Adaobi Nwaubani - I Do Not Come to You by Chance

‘Money laundering. The allegation was made at the Zonal Command in Calabar, so the police here have to pretend as if they’re really doing something serious about it.’

‘Who made the allegation?’ I asked.

‘It’s politics,’ the campaign manager answered. ‘They just want to get Cash Daddy out of the way. They know he’s definitely going to win the elections.’

‘These are the dangers I warned him to expect right from the beginning,’ the human-rights-activist lawyer added. ‘Nigerian politics is a dirty game.’

‘They’re wasting their time,’ Protocol Officer said with flames in his voice.

‘They’ve been writing all sorts of rubbish about Cash Daddy in the newspapers,’ another one added indignantly, ‘but thank God the people of Abia State are not foolish enough to believe everything they read.’

‘No matter what they do,’ yet another one added, ‘Cash Daddy is still going to win.’

‘Of course,’ they all responded.

‘Cash Daddy is our man.’

Back at home, I saw that in my absence Charity had once again arranged my shoes according to their colours. Wondering for how long I would be able to maintain the order this time, I unbuckled the Prada shoes I was wearing and placed them carefully in the caramel row. Then I sat beside her on the bed, where she had been waiting for me. Seeing the gravity of her facial expression, I became more deeply immersed in dread.

‘Kings,’ she began. ‘There’s this very close friend of mine I met through one of my friends in school.’

I swallowed a hard lump of fear.

‘Kings,’ she looked up at me with shy eyes, ‘he asked me to marry him and I told him yes.’

Because of how serious she looked, I immediately resisted the temptation to burst out laughing. Truly, the idea of marriage makes girls suddenly behave strangely. I had never seen my sister like this before.

‘What’s his name?’ I asked, strictly for want of speech.

‘His name is Johnny,’ she replied. ‘But he’s Igbo,’ she added quickly. ‘His Igbo name is Nwokeoma. Nwokeoma Nwabekee.’

Naturally, I would not want my sister to marry someone who was not Igbo, but right now, that was the least of my concerns. Throughout that night, I tossed and turned in bed, tormented by various fears. What would become of my family – what would become of my sister – if anything were to happen to me? Losing a father was bad enough. But losing their source of life and sustenance would bring unimaginable disaster.

And what would happen to me, their source of life and sustenance, if anything were to happen to Cash Daddy?

It was not until five in the morning that I remembered the girl waiting for me at the hotel.

Cash Daddy was released by 9 a.m. He came out of the police cell looking dishevelled and disoriented, like a hermit who had just been discovered in a cave. On his way out of the station, he took some cash from Protocol Officer and distributed the hundred-dollar notes amongst the officers on duty. They thanked him profusely and saw him off to the waiting car. Protocol Officer had arrived in a Jaguar that bore ‘Cash Daddy 47’. He came alone, with just a driver and without the usual convoy. Cash Daddy chatted briefly with his political cronies, dismissed them, and turned to me.

‘Enter my car,’ he said.

From the backseat of my Audi, I took the carrier bag with the books I had purchased in Lagos and instructed my driver to ride behind us. Protocol Officer took his usual position in the front passenger seat, I sat next to my uncle in the back.

We drove past a police checkpoint without stopping. This checkpoint had not been here yesterday. As usual, when the men-in-black saw the number plate on the car, they shifted from the roadblock, genuflected, and waved. Sometimes Cash Daddy threw cash out of the window at them. Today, he did not even look in their direction.

Before long, his verbalomania kicked into action and Cash Daddy, once again, became as talkative as a magpie.

‘These people don’t know who they’re dealing with,’ he began. ‘Of course I know it’s Uwajimogwu that arranged this police trouble for me. The eagle said that it wasn’t a child when it started travelling long distances. I’ve been getting in and out of trouble since I was this small.’ He indicated a distance from the floor to the air that was not higher than a toilet seat. ‘Honestly, he doesn’t know who he’s dealing with.’

Uwajimogwu was his co-contender for the gubernatorial ticket of the National Advancement Party. It was general knowledge that even though there were at least thirty others who had collected forms and indicated their intention to contest, the fight was really just between both men. Whichever of them won the primaries was fairly certain to become the next governor of Abia State. The NAP was currently the strongest party, the one with the most billionaires and the highest concentration of reincarnated politicians whose histories went as far back as Nigeria ’s first democratic elections in the 1960s.

‘He knows I have the police here under my control, that’s why he went and lodged his complaints with the Zonal Command in Calabar. But they still don’t have any proof. Money laundering of all charges. He wants to get me into jail and the only thing he could come up with is money laundering.’

Cash Daddy laughed. This tactic of digging into a co-contender’s past to unearth crimes was proving quite effective in many states around the country. Just last week, a House of Representatives candidate in Delta State had been disqualified for spending four years in an Italian jail for drug trafficking. The man had kept denying the allegation until his opponents published the twenty-year-old records, which they had obtained from the Italian police, in five national dailies.

‘At first, I tried to be considerate,’ Cash Daddy continued. ‘I had planned to allow a few delegates to vote for him in the primaries, but now he has made me very angry. I’m going to make sure that not a single vote goes to him on that day. He’ll see that they don’t call me Cash Daddy for nothing. If a person bites you on the head without being concerned about your hair, then you can bite him on the buttocks without being concerned about his shit. Is that not so?’

Fortunately, I was not required to answer.

Cash Daddy tucked his hands beneath his T-shirt and started slapping a rhythm on his belly.

‘I’m very hungry,’ he announced. ‘I don’t think I slept more than five minutes last night. Mosquitoes were singing the national anthem in my ears. I have to make a complaint to Police Commissioner. At least they should have put a fan in my room.’

From what I had heard of our police cells, the facilities in a horse stable were supposed to be better.

Cash Daddy stretched his upper jaw to the North Pole, his lower jaw to the South Pole, and yawned. A billion mosquitoes must have lost their lives in the malodorous fumes from his mouth. Cleaning his teeth must have been the very last thing on his mind this morning.

‘I’m sure the whole of Nigeria has been trying to reach me,’ he said, switching on the cellular phone Protocol Officer had returned to him.

His face split in another yawn. He peered through his tinted window. A blue Bentley was coming from the opposite direction.

‘Is that not World Bank?’ he asked excitedly.

Protocol Officer had already seen the oncoming car and confirmed that it was.

‘I haven’t seen him in a long time,’ Cash Daddy said. ‘Stop!’

The driver stopped. Exactly where the Jaguar was in the middle of the road. He wound down Cash Daddy’s window from the control panel in front, and Cash Daddy stuck his head out. World Bank noticed his pal and must have commanded his own driver who stopped directly beside us. Also in the middle of the road.