Eight
The coronavirus is here. An Italian man who works in Lagos went home to Milan for Christmas and has come back and tested positive and is now in quarantine in Yaba. I stare at the news for a while.
Jide calls in a panic. “I told you, , I told you!”
“It’s just one person.”
“We can never control this thing. We’re finished.”
“Jide, calm down. Remember, Ebola came to Nigeria. Did we all die?”
“We don’t even have tests for this coronavirus.”
“Lagos State said they do.”
“We are finished. I heard that there are no ventilators at National Hospital and only one oxygen tank.”
“It can’t be that bad.”
“All the politicians in this country had better go and bring back the stolen money in Swiss banks, because we’ll need it to fight this thing.”
I laugh. “Jide, from where to where?”
“I’m serious. The other day they said there is no money in the Central Bank. We’re going to need money.”
“Most of the stolen money is not in Swiss banks, not anymore. The money is right here in Nigeria. There is more money in dollar domiciliary accounts here than there is in the Central Bank.”
—
I would know.
I gave CEO the idea.
We liked the Zurich banks because they asked few questions, and transactions were always discreet and quick, as though they feared you might change your mind.
Until the American government began probing and poking around, in search of tax evaders and whatever else, and the Swiss banks turned skittish and careful, and CEO said we could no longer move dollars to Switzerland, we had to look elsewhere.
“But why do we have to, sir?”
I asked, and to the question in his eyes I replied, “Why don’t we strengthen our own domiciliary accounts so they can keep the money here?”
He nodded, his whole head slowly bobbing up and down, and I knew he would call a meeting and tell everyone the idea was his.
I didn’t need recognition.
I wanted only to be his star right hand, whispering in his ear, and wielding the soft and secure power of it.
I wanted this from my first day at work, when I had barely settled in my cubicle before they said CEO was asking for me.
His office was all marble and glass, awash with light from the wide windows, their stately blinds fully drawn.
He sat wearing a suit, a small man almost swallowed by the gilt-edged girth of his desk.
“Good morning, sir,” I said.
He looked surprised. His eyes traveled down from my face and then up again.
“You got the best score in our entrance test?”
he asked, as if expecting me to say no.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Mr. David rose from where he was seated in the corner reading documents, and came appraising toward me.
“Ah, this is the person? God blessed you with brains and also blessed you front and back like this?”
“More back than front, sir,” I said.
For a moment they were taken aback and then, disarmed, they began to laugh.
“I like this girl!”
Mr. David said.
But only a year later and he did not like me at all, because I had too much power too soon.
Each time we met in CEO’s office, he sized me up with distrustful probing eyes, as if to gauge the details of my latest dark intentions.
If I were him, the director closest to CEO, I would resent my young and nimble hunger, my eagerness, the bright scarlet letter of my stark ambition.
I had studied the company and learned its innards, and I saw the empty apathy at its core.
How perfunctory most staff were.
They chose the smallest effort and the easiest way out; they overlooked details and paid scant attention, as if everyone had agreed to a second-rate will, a mass failure of seeing.
Almost all the books I checked in internal audit had wrong analysis of loans going bad.
It emboldened me.
I brought new ideas to CEO, and I always said, “We have to do this before they do, sir,”
they being the other bank owner in Lagos, who in public was CEO’s friend.
In private, CEO said his name as if spitting out something foul on his tongue.
Their hatred was mutual and blistering, from a series of business betrayals when they were first starting out.
I kept telling CEO about his legacy—your legacy must be bigger than theirs, sir, consider your legacy, sir—until he absorbed the word and began to say my legacy this, my legacy that.
The male ego is a phenomenon easy to predict.
He walked in a short trot suited to his short height, head held high and eyes afloat, as if too busy for minor people and minor issues, and as he passed by the halls, staff melted into corners.
In the head office in Lagos, nobody came out into the halls at all until he had walked into his office.
I first impressed CEO when I told him I had a spy high up in his enemy-friend’s bank, which was a lie, but I did not become his right hand until we were investigated for the U.S.
Treasury bonds case.
Those long tense weeks, everyone hushed and rushed, CEO screaming like a toddler and throwing things at us—his desk diary, his cell phone, even his suave expensive pen.
A grown man behaving this way, the sort of thing you saw in films.
The directors cowered in the face of his frustrated rage, all jittery, all stammering, and Mr.
David went on sick leave, claiming he had a mini-stroke, and then came back to work at the end looking healthier than before.
The transactions happened before I was employed, but CEO hurled insults at me, saying my position in internal audit was a waste of space, calling me a stupid idiot, a prostitute, a fool.
I always cast my eyes down until the tantrum passed and then continued reading documents to show that all was well.
I stayed in the office late, I repeated platitudes, I exuded self-possession and showed more hope than I felt.
They do not have the capacity to check every bank transaction, sir.
They cannot prove collusion, sir, because there was no collusion.
Sir, we need to make it clear that we import everything and so we must have foreign exchange.
I didn’t stutter or say “yes sir, yes sir, yes sir”
before he was done talking like other staff did.
I disagreed with his suggestions.
I revived documents he preferred to forget.
I memorized tiny details and recited them to him, and when something was overlooked, I pointed it out.
But in my boldness, I never failed to perform respect.
A delicate balance with powerful men like him, whose shockingly thin skins I came to know well.
One of the directors screamed at me when I said there was a mistake in his team’s analysis.
“Are you insulting me? Am I your mate?”
He sounded like a shrill market woman ever ready to pull off her wrapper and jump into a fight.
It took so little for these men, these men who held so much power in the palm of their hands, to dissolve like a cube of sugar in tea, unable to take any criticism at all.
CEO was better than most, to be fair, and even found it in himself to apologize to me after the bank was cleared in the U.S.
Treasury case.
“, I’m sorry about the way I spoke, I was under stress,” he said.
“It would happen to anybody, sir,” I said.
He was watching me. His glasses overwhelmed his face, which was much thinner from the many weeks of strain.
“I’ve noticed something about you. You don’t cry,” he said.
“I did not come to work to cry, sir.”
He chuckled and shook his head, and I thought to myself: I’m reaching my goal of becoming indispensable to him.
I laughed at his bawdy jokes and I shrugged aside the lewdness of his friends.
The more they talked of my braininess, the less they mentioned my body or asked for my number or joked about taking me home.
In front of my bathroom mirror, I practiced and practiced until I perfected my neutral face, features free of all expression, blank but open, my strategy face.
I wore it each day like a pair of work shoes.
At the mention of a shady deal, I talked of how best to document and what strategy to take.
CEO would call me and I would sail past his executive assistant and into his office.
There, I saw the putrid center of Nigerian finance and its oozing pus.
I already knew of the small deceits of the banking world, the tiny side profits made in foreign exchange deals, the unqualified client cleared for a small loan in exchange for a cut of the loan, but with CEO, I saw massive non-performing loans piled high and magic money that disappeared with a signature scrawled in ink.
I was astonished to discover that the wealthiest men borrowed with the clear and calm intention of never paying back, and when they defaulted, the bank swallowed the loan; by writing it in the profit and loss statement, the loan just disappeared.
It was a kind of theft—or theft really, not a kind.
These same men paraded wealth that they knew to be mere hull and all hollowness beneath.
If I stole so much, I would not flaunt cars and private planes, but brazen theft has never been the act of subtle people.
Foreigners go on and on about the challenges of emerging markets, not knowing that the biggest is the hubris of irresponsible men.
Once, one of the wealthy men fell out with CEO.
He gave an interview in a newspaper saying CEO’s bank was local and he preferred to bank abroad, even though his loan was one of the largest, and so CEO sent the bad-loans division to his office.
The wealthy man screamed at them and threatened CEO and said he would invade the bank with the military and throw CEO out.
“He’s threatening me because he doesn’t want to pay what he owes? Madness. How can he now claim I am targeting him because he is a Yoruba man? If I was Yoruba like him, he would not dare disrespect me.”
Each time CEO joked about being from a tiny ethnic group in northern Cross River that nobody had ever heard about, I saw the bulging shape of the chip on his shoulder, under his crisply cut suits.
“Sir, you have to push back, for your self-respect and legacy. It’s good to make some of these people a little uncertain, without scaring them off,” I said.
And CEO nodded in that slow dramatic way. He called in the loan and the wealthy man’s hotels in Abuja were sealed off, and his buildings in Lagos were about to be sealed off when the wealthy man caved and called CEO to say, “My brother, let us discuss, we are not quarreling,”
and CEO, chortling with self-satisfaction, let the loan go.
So much of the banking world was about whose ego would bend, whose will would break, who would kneel down before whom.
It was at about the time CEO made me treasury officer.
“I know you will take carefully the subject of who should get our surplus money in loans,”
he solemnly told me, as if we were in a beginning class on banking, but soon I discovered that CEO himself was borrowing from the bank and not paying back, and I knew right away this was a test.
He wanted to know what I would do.
I walked into his office with papers prepared and said, “Sir, I know a better way to disguise all this.”
—
Grumbling about my rapid promotions rose and spread from all parts and branches of the bank, nebulous as clouds, and they were right to complain, but nobody did so directly. CEO was lord of all.
“Your mentor,”
people began to call him, their sneers concealed under smiles, asking me for favors, to get through to him.
Your mentor.
And he was my mentor, in a way, if your mentor can be a person you do not respect.
He made me assistant general manager too quickly and said he would have made me an executive director, only it needed to first go to the board.
“And we don’t want too much attention, so we can continue the work we are doing,”
he said.
The work we were doing was helping his politician friends.
“His Excellency needs our help”
was all CEO needed to tell me.
Pearls of sweat clustered on the forehead of the man from the governor’s office who heaved in large bags filled with freshly minted cash.
Always in the late evening, when our building had emptied out.
At a corner of CEO’s sweeping office sat a swollen red leather chair.
The bags of cash were deposited near it and counting machines brought in.
Governors have medieval powers, and their daft and breathless acquisition was something to behold.
I moved millions into new accounts and changed them to dollars and sent them back to the governor in suitcases whose zippers I clasped with silver locks.
I was proud of the suitcases; layers of cash in a suitcase was tidier and classier than stuffing money in those squashy checkered ghana-must-go bags.
Usually the private secretary picked up the suitcases.
Sometimes it was just his personal driver and an orderly wearing a long gun slung on one arm.
It wasn’t always cash; it wasn’t even mostly cash.
We issued advance payment guarantees for contracts inflated by three or four hundred percent, and I moved the surplus from the contractor’s account to accounts owned by the governor but which were not, of course, in his name.
One was in his cook’s name.
Other signatories were friends, siblings with different surnames, companies registered in the Caribbean. For the beneficial owners of his foreign houses, he used the name of his friends, knowing how badly it could go if their loyalty were ever overcome by their greed. The fragile security of stolen wealth. He was always surrounded by many people but he trusted so few, because his power had robbed him of the ability to trust. CEO liked to tell the story of a politician who made his driver the sole signatory of an account, which the driver then emptied of millions of dollars, dollars not naira, before running off to Canada. The politician did nothing, because what can you do when a person has stolen what you stole? The moral of the story, CEO said, was “Use trustworthy staff that you’ve known for years.”
CEO talked often of governors losing their immunity once their term is over, and his words brought to our actions a flavor of ritual caution.
“A sensitive transaction that can’t be traced after handover,”
CEO would tell me, and sometimes I would say “sensitive”
even before he did. We said “sensitive”
like a mantra, a special code that bound us in a giddy sense of secrecy.
The stories leaked anyway, because there are too many people involved in the project of grand theft and they tell someone they trust, or love, or want to impress.
The commissioner for works, the person who organizes the fake contract bid, the typist who types it up, the drivers, the orderlies, the guards at the door.
I moved hundreds of millions through Thailand and the U.S., or some iteration of that, and it came back looking clean.
Liechtenstein was easy, with its lax reporting.
We deposited money there and to the question “Source of earning?”
we said, “Consulting.”
Consulting meant whatever you wanted it to mean; consulting wore the blessed aura of concealment.
In just a few years, I had learned to paint fraud in pretty colors.
I knew what to write in the books to hide bad transactions and how to make fictitious transactions look real, and I wrote elegant memos approving loans for companies that didn’t exist, and for collateral I accepted fake land titles and worthless deeds and dismal documents signifying nothing.
CEO was generous; I got bonuses and two company cars, and he always approved my training courses abroad.
But I wanted and wanted.
I eavesdropped on discussions and read every document, even of transactions in which I was not involved.
I peeked into the caves where Nigerian fortunes are spun, caves filled with men, some of them bright and some of them not, but all talking and sharing and colluding.
Then, in the week that I heard them buying and buzzing about PGT shares, I took money from dormant accounts of forgotten customers and bought shares for myself.
—
That the governor was coming himself and not just sending his people as usual had CEO in a tizzy.
He kept pushing his glasses up his nose even though they were not sliding down.
The advance team arrived first, three men in dark plastic sunglasses and ill-fitting cheap suits.
They marched about CEO’s office with comical importance to make sure it was secure, before the governor himself appeared.
He looked better on television, an average, ordinary-looking man with an easily distracted air.
It was said he was once imprisoned in London for fraud.
In the bright light of CEO’s office he had the pallor of a person with some kind of illness, something to do with the kidneys maybe.
I looked more closely and thought it wasn’t his kidneys: the unnatural paleness and the discolored smudges were from bleaching creams.
How strange vanities can be.
He made me think of an intern I once had who was bleaching her skin with cheap creams that turned her face into a peeling lemon, because she had applied for an usher job at a corporate event years before and was told she was too dark.
You would think this governor with his medieval powers would at least use better-quality creams, the kind Michael Jackson must have used.
The governor went around and sat on CEO’s chair and swiveled from side to side. “So this is the seat of true power, where you sit and control so much money! So much money!” he said.
“Your Excellency, this is not power compared to you,”
CEO said, with the fawning tone he used for all politicians, until they left office, and then he stopped taking their calls.
The governor had brought his own brandy.
His assistant unveiled the bottle from a long suede box, asked for a glass, and then went into CEO’s bathroom to rinse it, as if we might have poisoned it.
The governor drank the brandy in a gulp and began talking about the best part of Dubai to buy another house; he had one in Green Community but was buying another in Emirates Hills.
Then he turned suddenly to the television at the other end of the office and pointed at a newscaster on the screen.
“I want that lady.
Get me her number.”
CEO looked slightly confused but quickly recovered himself, mumbling, “Yes, yes, yes.”
We were helping the governor move millions of dollars and he barely looked at the papers I presented to him.
He was so casual, so throwaway, slouched on the swivel chair with legs stretched out.
If something went wrong, there was always more money to steal.
I looked at the figures on my screen: so many zeroes, a parade of zeroes, lined up one after another, dizzying and daring.
How many lives all that money could change.
What dreams it could make.
I thought of Mama Olisa, who was always sending me checking-in texts.
How are you, Sister ? Happy New Month, Sister .
I said let me greet you, Sister .
What she was really saying was remember me and help me when you can.
Her patience was a strategy and I admired it.
Imagine what Mama Olisa could do with a tiny fraction of this money.
Imagine if she had a fraction of this.
Well, what if she did have a fraction of it? I had never thought of this before, but in that moment a clear map formed in my mind as though it was long fated to be.
We often registered new companies to move money around, and so I called the lawyer to say could he check if the name Robyn Hood was already taken, Robyn with a Y .
When he said it wasn’t, I felt like laughing a mad and happy laugh.
I didn’t even feel afraid when I slipped out the first packets of cash from a bag hauled into CEO’s office that evening.
The loss could have occurred with the people in the governor’s office, the driver who put it in the trunk, the man who carried it up to CEO’s office.
Not that the governor would check.
What difference did a few hundred thousand naira make? The next time we had a bag of dollars, I slid two packets into my laptop case.
A moment later I slid in two more.
Packets of dollars were much slimmer and easier to handle than naira.
Later I brought wide handbags to work, then I began to slip out the cash at the end, in the stillness of time after the counting was done but before the money was taken to the vaults.
Jide said it was a crazy idea, going around giving money to women with small businesses.
“Free money just like that? They’ll spend it. They’ll never use it for business,” he said.
“You don’t know women,” I said.
“There are two types of gay men, the ones who love women and the ones who hate women. Lucky for you, guess which one I am,”
Jide said. It was one of his favorite things to say when he was happy-drunk.
“Loving women doesn’t mean knowing women,” I said.
—
In secondary school, I read in my father’s newspapers about General Abacha’s failed banks tribunal, the Big Men he threw into decaying prisons in Lagos for running failed banks.
Failed banks, they were called, as if the banks just happened to stumble and fail, as if the banks wrote the wrong answers in an exam and failed.
I never forgot a story about a woman and her eyes.
She was a teacher, going blind, saving a little each month for eye surgery.
When she finally had enough, she went to the bank to withdraw her money, only for a tense-faced teller to say, “Sorry, madam, the money is gone.”
“Gone to where?”
she asked.
To where? In the newspaper photo, she looked dazed, her eyes milky behind thick glasses.
She never recovered her money, none of the ordinary people ever recovered their money.
What became of her, a woman who was going blind? What became of her when she went blind? I thought of her on my first Robyn Hood trip, when I went to my village to give out ten grants.
I saw a woman who was losing her sight but still weaving cloth at an ancient loom, and I gave her twice the amount I gave to others, as if to mollify that teacher from years ago.
But before the women in my village, I gave Mama Olisa a grant.
I went to her shop in the late evening, when buyers had petered out, and sellers were closing up and packing up to walk to the bus stop.
Mama Olisa screamed and danced and hugged me and said her pastor had told her she would see a sign, that her helper would come that week.
“I knew from day one that God brought you to my life for a reason.”
She asked if I kept in touch with that small girl who had been in the accident years ago, and when I said Atasi lived part-time with me, she said, “Just because of one small accident.
You paid her hospital bills.
Did you also have to take her to live with you? Who does that?”
“Mama Olisa, stop talking nonsense,” I said.
“I have seven children, if you are looking for another one to pay school fees for,”
she said, and then began to laugh and to hug me again and to say she was praying for me and asking God to bring me a husband before the year ended.
—
The first women I gave grants to, I marginally knew.
They were from my own village, Abba, and from nearby villages—Abagana, my great-aunt’s ancestral home, Umunnachi, where my maternal grandmother was born, and Nimo, where my grandfather once lived.
I stopped at their shops and greeted them, and they greeted me, pleased that I stopped by: , professor’s daughter, the one doing well in Abuja.
“I want to support your business. Use this for your business, keep it between us, and the only way you will thank me is to help another woman when you can.”
Shocked delight and prayers and dance and song, the cash unbelievably in their hands.
“Don’t waste it,”
I said, but I knew they wouldn’t waste it because they were bursting with dreams.
These village-raised women who barely finished primary school, querulous and wise and sharp-tongued; they guarded their money and spent with good sense, and never missed a thing.
I sat with them and listened as they stared at the cash in their hands.
I want to go to Anam and buy plantains.
I have been pricing another dryer for my salon.
I will buy hand grinder so that I can now do my beans myself.
I will buy electric sewing machine.
—
I flew to Asaba and took a taxi to a town I didn’t know.
There was a woman frying akara by the roadside, an ambitious operation with three large pans, a few helpers, a small crowd of buyers.
I waited for her to be done selling before I extended my hand with the envelope of cash.
It was late morning and a stray chicken was pecking in the mud.
She wiped her brow with the edge of her wrapper and looked suspiciously at me.
Was this some kind of fraud, was the cash fake, was it some way to entrap her in a ritual? Why just give her cash, and so much cash? She shook her head and waved her hands in the air.
“No, no, keep your money, please.
I don’t want it.”
Back in the taxi, the driver said, “Aunty, you did not mention God.”
“What?”
“You said you want to help her business but you did not mention God. Business and God go together.”
I stared at the small keloid on the back of his neck. What was he even doing listening to my conversation?
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“Eze.”
I hired Eze to scout the villages for women with small businesses.
He was unsparing and spare, with a long neck and truthful bluntness that was perfect for the job.
He gave me reports and suggestions, and I flew to Asaba, Owerri, or Enugu airports and drove with him to whatever village he had found to push cash into a woman’s hand and show her my bank ID card and say, “God blessed me and I want to bless my fellow women.
Use this for your business.
Don’t ever come looking for me to thank me.
I mekatakwana bia I kene m.
Just pray for me.
The only way you will thank me is by helping another woman when you can.”