The President Who Was Like Me Chukwu Sunday Abel

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THE PRESIDENT WHO WAS LIKE ME

Chukwu Sunday Abel

I was like you, when I had no shoes, said our president, the commander in chief of the armed forces. I heard his voice over brother Femi’s China-made giant of a phone cum radio, cum torchlight. There was a time our president had no shoes—he walked barefooted like me. The soles of his feet conquered by allied forces of dirt, of the hard and jagged hot sand we tread on. His soles must have had psoriasis, must have been flaked by out of sight leeches, just like mine. The president must have walked on his tiptoes when his soles went sore- peeled by hot, grainy sand. He must have resorted to walking with his heels when the tiptoes went sore. Our president must have had his toenails caked, disheveled by unsympathetic dermatophyte fungi. The president once had no shoes and today, I have no shoes—a shared omen. An augury that portends that one day, I will become the president of Nigeria, or if not the president, maybe a minister or a governor, or a commissioner, or a representative in the national or state assembly.

What he said yesterday—what I heard over brother Femi’s phone cum radio—is the most interesting thing. So interesting that my protesting intestines became calm, pacified by the augury words of the president. His voice was loud and clear, unambiguous, so coherent, like the sound of my growling, churning stomach, but brother Femi’s expression was that of artful disbelief. He thought the president was lying. Politicians! Politicians! And their lies, liar-liar people, he said, shaking his head vigorously as if to shake off the words. I was not bothered by whatever so bothered him. My concern was the president, the president who had no shoes. I want a Nigeria where the son of nobody will become somebody without knowing anybody, the president said. The president understood that not everybody has somebody, and not everybody is somebody. Even though everybody must be conceived through lovemaking, that seems not to be the case with me, with us. A child conceived through lovemaking should be loved, cared for. Maybe, I am born by mistake, an unwanted child. Maybe a curse from God, rather than a blessing. No child conceived through lovemaking would be treated like we have been, by our parents. The society smiles at it, so, we learn to live with it, by it. A perennial sinister experience that has become conventional.

The president must have been nobody when he had no shoes—just like me, just like brother Femi, just like everybody in this school. This school we live in, sleep in, eat in. This school some of us have died in. Some of us have been raped in. Some of us have been violated, violated in our anuses. Our anuses panged by older ones amongst us with their stiffed phallus until the anus reddened, unable to hold water or air from slipping out. It is a school for the school children but a home for us, the homeless, homeless boys and homeless men with two arms, one head, two legs, two eyes, and one penis each that pokes our pants each morning. Boys and men like all the others, but homeless. Boys with hope, very hopeful, and men who had hope, just like brother Femi. Brother Femi told me how he wanted to become a welder, how he had hoped to become a husband, a father to a child, at least. He told me he has no father, like me. He said

It appears my president who was like me, my source of hope, wants to make me homeless. I have lived here for what have been the most important days of my life. The president has declared that our home, my school, will be demolished.

he has no mother also. He said that I am lucky, lucky for having living parents.

The mosquitoes seem to have procured metal proboscises this night, brother Femi said. Their buzzing seems to be aided by an evil spirit. They seem to have slipped out of the hand of God, maybe unplanned. Nothing went just right.

You have refused to tell me what happened, brother Femi said, jolting me from my rumination over my life, over the day.

Nothing happened—it’s just that today is, somehow. Nobody sought my load-carrying services today. It was as if the day and the people at the market conspired against me. Not even five naira returned with me. The woman I sweep her shop said she will pay me tomorrow. It was really a bad day. I looked at brother Femi, his head hanging fittingly in his outstretched hands. He seemed to be dozing off. Maybe he was unlucky as I was. Whatever it is that troubles his mind should not deprive me of the opportunity of listening to the president today, I thought.

That is not what I am asking you. What happened in your house? Even if you are to go out of your papa house, but not now. You are too young. How many years did you even say you are?

Eleven, I said.

You look very tiny, smaller than an eleven-year-old boy should be. Each time I ask you to tell me why you left your papa house, you will start crying.

The first night I slept here I didn’t know about the diurnal life after the daily school life of school children. I had spent some hours in this school. I was in primary three—still battling with ABCD and four-digit numbers. Every morning, we recited the English alphabets in a singsong manner, over and over and over. I failed to learn how to recite the letters, let alone write them. During the recitation, whatever you shouted—whether it was misplaced or not—sounded correct to of the worn out teacher. I never knew I would return to this school and make it my home one day. I stopped going to school afterwards once I started living in my school. I had to fend for myself, just like I had been when I lived with my parents. We return when the school children have left and we leave very early in the morning, before the school children arrive, without leaving any trace.

It was a few months ago, maybe six, maybe five. I don’t remember past things because they are not worth remembering. They add nothing to my present except hopelessness. But, thanks to my president, a source of hope. That night, that rainy night, nature and God were against me. If not so, why would it rain so heavily the night I had no shelter to sleep in? The night that flood swept my feet off the ground, into the flooded gutter, my gaping mouth drank hungrily, helplessly from the befouled gutter water. If not for these, my eleven year old hands—brother Femi called them tiny—would I have survived? These, my tiny

hands, were what delivered me from the resilient flood that wanted to sweep me like it did the empty plastic cans, nylon bags, and the bagged feces. Thank God my hands were more resilient than they should have been.

After swimming through the flood, I trotted towards this school in the thick darkness of the rainy night. On getting to this our school, into the classrooms, I was greeted by smoking cigarettes, a head-dizzying hemp smell lingering in the air. Every space was occupied by listless, muscular bodies—some slumbering, some blowing cigarette smoke into the air. I was treated like a stray ewe that night. Different, eye-threatening torchlight pointed at my face. Shouts of, Who is that! coinciding here and there. Some of them stood up, walked towards me to know my mission that night at the school. My tears answered their questions. Since that night, I have joined this league of homeless children declared surplus by their parents, their parents who married new wives to augment the existing ones in a one-room apartment. Three wives, nine children, as is the case with me. My father married a new wife the week my mother was delivered of what would be her fourth child. With the pregnant new wife, and my nursing mother and younger siblings across two stepmothers—siblings with little age difference among them—the mantle of leaving the home fell on me. I was the eldest, hence, nobody saw anything bad in the bad act. My father informed me that at my age, I was not meant to be sharing his apartment with him. Azeez, who I met here, said that his parents told him same. Fatai said same. Gbenga said his father abandoned them and his mother remarried. His stepfather told his mother that he only married her and not her and her son, Gbenga. They—Azeez, Fatai and Gbenga—are not older than I am, but it appears so because nature cheated me of some flesh. It was Azeez who introduced me to kaya work, carrying of items at the market.

The league of homeless boys enjoy the commonwealth of homelessness—unrestricted freedom. No monitoring by parents, away from parental control. We go to wherever we want and return whenever we want, not to be shouted at by our zealot parents, not to be lashed mercilessly, denied dinner, threatened with being ejected from home. These are the commonwealth of the homeless—the dividend of homelessness. For me, no hawking of groundnut and bananas for my mother; no more incessant smacking of my head, squeezing of my ears by my mother, lashing of my buttocks by my father, rubbing of Cameroon pepper on my penis, my eyes and my anus, in extreme cases, when a glass cup was broken, or when notes of naira slipped out of my moist palm and went missing, when some counted chunks of meat disappeared mysteriously from the pot of our newly cooked ewedu soup, egusi soup. Before, my eyes had to be smeared in ground Cameroon pepper when I returned some minutes after my schoolmates had, or failed to meet the daily sales target of my bananas. My anus couldn’t escape being smeared in pepper when a report of my playing football while hawking reached the ears of my father. (This, the most veritable example of my being peppered like stubborn bush meat—pepper soup.) Since I joined this league, my ears have experienced calm from the vociferous rants of my parents. Here, we live by what fate brings and die by what fate brings.

The lying spaces are tacitly shared amongst us. The older ones, like brother Femi, who have become a veteran in the league of homeless people here, have more lying spaces. Children like myself, Azeez, Gbenga and Faita manage whatever is left. We live communally here. The older ones protect us, sometimes, prey on us by relieving their long-endured libido in our anuses. We, in turn, render services to them in exchange. We buy cigarettes for them whenever we are sent. We wash their clothes. Sometimes, we steal from them.

So, because your father married a new wife, that was why he chased you out?

Yes, brother Femi, I said, not wanting to prolong the discussion because it was time to hear from our president. Brother Femi is a waste-collector. He has done that for many years. His phone is the greatest feat he has achieved in recent time.

We want to lead a country where people will be less greedy. Where people will know that the commonwealth of Nigeria belongs to all Nigerians, where people’s wealth depends on the people around them. If you become a rich person and everyone around you is poor, you are very poor. In the comfort of our offices, let’s not forget that the majority of our people live below the poverty line, my president, who was like me, said. I will go to bed with the imaginary, reverberating voice of the president. That I am a part of the Nigerian people our president said the commonwealth of the nation belongs to. But my president did not stop there: My story symbolizes my dream for Nigeria. The dream that any Nigerian child from Kaura-Namoda to Duke Town, from Potiskum to Nsukka, from Isale-Eko to Gboko will be able to realize his God-given potentials, unhindered by tribe or religion and unrestricted by improvised political inhibitions. In line with my administration’s transformation agenda, we will be demolishing about one-hundred and four dilapidated primary school buildings across the nation. New buildings are to be erected in their place within this period of long vacation. The schools marked are: community primary school Ijegun, Lagos…

It appears my president who was like me, my source of hope, wants to make me homeless. I have lived here for what have been the most important days of my life. The president has declared that our home, my school, will be demolished.

What if they come tomorrow, as he said. What will you do? Brother Femi asked my troubled heart. With my bleary eyes, my twitching lips, I said: I will follow you. Please don’t leave me behind. I have no place to go to. Clouds of hot tears trickled down my cheeks. My chins seemed to be flabby, sagged by the heaviness of the pile of hopelessness in me. It had never occurred to me that my president could betray me in that way. My source of hope becomes my source of hopelessness, the cause of my

homeliness even though I had been homeless.

You can’t go with me. Where I am going to is far. I will be relocating to under-bridge, Orile Under-bridge. I have lived there before, so many years ago. That was the first place I lived when I became homeless like you. My father did not marry another wife like your father did, Brother Femi hissed. He hook his head and looked heavenwards, abstractedly, as if he were being spoken to.

My father became mad when I was like you, at your age. But I was bigger than you are now. We were two; I have a younger sister. One morning, we woke in our one room apartment at Orile to discover that our mother had abandoned us. She left the house while we were sleeping, leaving no trace of her whereabouts. That was how we became homeless, so many years ago.

What about your sister? Where is she now?

She started working at one brothel at Orile. She slept there. It has been very, very long since I saw her.

Please, don’t leave me behind. I have no place to go to.

Let’s wait and learn how many days, months or years it will take them to come for the demolition. Is it not government people? They don’t do as they say. Watch and see—it is easier to say than to do.

But he said the demolition and reconstruction will be done during this third, term-long vacation.

Rather than the hopeful words of the president I had expected, the message of my doom from my president echoed ceaselessly in my head while I slept. The night became extremely uncommunicative. Nobody spoke. Everywhere, noiseless, except the buzzing and fast-flying mosquitoes, the unsleeping crickets that broke the grave-silence with their intermittent chirps, the hooting of the wide-awake owls, relishing the night’s cooling breeze, keeping us company, haunting us, reminding me of my yet-to-come days of destitution. The night seemed longer than usual. Everyone awaited the daybreak as if it would furnish us with some hope, as if the president would rescind his decision. But the new day came and nothing happened. The president, oblivious of our plight, our homelessness, didn’t change anything. The brightness of the new dawn revealed to our agonized eyes the approaching bulldozers, excavators, concrete mixers, men with helmets on their heads, in contrast with brother Femi’s counsel: They don’t do as they say.

Indeed, one man’s meat is another man’s poison. While I stood with my black nylon bag— in it, my halved, tooth-chopped chewing-stick, my torn, aged, white-turned-black pants, my oversized shorts I stole from my father, a rusted razorblade, a brown fishing-net-like stolen singlet, defaced notebooks—I watched the Ijegun community primary school, my home for the past six months, about to be demolished. My heart pounded so fast in desperation, the sound like that of the stamping hooves of an overgrown elephant, like the hearts of the school children and some passers-by who must have heard the news the night before and had assembled, ceremoniously, to see my home, my refuge, my school, tumbled-down from the surface of the earth. I stood and watched alone, not with Azeez who had left, abandoning me, nor Bother Femi, who had left earlier while I was sleeping, betraying me. I watched the sun-pelted children of my school hopping and babbling—joyously, some of them—their kwashiorkor bulgy bellies, like mine, trundling as they gyrated excitedly, because to them, the government has remembered them. The president, my president had extended his salvaging hand to them. One man’s meat is indeed another man’s poison. I stood and watched the women who had gathered eulogizing the name of the president for making me homeless. I watched their hands rising and falling—rising, thrown in the direction of God in appreciation, before falling falteringly. From where I stood, I looked, mindlessly, at the brown, rusted, corrugated roof of my school, my about-to-be-demolished refuge. I looked at the wall of my school building, conquered by dust and age, begging for the unyielding hand of rain for a bath.

Finally, I watched as the rising blade of the excavator rose tall, upon the roof of my school building, and injected its fang. The rusted, corrugated sheets came crashing with the weak, soaked, mossed wall, as if they had waited for intervention of some kind. I watched as the excavator crumbled my school building, crumbled me, crumbled my soul. Each dragging, scraping, pulling grazing rouged my soul thanklessly with sorrow, with destitution.

From now on, the world has me.

Call of the Cat By Ellen Orseck

The night became extremely uncommunicative. Nobody spoke. Everywhere, noiseless, except the buzzing and fast-flying mosquitoes, the unsleeping crickets that broke the grave-silence with their intermittent chirps, the hooting of the wide-awake owls, relishing the night’s cooling breeze, keeping us company, haunting us, reminding me of my yet-to-come days of destitution.