The Wages of Corruption

My Money

57 The Wages of Corruption My Money M y imagination went riot the day I watched a fourteen-sitter bus swerve past the one in which I was an occupant. It shot in the air violently, missed its trajectory and crashed brutally against an embankment. The ensuing noise was deafening and as if that was not bad enough, it was followed by a very huge flame. Three persons managed to get out of the crashed bus but they were all aflame. What a double shock – the shock of the crash and that of the fierce fire. The rest of the occupants could not move. They had been overwhelmed by the double shock. They all succumbed to the passionate entreaties of death. Their bodies and the iron and steel that had built up the bus were in a fierce process of being charred. It was a terrible sight to behold. We fought and got the flames off the flaming bodies and then provided them with first aid treatment. It consisted of red palm oil, which we smeared on their bodies. As for the bus and the rest of its occupants, we simply watched hopelessly as it was smouldering against the road embankment. An appetite inducing smell of burnt beef was sailing gently in the air. I was still wondering how a bus crash could cause such a huge fire, when I heard one of the three who had got out of the bus aflame moaning: oh my money, my petrol, my money. I wondered he still had enough energy to moan. I went closer to where he was lying and listened attentively. I heard the words clearly and gathered the courage to ask: “what exactly are you talking about?” “All ma money don bon for dat motor and ma wan hundred liter petrol,” he managed to say. 58 Sammy Oke Akombi “For his money I could easily understand that his handbag might have been left to burn in the bus but for his one hundred litres of petrol to get burnt, I didn’t quite understand. It didn’t quite make sense, except that he was the vehicle owner. Even then he would have been moaning about the entire bus and not just his money and petrol. To compound my confusion, the bus was such that would have a tank whose capacity would not exceed fifty litres of petrol. So what did he mean by a hundred litres of petrol? I had to ask another onlooker who looked very agitated and terrified. “Somtaym na businessman for zua zua na,” the onlooker suggested nervously. “Zua zua! What’s that?” I asked The man looked at me suspiciously and then said, “where yu come from sef, weh yu no know weti bi zua zua. If yu wan onli hear for ma mop, zua zua na petrol weh common pipol di sell for gallon for manage dem layf, as weh plenty small town dem and village dem no get petrol station.” The revelation unraveled the mystery that was bugging me. That ill-fated bus was also transporting containers of fuel - highly inflammable. And the police let go the risk that the driver and his passengers were taking. And here I was at a most traumatizing scene. We tried what we could do by way of help. After we had ensured that the zua zua man and the two others had been taken to the nearest hospital we climbed into our bus and drove off. Two kilometres from the scene of the accident the police as usual had mounted a road block. The driver went down and settled them. One of them was good enough to throw an eye into the car and then greeted. When he did, I had the courage to ask if they were aware of the accident that had occurred two kilometres away. “Accident,” he said flatly. “Is that anything to bother about? We witness them every day and we see the victims die as they cry. So they are nothing new.” 59 The Wages of Corruption I looked at the policeman sternly, wondering whether he actually deserved the uniform he was wearing. We had left the scene of the accident without the presence of any policeman and here we were at the nearest check point to the scene and they did not care to know whether such a thing had happened, the state of the surviving victims notwithstanding...