeja, at the end of Agidingbi Road. On the way into the shop a doorman salutes us and holds the door open. When we leave the building a few minutes later, he follows us for twenty yards as we move toward the car, and asks for a tip. It is not a demand: it is soft. He does it with the gentleness of someone explaining something to a child.

—Do you have anything for me, sir?

He wears an off-white security guard’s uniform and carries no weapon. When my aunt shakes her head, he shakes his head apologetically, smiles, and melts away. When we get to the car, a thin woman in tattered
buba
and
iro
approaches us and says she wants some money for transportation to get home. I don’t see her approach, actually; she is just suddenly there, in front of me. She is small and looks ill. A small woman without a name: she is a part of what lies behind the gleaming merchant banks, the posh eateries, the luxury cars. The people who are suddenly there, the many who live off these small gifts.

Night descends with no warning. I am breathing the air of the city for the first time in a decade and a half, its white smoke and ocher dust which are as familiar as my own breath. But other things, less visible, have changed. I have
taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy—certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process—and in that sense I have returned a stranger. What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society.

Money, dished out in quantities fitting the context, is a social lubricant here. It eases passage even as it maintains hierarchies. Fifty naira for the man who helps you back out from a parking spot, two hundred naira for the police officer who stops you for no good reason in the dead of night, ten thousand for the clearing agent who helps bring your imported crate through customs. For each transaction, there is a suitable amount that helps things on their way. No one else seems to worry, as I do, that the money demanded by someone whose finger hovers over the trigger of an AK-47 is less a tip than a ransom. I feel that my worrying about it is a luxury that few can afford. For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms—the categories are fluid—is not thought of in moral terms. It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for.

Cash has to change hands, that’s the way of the world. Only in excessive cases, like that of the recently convicted inspector general of police, is it viewed as a blight on the system. Tafa Balogun’s stolen billions deprived many policemen
of their livelihood, and this is part, though not all, of the reason they in their turn extort drivers. Yet, the complaint that most people have is not that Balogun stole money. That a high-ranking government official would embezzle public funds is a given. What annoys people is that he stole so much so quickly. The reasoning was that if only he had shown some moderation, taking only a little here and there, he would not have been arrested. The Balogun case is one of the very few brought against a senior official since the national anticorruption campaign began; the day after my arrival in Lagos, the case is concluded. Balogun is found guilty and given six months in jail for the estimated fourteen billion naira he stole. Six months, that is, for a little over a hundred million dollars. There’s no reason, though, for believing that his is the most severe instance of theft. People assume that corruption goes on even at the highest levels of government: contracts, payoffs, oil bunkering. Later, there are rumors in the papers that Tafa Balogun has died in prison. How, why, or when, nobody seems to know. No one seems to mind that he is dead. And when the rumors turn out later to be untrue, that news, too, is met with a shrug.

Most police officers earn between ten and fifteen thousand naira a month. They cannot quite survive on such salaries, which amount to less than one hundred dollars. A friend of my uncle’s, an immigration officer, was once transferred out of state and to a remote area of the country. His refusal to take bribes was affecting his colleagues’ earnings
and, by extension, their ability to provide for their families; he had to be sent somewhere where he would be less of a nuisance. Salaries are similarly low in the armed forces, where, also, there is never any guarantee there will be payment. And it is these heavily armed and poorly paid men who are entrusted with the work of protecting the citizenry.

The informal economy is the livelihood of many Lagosians. But corruption, in the form of piracy or of graft, also means that most people remain on the margins. The systems that could lift the majority out of poverty are undercut at every turn. Precisely because everyone takes a shortcut, nothing works and, for this reason, the only way to get anything done is to take another shortcut. The advantage in these situations goes to the highest bidders, those individuals most willing to pay money or to test the limits of the law.

A few minutes after I finally arrive at my aunt and uncle’s house, the electricity goes out. For those who live here, this sudden deprivation is no surprise. It is a nocturnal ritual. But I’m no longer used to it, and I pass the night fitfully, tracing the shadows that flicker tirelessly on the concrete walls. The air is hot, and thick with old ghosts, and with the smell of kerosene.

FOUR

A
gentle music rouses me the next morning: the muezzin’s call to prayer floating across the forested valley that separates the house from the minaret. I rise and pad through the house. Everyone else—my uncle and aunt, my cousins, the servant—is still asleep. The electricity has not been restored yet. Natural light leaks into the living room. I make tea. Cockerels’ crows, from another direction, skitter over the muezzin’s Arabic. A smell of cooking smoke arrives from the distance.

From the back porch of the house is a view into a gorge. The view used to amaze me when I visited this house in the past, and while I was away my thoughts would periodically wander over to it. The gorge is now far from pristine. Trees
have been cut down, and tracts of land have been carved out for houses. Ugly buildings in various stages of completion now loom out of it. Clinging to the houses like barnacles are white satellite television dishes. Farther away is a half-built evangelical megachurch. It is a losing battle for the forest. But it is only daybreak, and all is as yet tranquil. I stand on the porch drinking my tea. Viewed from a certain angle, the gorge can still look primeval, can still conform to a certain idea of Africa: no gasoline fumes, no gleaming skyscrapers, no six-lane highways. Africa as bush and thicket. The morning sky is restless. Dark clouds gather in clumps and, little by little, the clumps gradually disappear. Light traces silver lines across the wide sky. I finish my tea and go back inside.

The hallways of the house are bigger than they used to be. The floor is broad and covered with curiously soft white tiles. It is as though I have shrunk in the years since I was last here, or the house itself has gently expanded in the heat, increasing by small amounts in each month of my absence to reach these dimensions. The doorframe is wide and high enough for a family of acrobats to walk through in formation. And there they suddenly are, in my presence, standing on each other’s shoulders, their limbs in astral shape. They negotiate the opening, thread it.