Written by Hymar David

A goat, gnawing at thrown-away yam peels in the bush, raised its head to stare at the commotion behind it. It resumed its chewing as if to say, How dat wan take consign me?

A pebble flew, from nowhere. It struck the goat on the side of its body. The animal gave a sudden jerk and fled. The boy who had thrown the pebble picked his tray of bananas from the ground and turned back to the crowd. To the commotion taking place in front of him.

A crowd thronged the big black gate, shaking it with loud banging and angry voices.

“Audu! Auuuduuu!!!” They chanted.

The gates gave in, parting like a black sea to let in a mass of screaming, restless humanity. The boy looked left and right, set his tray down and spread his mother’s wrapper that he had rolled into a cushion over it. Then he went with the crowd.

The house was big. Flowers on both sides of the entrance stretched almost to the front door.

Cars, their glasses tinted, gleamed in the afternoon sun.

“Auuuuuduuuu!!!”

He watched the faces in the crowd. A woman, her face dark and tired, wiped at her eyes with the hem of her wrapper. A yellow man’s face was printed on her wrapper, he is surrounded by umbrellas coloured green, white and red. The boy was in primary 3. He could read ‘Vote Prince Audu’ on the tired woman’s wrapper.

He recognized the man and the name. His parents had argued over him the day before yesterday.

“This one is nothing but a thief,” his mother said, looking at the newspaper over his father’s shoulder.

“He is still APC,” his father said. “I am tired of PDP. Look what they have done to this country.”

“Nonsense,” his mother countered. “All of them are the same. Look at this one’s face like he eats pounded yam everyday. What of the eleven billion he stole? Eleven billion, papa Usman! Give me just fifty thousand and I will make something better out of our lives. Eleven billion and you are telling me APC is better? Did you see his new wife? That small girl? Nonsense,” she said again and made a face like she wanted to spit.

His father shrugged. “Buhari is in charge now. With his anti-corruption posture, people will behave. Unlike that foolish Jonathan who said stealing is not corruption.”

Her laugh was mirthless. “Irony is so beautiful. If Buhari really is anti-corruption, the only position a dog like Audu will be contesting for right now would be the leader of the inmates in Kirikiri. Jonathan mismanaged Nigeria but he wasn’t speaking for himself when he said ‘stealing is not corruption’, he was speaking the minds of Nigerians.”

“What are you talking about?” his father’s outrage was visible in the lines on his arched brows.

“Yes. This government is proving that Jonathan was right. Stealing is not corruption. That’s why people like Audu have the effrontery to present themselves as messiahs after destroying the state. That’s why Fashola with his Borehole gate gets rewarded with major ministerial portfolios and Nigerians go on Twitter and Facebook to defend him. Who are we fooling. If stealing was truly corruption, half of the saints Baba dashed appointments wouldn’t even dare vie for local government chairmanship slots. Why do we like to deceive ourselves?”

“But no court have found them guilty,” his father protested.

She walked around the chair and came to stand in front of his father with an arm on a hip. “Have they been taken to court? You told me that EFCC has come awake with Buhari, so why is EFCC not looking their way given the billions involved? Let’s stop fooling ourselves, okay?”

He trudged forward, slipping past the crowd till he was in front. An elderly lady was talking fast in Idoma. He spoke Igala but he could tell from her expression and hand gestures that she was angry. The man in front of her was an Imam. He wore a turban, a beard that reminded him of grandfather, had tribal marks like a knife fight scare. A prayer bead dangled in his other hand.

His ears picked the sound of a bell. He turned his head. A man in a brown suit with dust coating the sleeves of his trousers was sweating as he prayed loud, surrounded by another similarly dressed man and women wearing scarves and clutching bibles. The ringing of the bell rose above the voices. And the voices seemed to get angrier and angrier.

“We came to pray for our new governor!” somebody shouted from behind him. “Get out of the way!”

“Get out of the way! Get out of the way!” the crowd took up the cry and repeated it in a frenzied chant.

The fear that gripped the boy was sudden. He moved away, darting to the left. As if on cue, the crowd pressed forward.

The elderly woman was backed to the front door. The crowd became a mob that shoved her aside and started banging on the front door.

He decided to go home. He had already sold four bunches of bananas. His mother would be happy with him.

He passed two men sitting at the foot of a stone statue of a horse standing on its hind legs. Their clothes were streaked with brown dirt. The colour of mud that he and his classmates dug up to make sculptures. One man balanced a shovel on his knees. A jigger leaned on the stone beside the other man.

His eyes roved the compound on their own accord till he came upon the mound of freshly dug earth. Somehow, it occured to him that he hadn’t yet fetched mud for the mortar he wanted to make in class. He slipped past the men, walking briskly towards the mound of earth. He dug his hands into the soil, rolling it into a caked ball between his hands. Then he walked away.

Behind him, the grave digger stared absently at the little boy lugging caked sand in his hands. He watched him chase a nylon bag blowing in the wind then go out of sight.

“I don’t like this kind of thing,” he said to his partner in Igala, gesturing at the mob. ” Let’s just finish the grave, take our money and go.”

His partner shrugged. “Let us wait and see if these foolish people can wake him up. I am sure they are only here because he’s yet to pay them the money he promised them if he won. Foolish people. Me, I just collected my one thousand naira and stayed at home. I don’t have PVC anyway.”

They watched the coffin brought out. They heard the thunder of prayers, in English and Arabic. They saw two religions united for the first time.

They waited vainly for the shouts that would announce the miracle.***

It was around midnight when Audu woke up.

It was dark and it hurt to breath. He felt his chest heaving and heaving as he struggled to let air out. Then he felt the cotton buds inserted into his nose come out. His lungs took in air in deep, relieved inhales and exhales.

He could remember nothing. His mind was as blank as the darkness surrounding him. As bland. He strained his ears but the night was quiet. Too quiet.

He formed a ball with his fingers and wriggled his toes. He was alive. Relief.

Where am I, he wondered.

The answer came when he tried to get up and his head smacked into something hard. His coffin.

He began to scream and pound furiously on the door of the coffin. His voice filled his ears with a roar that became a whimper as he tired out and lay still. His knuckles hurt.

Six feet above, a tiny black ant marched over Audu’s grave, rolling something white into its hole.

Somewhere in the now quiet compound, a gospel tract lay forgotten on the tiles; a beam of light shone from a window inside the house and illuminated the cover. It reads, GOD ANSWERS PRAYERS