On Sunday mornings there would always be a pile of white cow bones on the grassy verge outside the office. Where did they come from? Did someone march a cow up here and slaughter it on the rough wasteland between my hotel and the new office? I suspected that someone was just dumping the bones there. I thought they probably came along with a truck or a wheelbarrow and dumped the bones, they were too white to be fresh, I thought.
The pile of bones was usually topped off by a pair of yellowing horns, hollow in the core and with a thick fiberous rim, like an old fraying toenail ripped from a ingrown toe.
But it turns out I was wrong... they do indeed lead a cow up here and slice it up on the wasteground.
They buy the placid white cow from the Fulani herders who roam around the expressway, choosing as strong a cow as the Fulani will sell. They bring it up to Utako, tie its legs and pull it over, slicing the jugular as the cow goes down. They butcher the cow right there, stripping off the skin and cutting it up into sections which they sell to the hotel right away from a bloodsoaked table.
The butchers clothes are soaked with tacky, drying blood, and their knives, sharpened down to razor thin whip-blades, cut through fat and flesh. The skin, stripped off, lies drying in the sun. They will sell that too. A whole cow costs about N100,000. Ken tells me the Fulani, who sell milk and yoghurt to make a living will only sell a cow that is too weak to produce more milk. The tail and the head lie burning on a fire. Flies like glistening green glass beads stud the flesh on the table. In a few hours all that will be left are those white bones, a jaw with its teeth still crammed in lying on the table.

Part of the reason they employed me here is to improve journalistic standards at the paper. The CEO said to me when I arrived they put a lot of defamatory libellous stories in before. Stories are based on single sources, with little verification. He said he wanted to be more serious about this, improve the level of fact checking and balaning stories.
We have a story on hold at the moment about a business man in a northern Nigerian state who is going back on an agreement he made with the state government that he shoudl not attack the governor any more.
Last year the man signed a memorandum of understanding which said he would not issue any petitions or be involved in any legal action against the governor. He and his associates had been sueing the EFCC trying to get them to investigate the governor.
He says they paid him some money. He says he tried to pay the money back, because, he said if he flat refused the cash the government could have claimed he had taken it. If he took it and returned it, at least he could prove that he'd paid it back.
The trouble was his associates petitioned the EFCC about him, claming he'd taken N25 million and two plots of land. The people who got him to sign the agreement to leave the governor alone got hold of the petition, and forwarded it to the police.
They came up form Abuja, arrested the business man, and questioned him about the bribe. He was released. He resolved to start his campaign against the governor again, screw the agreement, they'd broken it by reporting him to the police for the bribe they gave him.

The story is riddled with incosistencies and one sided "facts". Our legal department has refused to pass the story and the reporter is getting more and more frustrated. There is talk that the CEO has links with the governor and is trying to stifle the story, but this is not entirely true. There was another story about the governor before, and the CEO just wanted some balance, apparently.

But we have three solid facts. There was an agreement, the man was arrested, and he has broken the agreement. I'm itching to publish the story, but the editor is being very cautious. People ask in the afternoon conference, "so the XXXX state story is done?" and the editor says "Kai! there are still problems with the legal side.""We're waiting on the documents to come".

I found myself on the side of people I had previously contradicted for being too reckless before.. using the same arguments ("what is the information commissioner going to say, IF we even get hold of him?" "Its a DAILY paper we should publish"). I phoned the information commissioner who refused to believe i worked for the paper, and even after speaking to the editor refused to make any comment or even listen to the accusations without seeng the documents.

Apparently the state government employees were really scared about us publishing the story, our reporter showed them the documents and the information commissioner said he wanted to see the story. we refused and so he said "no comment" which was predictable. But still we refuse to publish. Apparently the state civil servantsinvolved have started taking the mickey out of our reporter. They've started gloating.

Every day as I walk down the street people stop, point and shout "Oyibo!" it means white man. Let me just say, I don’t mind people hailing me in the street. By the big grins on people’s faces I can tell it gives them a lot of pleasure to point out the obvious.
There was only once that I felt threatened. A boy stopped me as I passed through Wuse market and said “Oyibo! You want beef?” His arms went out, his palms turned upwards, adding force to the question. I quavered, stammering “No! I just want to be friends!” In the US and Britain “You want beef?” means “do you want an argument? Let’s fight.” Rarely does it actually mean, as it did here, “would you like to buy my slaughtered cow’s flesh.”
It has been a challenge to find an adequate response. I started with a slightly reserved “hello”, but for some reason it felt too repressed. I wanted to break out of the bumbling English character, restrained by centuries of queasy embarrassment and social conformity. Other greetings like “hi” and “alright?” –pronounced “orrite?”, the usual greeting between Londoners– left me feeling I wasn’t making an effort. Adopting the pidgin “well done” sounded like I was taking the piss.
Often, the greeting from street hawkers with ribbons of MTN cards, or heads full of pure water packets, is shouted at me as I pass in a car with the window down, getting some air. This leaves me barely enough time to raise a hand in acknowledgement as we drive past.
As William Boyd wrote in his novel A Good Man in Africa, protagonist Morgan Leafy is pleased just to be noticed by the children in the street who yell at his passing. A strange satisfaction from a sight so unusual it made a stranger call out. Still I'm not Morgan Leafy, although I heard the man he based the character on still works in the high commission in Lagos.
After a long period of consideration I decided to try shouting back “BLACK MAN!”
It was apt, short and to the point. I thought it was funny. I just hoped people would take it in the spirit it was meant.
When I told him of my plan, Emmanuel from the politics desk said: “Why don’t you say ‘NI***R!’?”
Now, reader, be assured I can hardly bring myself to write that word, let alone allow it to pass my lips as audible speech. It’s a word so laden with negativity and malice that my skin turned more pallid at the thought.
“Absolutely no way could I say that, Bello.”
He looked puzzled. “But Eminem says it all the time. He is white, why can he say it and you cannot?”
But Eminem wants to provoke aggression. Marshal Mathers the third likes nothing better than being attacked, set free to unleash his own vitriol.
Now why would I want to do that when just stating the obvious gives me a kick?