A WRONG CAN NEVER BE RIGHT
Two drivers had a similar experience of discharging a passenger, before he could remember a property of his in the booth. In each case, it was a pack bulging with a million naira plus. As though the coincidence had planned to be in multiples, both drivers badly needed at least one million naira for a straight solving of three crooked problems. Really, the two forty-five-year-old men were two cruisers-round-town with the same itchy palms they should love to close over the money which their helpless passengers had ruinously forgotten in their ash-colored Mitsubishis. Theodore Adala, who was the bona-fide member of their Road Transport Workers’ Union, found the ennobling spirit to walk into their General Office with the picked-up pack and drop it on the table of their chairman, ahead of the customary announcement he made each time there was such loss to the effect that the rightful owner should come for its claims with convincing proofs. Soon, a Nelson claimant did, carefully checked the pack and it turned out that Theodore Adala has not at all tampered with its content; only slit a part of the pack open from a cat’s curiosity…
It was not a small treat that Theodore Adala received for his mindless show of true empathy for Nelson Osahon - a half business man half politician. Happily, Nelson pushed into his surprised hands one tenth of the pack it had borne while further politely asking him to be his guest in a nearby eatery for a lavish lunch. Not long the nice story-experience was to take on an evergreen color. With one accord, elated members of the Road Transport Workers Union, whom Theodore had done proud, agreed to erect a befitting statue of him at their main motor park, even as his one-time accuser of insincerity and fraud conjured up his deleted phone number for the friendliest of chats capped with a from the bottom-of-the-heart apology for a misapprehension of his person.
Eche Julius, the other driver with as much money-asking challenges, had accumulated a half year’s electricity light bills and for it had his supply of power disconnected a half dozen times, except that he would have it reconnected for as many times, shortly after the Service Providers’ Disconnection Team had driven off with his severed wires happy to quit the scene with the angering electricity conductors. Also, Eche Julius had not the faintest idea of how to pay back a two hundred thousand naira loan he had received on trust from a well-off neighbor living only four blocks away, now over Eche’s delays in retuning the thing fuming like the pipes of an industry!
Still, Eche Julius’ most singular problem-torturer was how to speedily cough up the half a million naira his Miriam daughter would need to take care of her registration for her just secured Medicine and Surgery Course at a Western University. With unusual persistence, Eche’s mind had kept pressing that he accept a strong connection between the picked-up pack and his daughter’s bound-to-be impossible registration, if he chose to play The Good-Natured on the matter, the money manna from heaven sheepishly handing back to owner.
“I’m sure only witches and wizards know where else I could get the amount that should swallow the costs of Miriam’s Medicine stuff”
His peculiar case would not make it a meanness on his part, if he didn’t let the money pack get back to owner…
Who that owner was, Eche Julius could not quite pinpoint of his seven passengers. Maybe the very last guy to leave his bus before his return to base. Maybe, also the guy who was far too absorbed in his frustration with Nigeria’s Collapsing Economy to remember a pack of his, in which he had tucked away A Cool One Million Four Hundred Thousand Naira!
“A big irony!” Eche would have mouthed, if one had asked his candid opinion about the entire incident and he accepted to vouchsafe one his briefest response: He, Eche, would never ever understand ‘Why’ most vocal critics of their Nigeria’s Economic Downturn turn out at last to be The Stinking Rich if not subjects of envy of the Truly Poor. This, too, is a screaming reason why the pack now safely in his hands should not be given a half chance to fall off same! nor, for that matter, he later surrender self to a guilty feeling, after the money had justly gone into Miriam’s Campus Bills…
So, it was that Mr. Eche Julius created by God in His own Image maintained sealed lips over the whereabouts of the forgotten pack, after its loss had become a public knowledge with earnest calls for its kind return by finder continually on air from two outstanding radio houses of their state.
“These newscasters make me want to laugh in soprano,” burst forth an already laughing Eche with the relevant amused look. They ought to know that no lucky finder of a bulging pack wouldn’t stop discovering newer genuine reasons for holding it back; especially the stared-in-the-eye-by financial challenges of the same color as his! In any case, he Eche had always resented passengers’ conversion of his bus into a forum for animated arguments of Politics or Economics; which debate battles, it would appear made owner of pack forget same for completely submitting himself to it.
God should be able to defend him on the point that he had at a point wanted to angrily halt his vehicle and tell the owners of the arguing lips to choose between a journey with the rest of it in silence and a suspended one from a turned-off key and engine…
Why not? He would keep hating with greater passion passengers all of a sudden inspired to start a long or short prayer plus Evangelism in his Mitsubishi soon after a begun journey. On several occasions had he even felt like physically assaulting them, when it was time for payment of rendered service and they hesitated dropping what they should on his waiting palms, because, apparently, they could not imagine as Ministers of The Lord that they would still be passed for Normal Passengers! Julius Eche’s non-membership of their State’s Transport Workers’ Union had meant an off-and-on presence on the transporting scene, he smartly but riskily grabbing the much he had hastily agreed to collect from persons either in a hurry to get to their destinations or do so at cheaper rate. Of course, it had sometimes translated into his speeding off from an illegal stop, whenever Unionist Drivers surfaced…
Eche Julius’ vague presence in their transport circle became the reason why he could not be brought to book by Pained Claudius Loser of the pack helping himself with paid detectives. But while nothing happened to Eche, even as Claudius determinedly fell to a midnight lighting of red candles over the deprivation, his Miriam daughter did not fare as well. The nineteen-year-old beauty known for her near excellent health and for only once-a-year-treatment of malaria began upwardly to receive anti-malarial shots twice monthly… Much sadder, a doting lecturer of hers, who struck up a relationship with her, accidentally ballooned her tummy but sensibly arranged their shot-gun wedding mysteriously died nine days later to make Miriam one of the youngest widows of all times… something she had always asked God to not make her portion.
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