These recessionary times are fraught with anxiety.
Endlessly, you worry about money, family, work, health, career, relationships, and just about everything under the sun and even beyond it.
That anxiety is compounded if you are a politically exposed person (PEP), the type who may for any reason whatever register on the radar of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) or the Department of State Services (DSS)
What kinds of cues, verbal and non-verbal, are likely to raise the PEP’s hackles, disrupt his exterior calm or otherwise put him out of sorts?
In the normal run of things, these cues often come from persons who usually defer to them – persons from whom the PEP has a right to expect a great deal of deference – personal assistants, stewards, drivers, gardeners, guards, and the whole lot. They have been with him for so long that they are virtually family.
As has been said, no man is a hero to valet, and no lady a heroine to her maid. Vulnerabilities open up here and there, but the relationship has endured. Over the years, no signals from this extended family have disrupted the relationship in any fundamental way.
But lately, the steward has been reporting only spottily and going about his chores indifferently. The driver keeps talking back or mutters under his breath instead of following instructions. The gardener, inscrutable even in the best of times, has become positively taciturn.
When he deigns to mow the lawn or trim the hedges, he goes about it as if he is doing you a favour. The guard takes his time opening the gate when you get home after hours. He is in no hurry to switch the generator on or off as determined by the municipal power supplier.
Collectively, they adopt a sneering tone toward the lady of the house. They no longer make the children feel welcome in their company.
They have not asked for pay increases. They have not complained about conditions. They seem to have discovered the power in silence, and to have chosen to exercise that power.
But to what purpose? What does it all mean? What could account for this collective sullenness in what has been a cheerful household?
If you are a PEP, these are ominous signals.
Should you call them together or separately, tell them what you have noticed, and demand an explanation? Or perhaps maintain your equanimity in the hope that the situation will work itself out? Could it even be that you were only imagining things and tormenting yourself needlessly?
If the PEP overhears his aides chatting animatedly about the EFCC and the DSS without a care as to whether he or anyone was listening, that is not a good sign. But there may be nothing to it, since those agencies dominate the headlines and the front pages these days, conducting raids that uncover mountains of cash in the most sought-after currencies.
Money owned by nobody in particular, or abandoned because it has become an encumbrance, like the “stockpile of dollars” found on the grounds of the Executive Mansion in Akwa Ibom following the change in government, or because there is just no way to spend it even in several lifetimes.
Nor should he be alarmed if they went on to talk about fortunes stashed in faux septic tanks, abandoned at airports, buried in farms, piled up in steel vaults tucked away in rat-infested rooms in derelict houses in the most distressed parts of town, lodged in bank accounts in the names of a battery of untraceable proxies, or warehoused in ultra-luxury flats inhabited only by persons of galactic net worth.
If they should add amidst knowing glances that EFCC and DSS operatives would shortly be turning their attention to flower beds and cemeteries in the neighbourhood and ruins of ancient dwellings back in the villages and palaces and places of worship, not sparing their sanctums, there might be something to that.
The PEP may well recall how, in Babangida’s time, Colonel Yahaya “Jungle Expert” Madaki had disclosed at the end of his tenure as military governor of Katsina State, that he always took the most sensitive official materials to the palace of the monarch of his ancestral village for safe-keeping. The colonel did not trust the bureaucracy one bit.
The suspicion is widespread now that some of the people running the country today may be doing the same thing, only that what they are shipping out is public money, heaps and heaps of it.
At this point, the PEP should begin to worry about how much his aides really know? Were they taunting him, or just bluffing?
The driver knows his going out and his coming in and is not totally innocent of the transactions thereof. The gardener knows where stuff could have been buried. The steward knows the kinds of things stewards usually know and has supporting documents. The gateman knows what those heavy sacks they are continually lugging in and out contain.
“How times have changed?” I can almost hear the PEP reminisce.
In the good old days, empty overhead water reservoirs used to be the preferred storage for the kind of money that has been a staple of the news. So were chest freezers, until one-time U.S. Congressman William J. Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana, gave the game away.
The FBI found interred in his freezer bundle after bundle of shrink-wrapped dollar bills amounting to the tens of thousands, believed to have been corruptly obtained from a prominent Nigerian politician.
Don’t count on them to acknowledge it, but they must have learned a thing or two from Nigeria’s armed robbers. Years before FBI agents zeroed in on the Congressman’s freezer, Nigeria’s armed robbers had made full access to that receptacle a prime objective of their operations.
On breaking into a home, they would head straight for the freezer and methodically empty it in search of cash or other valuables. They would then move to the kitchen and rummage through sacks of gari or rice or beans or yam flour, in case other valuables were concealed therein. That was back when you could purchase these commodities by the bagful.
For good measure, they would upend shelves piled high with books, rip apart slim volumes, shake the stouter ones off their spines, and generally leave behind a huge mess. All this was before syndicated kidnapping supplanted armed robbery as the surest and least risky path to money.
Back then, politically exposed persons had little to fear even from armed robbers and even less to fear from law-enforcement officials.
Still, there are politically exposed persons and politically exposed persons. It is some consolation if, compared with others in that league, you are a minor player. Nothing may yet come of your gnawing fears.
The day that should worry you is the day you overhear your steward ask the steward next door across the fence, “Old boy, dem whistleblower sef, how dem dey operate? Especially if, after that encounter, your steward’s face turned aglow and his eyes danced in ways you had not seen them do since you hired him seven years ago.
Then you know that the game is up.
