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A year in the life of an odd job man

By Nosa Osaigbovo

He turned up at my door one Saturday morning in November 2008. He knocked with the timidity of a rain-whipped man seeking shelter in a baronial mansion. But the sky was smooth and blue.

There were no clouds disfiguring the sky like wind-tossed washing on a line. And birds flew, almost in slow motion. The space above the houses and the trees was safe and the birds knew they would not fall prey to a man with an air rifle or a bigger bird with a grip tighter than a lasso. It was a clear morning without the rainy drip, drip of depression. It was November, remember?

The weather was fine, but the man’s spirits did not soar. It could easily be seen that he was feeling low. His clothes were old and they sat on him like a load. He looked like a scarecrow used as a clothes hanger. He stuttered like a shy man struggling to tell a formidable-looking lady that he loved her. Some mousy men try to conquer women with the temper of a bereaved lioness. They are marital masochists and are regularly mauled by their wives.

The visitor said he needed a job. He said he was good at cutting grass and washing cars. But he had no cutlass, had no tools of his unlearned trades. Was this a strategy? He could say his employers’ tools had made it impossible for him to do a good job. He had worked for a fairly rich man a week or two before.

He was permitted to pluck fruits from the orchard even before weeding it. He was paid N2, 000 and the man’s wife gave him food. A smile papered over the crevices of care on his face when he said ‘his wife give me food.’ It seemed he could still taste the food. He said he had been served rice and two pieces of meat.

But now he needed money to buy food. He did not cook. It was cheaper for him to eat in a buka , a restaurant where diners sit on benches and there is no starchy formality. There is a feeling of communality, of contentment. The poor eat a simple meal and are happy, but the rowdily rich do not really enjoy their feasts

I had stepped out of the sitting room when I responded to his knocks that could have been made by a naughty cat begging to be allowed back in. The knocks had the force of an expiring echo. They had the urgency but not the wild intensity of the knocking at the gate after Duncan was murdered in Macbeth. My visitor said he was being murdered by hunger. We had stood talking for about five minutes and he had been willing enough, even happy, to tell me about himself.

He was engaged to cut grass and asked to be paid a fairly large sum. He said cutting grass was a hard job and that he needed to regularly buy and take drugs. He went to work with a zeal that was lacking in skill. He was not committed to doing a thorough job. His concern was to be paid. He was hungry and needed to eat.

When he suspected that he might not be paid in full for not being a cut above a loafer, he became disagreeable. The meek cat had become a fierce tiger! He surlily did what was necessary and was paid. He must have believed that he was a Nigerian civil servant or a politician, who is as industrious as a drone but wants to be handsomely paid.

Three weeks later he was back. His knocks on the door were even more tentative than the first time he came asking for work. He apologised for his laziness and loutishness during our first meeting. He needed work. It was past noon and he said he had not eaten anything. There was no work for him to do, but there was no need for him to brood, at least for a few hours.

He came around often, always uninvited. He was not married. He said he could not take care of a wife. He had no source of steady or adequate income. He could not afford to rent a room and shared one with a man who was also an unskilled worker. He owned a pair of serviceable shoes, a gift from a man he occasionally worked for.

The shoes were sparingly used and they were his most valuable possession. Had he be reading Joyce Cary’s Mister Johnson, the novel about colonial Nigeria that got Achebe and Ken Saro-Wiwa hopping mad? Johnson treated his own shoes with a fetish fondness. But the odd job man has not read even Things Fall Apart. Like Johnson, he is not free from ignorance. He told me he had not done much schooling.

He left the village to try to make something of himself in the city. He did not seek to make a fortune. Fortunes are not usually honestly made in Nigeria. He said he would never steal. He knows who Umaru Yar’Adua is, but has never heard of David Mark or Dimeji Bankole. His immediate environment is his orbit and politicians are insignificant, invisible stars. He has never seen government at beneficial work.

Governments talk about ghost workers, but they are the real ghosts. The water he drinks is drawn from a shallow well and some of the roads he sees in the city are like dirt tracks He came to see me in early December. He wanted a job, any job. He begged for a job with a distressing desperation.

The year was coming to an end and he was close to starvation. He is trapped in a wickedly whirling circle of poverty. They talk about budgets of trillions, but he is on a gridiron of great suffering. Next year may not be different.