Poverty fair

The sun filtered down from the jewelled skylight, water playfully tinkled from the granite fountain catching the midday sun that poured into the atrium of the Yar’adua centre. I was looking at a set of pictures pinned to the wall. I couldn’t quite see what I was looking at. There were three that seemed to be where rocky ground met a swamp. It wasn’t much of a swamp even, a dirty brown smear with spines, porcupine quill reeds bristling up. In the third photograph there is a woman walking toward the camera. She has an enamel bowl on her head. Her red wrapper looks dull and muddy, I can’t tell if it’s the photograph over exposed or the swamp smeared on her body.
In the first of the next row of photos, a man sits on the floor, holding a cup. His green caftan is rumpled. I see his face. It looks punched. The photo looks as if it’s captured the moment he hit the floor on his rear. His mouth is pushed to one side and pursed in pain. It looks like he’s been pushed down, humiliated.
I can’t see what the other photos are because my eyes are on the next three. They’re drawn to the pictures by a kind of grotesque fascination. A woman stands with her arms open, fists clutching the corners of her wrapper. Her torso is exposed, her head removed by the edge of the picture. Her breasts hang around a giant bulbous belly. Under her skin, it seems, are bags of pawpaw, or potatoes. One of the bags has erupted in a raw, open, weeping wound.
The pictures are part of a display wall in the Rotary Project Fair. Tony, a smartly dressed Rotarian from Yola, explains the village is a few kilometres from Numan in Adamawa state. “When I went to this village I had to take a bike. It was dry season and the driver went a very narrow path that would have been impossible during the rains.
In a salesman’s voice he says: “There are maybe 500 families in this village, and you know with our polygamous culture, there could be ten to fifteen people in one family. This water here is their only source of water,” he said pointing to the slick of mud in the first shots.
“Their only water?”
“Yes, drinking, bathing, washing. If you can see in this photo there is a woman taking water from behind these reeds.” I hadn’t seen her. He pointed her out. “They don't even boil it before drinking. They believe if they go further in the water is cleaner.” He shrugged.
Pointing to the man “This is the head of the village, and he’s drinking the water straight from the marsh.” The water was thick and brown, it looked like tea.
“Two decades ago some people came and dug a borehole, and after two days it packed up. Maybe they didn’t dig it properly and it dried up very quickly. And here,” he said pointing to a stack of dusty concrete blocks, “Is a well that never worked. In this area there is a lot of Bilharzia. This picture you can see samples of urine.” He pointed to a picture I had skimmed over because I was gripped by the pictures of the woman just below it. “All these are samples of bloody urine. The parasite lives in the bladder and feeds off tissue and the inside of the bladder bleeds.”
How many people have the disease in the village?
“Virtually everyone,” he said. “We want to dig a series of boreholes that will work. A standard borehole will cost 800,000 naira.” (3200 pounds)
And what does this lady have? I asked pointing at the pictures.
“No one knows,” he replied, “Because there is no health clinic or any facilities. Even this school," he said pointing to a building “was built by a charity, but in this school many children die of measles, because the disease spreads through the still air in the classrooms.” He points to a picture of a sandy piece of land with a tree. “This is where the villagers have designated someone can come and build a health facility if they want. The last time the government employed a village health worker, he came and after two days he ran away because there was no water.”
The only thing I could think to say was “I suppose most of the young people leave and go to the city.” Tony nodded.
As I thanked Tony for taking the time to explain the villages situation to me, a colleague of his pinned an A4 sized enlargement of the woman’s tumour-filled belly on the wall.
I returned to browsing the stands with the visiting American Rotarians as they decided which of the many projects on display to fund.

The Third Man

I turned on the television the other day. Through the blizzard of fuzz across my ailing TV set a face rose out of the gloom.
It was a man’s face I recognised, but couldn’t immediately place the movie it was from. It filled the black and white screen he had a wave of grey hair, a slightly skewed look on his face, and a drooping lip. I heard the joyless-but-jaunty zither music of the score and it clicked, one of my favourite films - The Third Man. The face was that of Harry Lime's porter -scared, powerless and confused, caught in the middle of something bad.
The porter tells out-of-his-depth pulp writer Holly Martins there was a third man in the street –not two- when Harry Lime was killed “quite dead”. Martins had arrived in Vienna at his friend Harry’s invitation, only to be told Harry had been killed in a road accident.
Naïve Martins feels something is up, and despite everyone telling him not to stir the murky pot of post-war Vienna he continues to ask questions. He and Lime's girlfriend Anna are pulled into a vortex of deceit, corruption, murder and betrayal which ends sourly.
I loved this film from the opening monologue: “I never knew the old Vienna before the war, with its Strauss music, its glamour and its easy charm –Constantinople suited me better.” It conjures atmosphere. On-screen the wet cobbled streets of Austria’s capital are eerie and deserted, with only the broken poor and international police stalking them. The city is full of broken buildings and bombed out heaps of bricks. The final chase is through the city’s labyrinthine sewers, and the end gives no redemption. It’s unmerciful.
It also has one of the greatest entrances in movie history. As Martins walks though the streets at night he sees Anna’s cat playing at the feet of a man hiding in a doorway outside her apartment. He calls to the man to come out, and a woman in an upstairs window tells him to shut up. She turns a light on and the man’s face is illuminated. It is Harry Lime, the boyish Orson Welles, back from the dead.
The film brought together legendary producer David Selznick, British director Carol Reed and the great novelist Graham Greene. Reed was the first director to use skewed, busted-angle shots, a technique so unusual then a friend sent him a spirit level. Now all thrillers are shot a bit wonky. The way the city is lit makes it another character, with creepy shadows and unseen lights. Several shadow shots are actually impossible, the results of great pre-computer light trickery. We see Harry Lime’s shadow running away, but it is actually the shadow of a man running on the spot in front of a spotlight. The ominous shadow of a man selling balloons enters a square from the opposite direction as the actual actor, because the shot would not work any other way.
But watching in my room in Abuja I realised that something has changed. The film is the same, but something has changed in me. Its not only a film about the search for Harry Lime, it’s also about corruption and poverty. It’s about a failed and broken state where the poor and sick are too numerous to be treated. When the Viennese characters speak they are ignored, and remain un-translated for the audience. The city is divided between outside forces, ruled by a haughty international elite who are enacting their own interests rather than governing for the defeated people. The black market fills the gap they leave. Ordinary people suffer and are exploited. Harry Lime’s racket is stealing penicillin and diluting it, faking the drugs people need to cure their multiplicity of diseases. People continue to die and no one really cares.
Before Nigeria, I’d just seen Orson Welles playing an evil man – Welles and his enigma, his own star quality- in the foreground, the evil somehow in the background. The corruption seemed to be one of the things about the film that didn’t add up (why does Harry invite his friend to Vienna? What was he doing outside her flat? Who would fake drugs, just to make money?)
But years later, knowing about the factories in Onitsha that churn out fake pills, protected by powerful godfathers, Welles’ famous speech reveals more to me than before: “Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you 20,000 pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man, free of income tax.”

The phone

I pulled up the car and climbed out of the ac blast into the heat. It dragged my shoulders down, I could feel energy evaporating out of my body and escaping into the air, up and away into the eggshell blue sky. I’d been putting this off for over a week, and now there was no getting away from it. I locked the car and turned towards the line of touts who had begun to shuffle toward me.
All that time ago, back in Kano, some little scrotum stole my phone. I must have been standing almost within reach of the governor as the Emir made his way down the long red carpet under his sequinned umbrella. We’d pushed and shoved to get to the front, and I was trying to protect my pockets and take pictures. One hand was on my right side where my car key was, and the other hand was on my camera. I guess something had to give. Regular readers might remember I have a track record of having my pocket picked within spitting distance of important Nigerian leaders. It was only a matter of time before it happened again, I suppose.
And now, after too long, I’d eventually wound up the umph to deal with the modalities of re-acquiring my personal telephonic registration and availability-facilitating numeric sequence. I’d been ringing the customer service helpline for days trying to get hold of a human being to tell me how to get my number back, without avail. Every time I’d just get trapped in an infuriating loop of an automated message. It promised me I would get to speak to an operator but, when I pressed the button I was delivered back to the start, where the woman said in a bright perky faux-posh twang: “To hear this message in English press one.”
So I went down to the customer service department of the phone company and walked smartly up to the guard on the door. In front of me, a little chubby guy was looking very frustrated. He was waving papers at the guard and gesticulating. “Why can’t I reach the customer services on the phone? I have a complaint!” he said.
The guard gave a wet-lipped Buddha smile and said: “That’s because the customer services people want to listen to your complaint in person. Now please take a number and join the queue.” He pointed to the sunshades behind us where about 70 disgruntled people sat fanning themselves.
He pointed me over there too. I walked up to the seats and asked: “How now? How long have you all been waiting here?”
There was some grumbling. A weary, lean looking guy said: “I been here only ten minutes, but my friend, if you want it sharp sharp go speak to those small boys outside. They take you to another office where they know someone and you get it the same day. Here you pay 380, but there you give them a K. Here you have to wait three, four days, there you can use it the same day… That’s Nigeria for you.”
This last aphorism brought another man’s head round. “Eh! Why you go tell him ‘that’s Nigeria’ you give him a bad impression.”
The weary looking man rolled his eyes, as if to say “my friend you don’ craze”. A hefty argument was about to ensue. I hightailed it out of there.
I couldn’t face dealing with the touts that day, so I sacked it off and resolved to do it the next.
And there I was, standing before them as they ambled to me like a posse of gunfighters. I drew myself up to my full height. How much?
“Two thousand.”
“A-ah! You are a greedy man. I know it’s less than that. This greedy man wants two thousand,” I asked his friend “what do you say?” By public auction I hammered them down.
I took John, my chosen tout, to the other office. He’s been selling recharge cards for four years. “But I moved over to the welcome back because you can make money,” he said. Of the one K I was to give him, he would take 600 and pay the “inside man” 400. There were scores of other guys in the shop with stacks of welcome packs. Other customers gave me a knowing glance as John handed me my life back.
But I'd realised that I didn't need this guy. I could have just come up to the office myself and queued. But in Nigeria information is so badly dispersed that it becomes as valuable as money. Not many people know about the phone company's Wuse Zone 5 office at the moment, so the touts exploit that and charge people who want their phone numbers back "sharp sharp", and don't mind paying extra. Its a precarious way of making money, but one that requires little education and no start up cost.