Anthills of the Savannah (2 page)

“Which Honourable Commissioner? There are twelve of them, you know.” This would have excited laughter at other times, but something totally new is happening now and we are all too amazed.

“Your Excellency I mean the Honourable Commissioner for Information.” There is a long and baffled silence. Then His Excellency who, I should admit, is extremely good at such times says:

“He doesn’t need a word from you. Remember, he owns all the words in this country—newspapers, radio and television stations…”

The peals of laughter that broke out engulfed everybody for minutes and put us all at ease again. Colleagues close enough were laughing and slapping my back. Others beamed their goodwill across.

“The Honourable Commissioner for Words,” the Attorney-General manages through his laughter. “That’s a good one. By God that’s a good one.” He is dabbing his eyes with a handkerchief still neatly folded.

“Opposed! It sounds too much like me,” protested the Commissioner for Works.

“That’s true,” says the Attorney-General, pausing in his laughter
to reflect. “Commissioner for Words and Commissioner for Works. There’s a point there.”

“Theologically speaking there is a fundamental distinction.” This is Professor Okong in his deep pulpit voice.

“Ah, Professor done come-o,” says the Commissioner for Education. We were all so merry. If the meeting ended now we would go home happy—the homely ones among us entitled to answer their wives with a smile should they ask what kind of day they’d had. But His Excellency wasn’t done with us yet, alas!

“What were you going to say for the Commissioner of Information, anyway?”

“Your Excellency, it is—erm—about this visit to Abazon.”

“In that case the meeting stands adjourned.” He gets up abruptly. So abruptly that the noise we make scrambling to our feet would have befitted a knee-sore congregation rising rowdily from the prayers of a garrulous priest.

His Excellency sits down again and leans back calmly on his swivel chair in order to search under the table for the court shoes he always kicks off at the beginning of our meetings and which the Chief Secretary as always and quite unobtrusively arranges side by side with movements of his own feet to save His Excellency the trouble of prolonged searching at the end of the meeting. If His Excellency is aware of this little service he never acknowledges it, but takes it for granted like the attention of the invisible bell-boy who shines your shoes overnight in an expensive hotel. With consummate deliberation he looks down to the floor and slips in his right foot. He looks on the other side and slips in his left. And then discarding altogether the sprightliness of his first rising he now heaves himself slowly up by the leverage of his hands on the heavy arms of his chair. And the amazing thing is that this lumbering slowness and the former alacrity seem equally to become him.

We all stand stock-still. The only noise in the room comes from his own movements and the continuous whirring of the air-conditioners which have risen to attention in the silence of a deferential Cabinet waiting with bated breath on the Chief to become shod again and, in his good time, withdraw into the seclusion of his adjoining private enclosure.

Sometimes he would say
Good afternoon, gentlemen
on taking leave of us. Today, naturally, he said nothing. As he left his seat an orderly gathered up his papers quickly and followed him out. Another
orderly, more stern-faced, opened the heavy doors of carved panels, stood aside and gave a long, hand-quivering salute.

“He is not in a good mood today,” says the Chief Secretary, breaking the freeze. “We’ll bring it up again next Thursday, Chris. Don’t worry.”

His Excellency is probably meant to overhear this and I believe he does. I could see a smile or the radiance of a smile from the back of his head like the faint memory of light at the edges of an eclipse.

In the final stages of His Excellency’s retiring, the silence in the Council Chamber seemed to be undergoing a subtle change. Something indeterminate had entered it and was building up slowly within its ambience. At first I thought the air-conditioners had become just fractionally louder which would be perfectly consistent with the generating vagaries of the National Electric Power Authority. Then the Chief Secretary’s observation and the flurry of conversation it started about His Excellency’s changing moods kept us from noticing the sound for a while. The Attorney-General came over to my seat and clapped me on the shoulder.

“What’s the matter with you, Chris? Why are you so tense these days? Relax, man, relax; the world isn’t coming to an end, you know.”

I was angrily but silently rebuffing his peace overtures when, as though on a signal, everyone in the room stopped talking. Then we all turned to the east window.

“A storm?” someone asks.

The low hibiscus hedge outside the window and its many brilliant red bells stood still and unruffled. Beyond the hedge the courtyard with its concrete slabs and neatly manicured bahama grass at the interstices showed no flying leaves or dust. Beyond the courtyard another stretch of the green and red hedge stood guard against the one-story east wing of the Presidential Palace. Over and beyond the roof the tops of palm-trees at the waterfront swayed with the same lazy ease they display to gentle ocean winds. It was no ordinary storm.

The Chief Secretary whose presence of mind is only inhibited by the presence of His Excellency moves over to the sill, unhooks a latch and pushes back a glass window. And the world surges into the alien climate of the Council Chamber on a violent wave of heat and the sounds of a chanting multitude. And His Excellency
rushes back into the room at the same time leaving the huge doors swinging.

“What is going on?” he demands, frantically.

“I shall go and see, Your Excellency,” says the Inspector-General of Police, picking up his peaked cap from the table, putting it on his head and then his baton under his arm and saluting at attention.

“Look at him! Just look at him,” sneers His Excellency. “Gentlemen, this is my Chief of Police. He stands here gossiping while hoodlums storm the Presidential Palace. And he has no clue what is going on. Sit down! Inspector-General of Police!”

He turns to me. “Do you know anything about this?”

“I am sorry I don’t, Your Excellency.”

“Beautiful. Just beautiful. Now can anyone here tell me anything about that crowd screaming out there?” He looks at each of us in turn. No one stirs or opens his mouth. “That’s what I mean when I say that I have no Executive Council. Can you see what I mean now, all of you? Take your seats, gentlemen, and stay there!” He rushes out again.

At the door he is saluted again by the orderly of the quivering hands. Perhaps it is the way the fellow closes those heavy doors now like a gaoler or perhaps some other subtle movement or gesture with the sub-machine-gun in his left hand that drew from the Attorney-General a deep forlorn groan: “Oh my God!” I put on a broad smile and flash it in his face. He backs away from me as from a violent lunatic.

Very few words are spoken in the next half hour. When the doors swing open again, an orderly announces:
Professor Okong Wanted by His Excellency
!

“I go to prepare a place for you, gentlemen… But rest assured I will keep the most comfortable cell for myself.” He went out laughing. I too began to laugh quite ostentatiously. Then I said to my colleagues: “That is a man after my heart. A man who will not piss in his trousers at the first sound of danger.” And I went to the furthest window and stood there alone gazing outwards.

Professor Reginald Okong, though a buffoon, is a fighter of sorts and totally self-made. Unfortunately he has no sense of political morality which is a double tragedy for a man who began his career as an American Baptist minister and later became Professor of Political Science at our university. Perhaps he has more responsibility
than any other single individual except myself for the remarkable metamorphosis of His Excellency. But, perhaps like me he meant well, neither of us having been present before at the birth and grooming of a baby monster.

As a bright pupil-teacher in lower primary school Reginald Okong had attracted the attention of American Baptist missionaries from Ohio who were engaged in belated but obdurate evangelism in his district. They saw a great future for him and ordained him at the age of 26. In their
Guinness Book of Records
mentality they often called him the youngest native American Baptist minister in the world. Native American? Good heavens no! Native African. But, while they were conscientiously grooming Okong slowly but surely into the future head of their local church in say twenty or thirty years, the young Reverend, bright, ambitious and in a great hurry was working secretly on schemes of his own, one of which was to take him away altogether from the missionary vineyard to the secular campuses of a southern Black college in the United States of America itself to the dismay of his Ohio patrons who did not stop at accusations of ingratitude but mounted a determined campaign with US Immigration aimed at getting him deported. But he too was tough and overcame all his difficulties. Augmenting his slender resources by preaching and wrestling he graduated in record time by passing off his Grade Three Teachers’ Certificate as the equivalent of two years of Junior College. Four years later he was back home with a Ph.D. in his bag, and went to teach at the university.

I was editor of the
National Gazette
at the time and he approached me with a proposal for a weekend current affairs column. I was mildly enthusiastic and although I was aware of the reservations some of his academic colleagues often expressed about his scholarship I proceeded to build him up as a leading African political scientist, as editors often do thinking they do it for the sake of their paper but actually end up fostering a freak baby. But I must say Okong was a perfect contributor in meeting deadlines and that kind of thing. And his column, “String Along with Reggie Okong,” soon became very popular indeed. No one pretended that he dispensed any spectacular insights, wisdom or originality but his ability to turn a phrase in a way to delight our ordinary readers was remarkable. He was full of cliché, but then a cliché is not a cliché if you have never heard it before; and our
ordinary reader clearly had not and so was ready to greet each one with the same ecstasy it must have produced when it was first coined. For Cliché is but pauperized Ecstasy.

Think of the very first time someone got up and said: “We must not be lulled into a false sense of security.” He must have got his audience humming. It was like that with Okong; he was a smash hit! My friend, Ikem Osodi, was always at me for running that column. He said Professor Okong deserved to be hanged and quartered for phrase-mongering and other counterfeit offences. But Ikem is a literary artist, and the
Gazette
was not there to satisfy the likes of him; not even now that he sits in the editorial chair! A fact he is yet to learn.

Naturally Okong never upset the politicians; he kept their constituency amused. I didn’t mind, either. I had enough contributors like Ikem to do all the upsetting that was needed and a lot that wasn’t. But on the very next day after the politicians were overthrown Okong metamorphosed into a brilliant analyst of their many excesses. I thought he had finally overreached himself changing his tune so abruptly; but not so my readers, judging by their ecstatic letters. Apparently he had scored another hit by describing the overthrow of the civilian regime as “a historic fall from grace to grass!” After that I doffed my cap to him. And when His Excellency asked me to suggest half-a-dozen names for his Cabinet Professor Okong was top of my list.

This calls for some explanation and justification. His Excellency came to power without any preparation for political leadership—a fact which he being a very intelligent person knew perfectly well and which, furthermore, should not have surprised anyone. Sandhurst after all did not set about training officers to take over Her Majesty’s throne but rather in the high tradition of proud aloofness from politics and public affairs. Therefore when our civilian politicians finally got what they had coming to them and landed unloved and unmourned on the rubbish heap and the young Army Commander was invited by the even younger coup-makers to become His Excellency the Head of State he had pretty few ideas about what to do. And so, like an intelligent man, he called his friends together and said: “What shall I do?”

I had known him then for close on twenty-five years, from that day long ago when we first met as new boys of thirteen or fourteen at Lord Lugard College. And so I found myself advising “a whole
Head of State” who was, in addition, quite frankly terrified of his new job. This is something I have never been quite able to figure out: why the military armed to the teeth as they are can find unarmed civilians such a threat. For His Excellency, it was only a passing phase, though. He soon mastered his fear, although from time to time memories of it would seem to return to torment him. I can see no other explanation for his quite irrational and excessive fear of demonstrations, for example. Even pathetically peaceful, obsequious demonstrations.

In his first days of power his constant nightmare was of the people falling into disaffection and erupting into ugly demonstrations all over the place, and he drove himself crazy worrying how to prevent it. I had no clear idea myself. But I imagined that a person like Professor Okong without having any clearer ideas than either of us would be helpful in putting whatever came into our heads into popular diction and currency. And so he was number one on my list and His Excellency appointed him Commissioner for Home Affairs. He had his day and then went into partial eclipse. But I hardly think he is due for prison, yet.

H
IS
E
XCELLENCY’S
deep anxiety had been swiftly assuaged by his young, brilliant and aggressive Director of the State Research Council (SRC). He proved once again in his Excellency’s words as efficient as the Cabinet was incompetent. Every single action by this bright young man from the day of his appointment has given His Excellency good cause for self-congratulations for Major Johnson Ossai had been his own personal choice whom he had gone ahead to appoint in the face of strong opposition from more senior officers. And it had happened at the very tricky moment when His Excellency had decided to retire all military members of his cabinet and to replace them with civilians and, to cap it all, add President to all his titles. There were unconfirmed rumours of unrest, secret trials and executions in the barracks. But His Excellency rode the storm quite comfortably thanks to two key appointments he had personally made—the Army Chief of Staff and the Director of the State Research Council, the secret police.