Babangida The tranquility that enveloped the compound that Sunday afternoon was just what I needed to compose my column for the following Tuesday.
My host, a retired diplomatist, had left an hour earlier to attend to an emergency on his sprawling farm. For all practical purposes, his housekeeper had the day off. The boys who usually manned the gate gave themselves the afternoon off, which was just as well. There would be no distraction from their FM radio.
I wasn’t expecting any visitor. If anyone called and knocked and knocked and got no response, the person would conclude that no one was at home and go back, unless of course that person had some dark intentions on his or her mind.
I had just struggled through the introductory sentence, the lead as we call it in the business, and was beginning to find my rhythm when I heard a knock on the gate. Determined to tune out every distraction, I continued pecking away at my laptop keyboard. The Internet café from which I was going to transmit the material to this newspaper would close at 6 p.m. So, I had to get my copy finished well before then.
When three minutes passed without a repeat knock, I felt reassured that I was on target to meet the deadline.
Then, I heard the knock again, this time louder, and with just a hint of impatience. Still, I continued typing, until I heard the gate creak as it was pushed open, followed by the sound of footsteps right inside the courtyard.
“Who is that?” I inquired perfunctorily from my room, just across from the gate.
“Babangida,” came the reply. It was crisp, businesslike.
My heart must have skipped a dozen beats. All kinds of thoughts ran through my mind. Conjuring up the layout of the entire compound, I tried as calmly as I could to figure out the most suitable points for evasive action if it came to that.
“Babangida?” I summoned the equanimity to inquire, after what must have seemed an eternity.
“Yes, Babangida,” the fellow replied curtly.
So, this is it, I thought. Payback time for all the screeds I had written over the years about the former military president, the man who led Nigeria into a long, dark, dreary tunnel from which it is yet to emerge, and is now touting himself as the light at the end of that tunnel.
At the time of this unsettling intrusion, I was actually writing yet another screed. Titled “What manner of man,” it drew on Babangida’s record as military president to pour scorn on his bid for the ticket of the PDP to return as president.
In fact, I had used that record to damn Babangida so often that some correspondents complained that I was abusing my forum to ventilate a personal grievance. Some others said my strictures reeked of pettiness. Still others said my columns on Babangida were “hate-filled” and warned that I ran the risk of being consumed by my hatred of the man.
It has never been about the man, only about his policies and programmes and deeds while he held office. Long, long ago, I had learned from a father who could never hold a grudge and a mother who lived every day up to her baptismal name, Charity, that hatred serves no useful purpose. I learned this long before encountering the social philosopher Arthur Koestler’s magisterial warning that hatred even of the objectively hateful cannot conduce to the just society of our dream, which can be founded only on charity in its largest sense.
But on this day of reckoning, these prognostications were perfectly useless.
I picked up the cell phone from the table where it lay, beside the laptop. But it was of no use. It had run out of juice the previous day. Before then, the generating set that had become the default power source had suddenly stopped running and was undergoing servicing.
Was it mere coincidence that Babangida had chosen to call the very hour I was composing yet another screed? In whatever case, how could he have figured out from his Minna Hilltop fortress what I was typing in Kabba, some 300 miles removed?
They call it keystroke monitoring. By insinuating some device into your computer, anyone so minded can see on his computer screen in the next room of from the farthest point of the globe whatever you are typing.
Given Babangida’s great personal resourcefulness, to say nothing of his fabled wealth, was it beyond him or his agents to monitor my computer keystrokes from anywhere they chose?
But how could he have landed on the scene just thirty minutes after I began typing? As far as I knew, he had no villa in Kabba, and nothing had indicated that he was visiting, this presidential wannabe who still travels in the style of a potentate long after he was swept out of power.
Again, given his resourcefulness and his vast riches, could he not have teleported himself and landed on site with the pinpoint accuracy of a guided missile? In this digital age, what is not possible?
Thus did my imagination run riot, riving me almost to the edge of paranoia. It was payback time. Every day for the calumnist, one day for the object of his calumny.
I surveyed my immediate surroundings. There was nary a weapon of defence or offence in sight. There was no closet large enough to accommodate my bulk. None of the doors could block the advance of a visitor who practised teleportation.
Even if I somehow managed to streak across the courtyard and scramble up the perimeter wall, I would in all probability land straight into the not-so-welcoming embrace of his collaborators. The animated titter that seemed to be going on behind the walls served only to drive it home that escape was impossible.
So, that was it.
Calm down, OD, an inner voice told me. Don’t yield to panic. If you panic, you can’t think. And yet, it is only thinking, hard thinking, not brawn, of which you have little anyway, that can get you out of this hole into which you have dug yourself.
Ever so politely, eager to find out the true identity of my visitor, and yet trepidatious that my worst fears might be confirmed, I parted the curtains on the window facing the gate just wide enough to enable me peep into the courtyard.
The man standing there, alone and with nary a hint of mischief on his mind, was more than six feet tall. Still, it was too early to breathe easy. What if he was a decoy, or merely the advance party?
So, in a voice that completely masked my fright, I called out, using the name with which he had announced his arrival.
“Sir,” he answered. His tone was disarming.
My confidence somewhat restored, I asked: “Where are you from?”
He said he was from the School of Agriculture, Kabba, the local affiliate of Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
“And whom do you seek?” I pursued politely, still not totally reassured.
He said he had come to see my nephew, the retired diplomatist with whom I was lodging.
If General Ibrahim Babangida was not too engrossed at that hour chairing yet another meeting to corral the PDP into zoning its presidential ticket to himself or his fellow Northerners, he would have heard my sigh of relief wherever he was.
The whole encounter lasted no more than six minutes. But it ranks among the tensest moments of my adult life.
Since then, I have often found myself asking: What if . . .?
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