Guilt

This is not exactly what I wanted to write about guilt; the outcome is only somewhat related to it. ‘Guilt’ is a most tricky concept, especially where it concerns the personal. Put a thing like shooting point-blank at a person in certain contexts and the shooter becomes as innocent as any other fellow, once it is established that it was done ‘in self-defense.’ But, here, I am concerned with finally coming clean on a burden I have carried for more than a decade, a parasite that has been gnawing away at the root of my mind all these years. Long ago I made the decision to one day (at the right time) unload its gruesome weight and tear my mind away from what has become a lifelong moral struggle to escape dreary choices. The right time didn’t come in the past decade. I have in fact realized that the problem stems from the anatomy of this guilt of mine, and the complicated nature of my contrition, which I had tried several times to put into words and failed. And I suppose, then, that the only reason why I am sharing this story for the first time, and after all these years, has mainly to do with the idea that formed in my mind recently: the Nigerian government is the way it is because our politicians simply refuse to ‘take responsibility.’ This has happened again and again whenever the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission makes an arrest. It does not stop with politicians, however, for I have espied this same trait in my dealings with many ordinary Nigerians. I am one of them, and the point is that I am trying to take responsibility here.

The first time I tried to write about this was towards the end of 2014, shortly after I had floated a personal WordPress blog named Frankinscence (I had stylized, in the title of the website, the name of the famous resin which symbolized for me an abundance of sensations, in addition to its resonance with my now mostly dormant English name, Francis). Determining that fiction was the best genre in which to express myself, under Frankinscence I wrote a story titled “About This Business of Not Being Yourself.” Narrated in the second person singular, the story begins thus:

So you came back that afternoon, tired and sweating. You went into the parlor, kicked off your shoes, and sat in the sofa directly under the ceiling fan. The sweat oozed more now and it seemed to you that the fan was not whirling at all.

I wrote this rather hasty attempt at a story in my second year as a university student, in late 2014. I was twenty-one. At least seventy percent of the story is true. As is evident from the excerpt, I examined the minutiae of my own agitated mind. The afternoon in question was when I returned from trying to impersonate a student, for a fee and with her permission, at a university entrance examination and was nearly caught. For weeks afterwards, I did not leave my family’s second-floor tenement flat to return to school. I was wracked by the fear that the fellow who had given me the job, a known confraternity cultist, would be waiting perpetually for me downstairs with his goons and would shoot me once I stepped foot outside.  

The fear was palpable and the dangers were real. I was already at a point in my life where I was asking myself endless questions, and my days were serrated by sleepless nights and restless hours of daylight. On the one hand, I knew that it did not matter whether one did something wrong out of desperation; what mattered was that something injurious had been done. On the other hand, I told myself that a poor man should not be too hung up on principles.

Now, to the matter of the impersonation adventure which had flung me into this mental whirlpool. I will have to start from 2011, the year I finished secondary school. My father was dead and my mother was struggling to pay the rent and keep us fed. I tried to help her by working as a laborer at construction sites, but I hated the work – chiefly its ability to drain all my physical strength without a commensurate pay, so that I found myself having no life between grueling work under a scalding sun and deep slumber induced by my subsequent tiredness. A particularly vexing fact is how the tiredness that regularly overwhelmed me chipped away at my mental capacities, especially my ability to find time to read my books. So I abandoned the work. My twin brother had abandoned similar work before I did, but his reasons were different. His main gripe was that at the end of each day he kept spending almost his entire daily wage on pain relievers – and food, of course – or he wouldn’t sleep. The pattern went like this for him: work throughout the day, start experiencing bodily pain in the evening, rush to the pharmacy to get strong pain relievers. Same routine the next day. It simply made no sense to continue.

Shortly after, I started teaching at two lesson centers. In Nigeria ‘lesson centers’ are independent institutes that handle short preparatory classes for major national and international examinations and also facilitate registration for them. Within the informal economy lesson centers are notorious for encouraging and profiting from all sorts of malpractices in the Nigerian education system. During the time of exams, they recruit bright youngsters and even teachers to impersonate lazy students who are then charged exorbitant amounts for the service. These centers have established ways to evade capture, notably through bribing exam officials. In cases where this is not possible (the incorruptible exam official is rare), the risk rises steeply, and the price of impersonation along with it. Perhaps this promise of success amid danger is what makes these centers ‘special,’ and many students eligible for qualifying exams prefer to use them – sometimes with the blatant support of their parents – instead of standard schools, as a way to guarantee a good result. This was the racket into which I had been sucked. 

I found myself in the underworld of exam impersonation between 2012 and 2015, successfully taking papers ranging from senior secondary school exams to university entrance exams. In the exam room I would promise myself not to do it again, but the insistent tugging of poverty always forced me to take yet another assignment. I should add that I was not greatly profiting from these deals. Middlemen, always able to find naïve young men to take the exams without protesting too much, took most of the money. By the time I caught on to the complex network of middlemen who dominated such deals, I was already deep into the cavity and struggled to find my way out. 

*

It was the prospect of making a real profit, for the very first time, that forced me to take that job from Ifeanyi Black. He agreed to pay me fifty thousand naira to take the university entrance exam for the daughter of a rich client. He paid me an advance of twenty-five thousand naira and gave me the documents I needed. I had traveled from Owerri, where I was attending university, to Onitsha, where my family lived and where I knew more people, to meet him and broker the deal. The major problem with this assignment was that I had to take this exam for a female. Impersonating a member of the opposite sex was not unheard of in exam fraud, and it could be done. But it was very difficult to pull off, which was why it paid so well. 

On the day of the exam I arrived rather early at my client’s university. The security men refused to let me in. I was told to wait a few hours for the official screening. This was surprising because I hadn’t thought there would be a screening (Ifeanyi Black had assured me there wouldn’t be any). As I waited, my nerves went crazy all over my body. By the time the screening started, I could hardly walk. As you would expect, a lot was going through the rumbling disquiet of my mind, mainly the question of what would happen if I was caught. I imagined my mother devastated, my family plunged into unexpected sorrow; I saw long, dreary days in prison and then I thought about all the colorful things I had planned for my future, especially with my girlfriend, and the thought of her absence in my future made me feel a certain hollowness, as if my heart had dropped queasily into my belly. 

I was standing in line waiting for my turn to get screened and my legs shook as I brought them forward in the moving line of enthusiastic students. As an experienced impersonator, I had never felt something approaching this torrid hysteria for any reason, but something about that particular day seemed different. Why was I doing this again and again? The excuse of my poverty didn’t offer me much solace then. Nothing seemed to offer any respite from the storm of questions that buffeted me while I stood there in that queue of vibrant candidates, waiting.

When I finally stood face to face with the people who handled the screening just inside the university gates, I felt a momentary calm. They asked me my name, and I gave them my client’s name, which, fortunately, sounded unisex. After a short while the heavy-set woman with a laptop held out her hand for my exam slip. She perused it quickly, looked up at me again, and shook her head. At that point, the numbness in my legs was spreading all over me, so that I seemed to be there but not there, as if I were looking down on the proceedings from above. “Wait by the side,” the woman said, and indicated with her hands that I was to stand near the cluster of Civil Defense officers. It took all the energy in me to bring myself to move, but when I did, I started running. I was running towards the small zoological forest to the right, zipping along as quickly as I could, and I was only half-conscious of the commotion behind me.

What I did hear were several voices saying ‘catch him, catch the criminal,’ and the noise of what seemed like a horde of feet coming after me. I was inside the forest in no time and kept running, bruising many parts of my body against trees and thorny bushes. The long university fence was before me. I went towards it and tried to scale it and failed. I turned and saw six Civil Defense officers running towards me. They were a little far behind, so I faced the fence and tried a second time and failed again. On the third attempt I was able to get a firm grip on the concrete, and finally climbed over the fence. I felt the weight of the jump on my legs when they hit the ground on the other side, facing the expressway. Without waiting to check which of my legs had been hurt, I dragged myself up, hailed an oncoming keke and instructed the driver to take me quickly to a bus terminal. 

And so I returned to Onitsha that day, sick with fear and physical injuries, and, as I have already said, for weeks I did not leave the flat. 

How can I ever forgive myself for engaging in this kind of racketeering, for whatever reasons I may assert? How do I bring myself to come to terms with a past life riddled with multiple instances of identity fraud? Is it even enough to acknowledge that I have behaved badly? This is the quandary that has burdened my thoughts all these years. I cannot claim righteousness when I harbor a clamoring darkness within. I am not sure there is ever any instance where villainy – especially of this level of ignominy – somehow transmutes into heroism. All in all, I have no qualms in my mind that I am the most clandestinely insidious iteration of a villain, having done what I have done while claiming indignation against all forms of corruption in my writings, on social media and elsewhere. 

Through the years, I have often been conscious of how horribly I have failed as a writer in a society like ours, as one who is supposed to lift that unimpeachable torch of uprightness. Writers are supposed to take the initiative when things begin to go wrong in their society: by being exemplary and by speaking out clearly against wrongdoing wherever they see it. While I was advancing identity fraud in Nigeria’s exam malpractice racket, I was also plugged into the community of young writers who, on social media, lent their voices to pro-democracy causes and demanded a more transparent government. I was making daily posts on Facebook that criticized corrupt politicians. I was, in short, putting up a front.

I have often criticized the lack of discipline and morality wherever I think it is missing, especially in the Nigerian government. But what right have I to say to my neighbor, “Look, there’s a bit of gunk in your eyes,” when my own eyes are full of it? The curse of sentience is to be haunted by a glut of moral dilemmas, as it were, and to be the victim of one’s own unwieldy actions. 

Reading about writers who have lived through oppressive regimes, I have come to see that there is a higher purpose to this writing life, to which I have laid claim all my life. To be a writer is to be aware of the obligation to live and speak what one believes in without equivocation. If I have chosen to be a writer, as I believe I have, it follows that I must take up the heavy mantle of a searching conscience, a mind that revolts against all forms and guises of evil and moral compromise. 

To be always indignant in the face of extreme corruption in government – the bizarre news reels of stolen funds, bribery, cronyism, bloated contracts – is to confront the scruples of one’s own moral failings too, because national immorality points to the atomized singularities of individual immoralities that then coalesce into our festering national problem. 

In his essay “The Trouble with Nigeria,” Chinua Achebe begins by saying that the trouble with our country “is simply and squarely the failure of leadership.” I should add quickly that a good part of that emanates from a shirking of responsibility. That is how it is for us in this country: everybody shifts blame; the last thing you would see anyone in leadership do is to accept a bit of blame. Unfortunately, this attitude has led us to a certain impasse in which one form of corruption begets another, and on and on it goes. Recently we applauded the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission’s action in arresting a former governor of Kogi State for corruption worth billions of naira; unfortunately, the suspect was being shielded from justice by the state’s sitting governor. It is the sort of thing that keeps us in an endless loop, with no one taking responsibility for the prodigious wastage of our finite national resources. But am I any better than those people? I think not! But I hereby reject who I was, saying no to my own bit of evil. There is no doubt we would experience an immense revival at home and abroad if Nigerians started to take responsibility for their personal failings.  

After I had accepted that I was misguided in my early life, I began to live like one with a shadow over his back. It has come to a point where, in my dealings with people, I get extremely nervous with shifty characters, as if their active shiftiness is infectious. One day I went to the Nigerian immigration office in Awka to get a passport. Upon enquiries, I was told my passport would cost almost twice as much as the official rate indicated on Nigeria’s immigration website. When I pointed this out and was rebuffed, I began to tremble because a thought rushed into my mind at that moment: that I was actually no better than a thieving immigration officer milking his beat. Perhaps I was even worse, having impersonated people in life-changing situations. It is the sort of thing one lives with for a long, long time. I paid the bloated fee quietly and left the immigration office, my head heavy with the memory of my own misbehavior and the shame of what I had just done. No doubt I was part of Nigeria’s problem.

The shame of my life is the guilt of my past, but I have decided to give myself another opportunity at redemption, starting with this piece of writing; all one can do, in the end, is to hold oneself to a probing brightness from time to time, if not all the time.  ▪