Norman Goodman Misserial’s
‘ESCAPADES OF KWEKU ATTA, ESQ.,’ (2)
“ALL DIE BE DIE TO DO AND DIE”
The reverberations were regular and rhythmic. They rang through the house with a consistent ‘boom, boom’ boom’ that rang through the two storey-mansion and area in the early morning quiet of the presidential neighburhood. The sound has been a source of irritation to the neighbourhood for years, if not decades, and has gone down into the annals of legend. Nowadays neighbours listened to it with tolerant smiles. It is not always that a neighbour became a President, so what if he liked fufu at dawn?
When the young lawyer and politician bought the property nearly forty years ago and moved in with his wife, their neighbours had complained the very next day. Who loved to be woken at six in the morning with the sound of fufu being pounded? But the young lawyer loved his fufu, the cassava beaten to a gooey mess, at seven o’clock in the morning.
Worse, it turned out that the young lawyer also spent a considerable amount of his pickings on venison and other forms of raw meat, known locally as “bushmeat”. ‘Bushmeat’ is the fresh, bloody flesh of animals newly slaughtered from the forest, particularly the intestines of the creatures. ‘Kwaata’ loved it if the intestines were full of fecal matter. He loved it when his meaty vegetable soups were spiced with the fecal matter of the animals, mixed with garlic, onions, red pepper and ginger. It was a delicacy of his Teansa tribe. Those people liked their soup smelly. At dawn, when this potent mixture was cooked on the hot stove by his wife, the fresh morning air of the neighbourhood would be permeated with fragrant (smelly) air that travelled for hundreds of yards, and attracted painful swallows of saliva from the often sleeping neighbours.
What did they know, thought His Excellency Nana Sir Obrempong Ewiasewura Kwaku Atta I, Esq., QB, SAG, OBE, KFC and to a highly specialized inner circle as simply ‘Kwaa’ or ‘Kwaata’. Indeed what does the neighbours know now, he thought with a gleeful smile, as the fragrances permeated into the air-conditioned comfort of his bedroom.
He was preparing to go to the office, but first, as he has been doing over the past nearly forty years, he needed to download that fufu. Many people had often wondered at his manly walk, his firm step, the way the earth seamed to shake slightly when he passed with his solid, determined walk. They did not know that his secret was a heavy breakfast, specifically fufu and bush meat soup, first thing in the morning, before he left the house to face the day. When a man had two heavy balls of fufu with several large pieces of meat resting below the breastbone, one could face anything the day threw up. And for a man in politics, the day could throw up a lot.
Like the line of petitioners he would undoubtedly meet as soon as he went downstairs. Indeed, it has been the same situation over the past thirty-five years, when he first went into public office. That since he first went into public office as an assemblyman, thirty-five years ago. Constituents always have problems, and as he went up the political ladder, from assemblyman to Member of Parliament to deputy minister to minister, the problems have become more complex and Machiavellian. A politician has to be smart, to see beyond the obvious, to hidden motivations.
And money. Everybody seems to want money or something from you. And they wonder why we have to steal, he thought and smiled again. If you come to me to pay for the abortion of your girlfriend to escape the wrath of your wife, where do you think I will get the money from? Somebody has to pay, and I am certainly not going to take that money out of my allowance for bush meat. It is give and take, and I will always take ten times what I give, baby. He laughed, throwing a snowy blue shirt over his undershirt and buttoning up, moving to the breakfast nook in his bedroom, switching on the television by remote.
Immediately his genial mood began to evaporate when he saw Alhaji Dr. Efovi John Joojo Asante Zubaida, the chap he defeated in the recent presidential election holding forth at some party program, his shoulders draped with the distinctive blue, black and pink colours of his party, the Socialist Party of Ogyakrom. Kwaata thought sourly that the only thing socialist about that party was its ability to con the masses, the poor and uninformed to vote for it so that the party’s leadership can come to power to steal hundreds of millions of dollars every few years, with the Chameleon at the forefront of the looting brigade.
Kwaata immediately tuned up the volume of the 70 inch China Star Ultra HD curve TV to listen to the man he privately called the Chameleon (the people had no idea he enjoyed assigning spiteful names to most people he met) for his highly changeable nature and ability to constantly to belong to every tribe in the country, as his name demonstrated.
As the volume came up he heard his political nemesis and arch-rival saying, “…the election was falsely taken away from me, yes! But we have learned our lessons! In the next election, in June, 2020, it shall be all die be die at all the polling stations! Yes! All die be die!”
“Kwasia! Onye! Buulu buulu!” Kwaata fumed at him, shaking his head in wonderment. This is indeed a very strange world!
There was a knock, and the 48-incher came in with the breakfast tray, shifting to get her monumental hips through the doorway and into the breakfast nook. She parked the tray on the breakfast table and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
“Good morning, Kwaa, my darling,” she said.
“Good morning, sweetheart,” Kwaata replied the First Lady, his eyes still on the dweeb on the screen. He pointed the remote device at the screen and turned to his wife in consternation, “Can you believe this guy?”
First Lady Joyce Adwoa Serwaa Atta, known to her husband as the 48-incher and to the nation as “Killer Buttocks” or “Bottom Power” (not to be confused with Crazy Buttocks who caused that Minister to lose his berth in that African country), looked at the screen saw the Chameleon and realized that Kwaata would very soon become apoplectic. The Chameleon often had that kind of effect on her husband. The pair had been political rivals for decades, belonging as they did to the two main and rival political parties in the country. They had met head to head in two elections and were headed for a third show down. Each had won once. The next election would be the third. But this was so unfair. Kwaata has been in office for less than a week, and the Chameleon, who has just left office, was touring the country on a so-called ‘Thank You’ tour, which was just an excuse to badmouth Kwaata.
“Really, can you believe this guy?” the President repeated.
“Come on, don’t mind him. Eat your food. Ralph Bonsu, Adamu and the Chief of Staff are downstairs. And you have about fifteen other people waiting to see you before you leave for office,” she soothed.
Kwaata met Joyce Adwoa Serwaa at the Law School when they were both trying to attain their professional certificate forty-five years ago. Kwaata, always a man to push himself ahead, was the class president, gangly, slim, bespectacled, handsome and clean, whilst Serwaa was the class secretary. Though not very pretty, one look at her backside convinced Kwaa that that backside was a convincing argument. He knew he just had to own that pair of boundary breaking haunches. But even back then, he had political ambitions, and he knew his future wife needed to have a brain. So he formed a study group and invited her to join. Very soon, he realized that she was probably smarter than him academically. Brains, buttocks, and the lashes with big, brown eyes told him that his bed would always be occupied with a stimulating life partner. Since she was highly religious, he strategically invited himself to her Students Union (SU) organization. After that, between SU meetings, ferrying her in his Peogeut 404 car, and study sessions, it was only a matter of time before the inevitable happened. One rainy evening, they found themselves alone in his bachelor pad, studying. She decided to prepare a snack, one thing led to another and by the time morning came, SU and studies were very far from their mind. Once she sampled the honourable Old Joe she also realized that Kwaata packed a convincing argument that could take care of the 48-inch backside for decades to come.
They married soon after law school, and Kwaata soon realized that he had a brilliant but unpaid legal assistant who had a great strategic and very political brain with the added bonus of loving to lap up Old Joe when that honourable member was not busy plowing the 48 inches. A highly successful legal and political team was born.
And she loved to cook Teansa delicacies such as fufu and bushmeat too; how lucky can one man get?
Now, she shut down the television and guided him to his breakfast.
“Was it not this same bastard who had his communicators chasing me when I said that it would be ‘do or die’ at the polling stations during the elections?”
The First Lady laughed, “He is just paying you back in kind. Take it easy. Just send your communicators after him too. After all, now you can afford it,” she advised.
His Excellency thought about the whole thing, recalling when he made the ‘do or die’ statement. It was after the last election, which he had lost under very funny circumstances to the Chameleon. That experience had been one of the worst in his life. Barely a day and in fact during the collation of that election results, he and his team had realized that the figures being entered at various polling stations across the country were simply unrealistic. To illustrate, in many polling stations, he, Kwaata, had realized that his personal votes far outstripped those of the parliamentary candidates of the Chameleon’s political party, the Socialist Party. Indeed, Kwaata’s votes even outstripped those of the candidates of his own party, the Capitalist Inheritance Party (CIP). But in a very strange development, the Chameleon, as if powered by the drug Largactil, powered past the numbers of his own parliamentary candidates, left the candidates of the CIP in the dust, powered past Kwaata, and won the Presidency. In anger, whilst preparing for the latest election, to drum home the fact that his people would be very vigilant at the polling stations, had said firmly that it would be ‘do or die’ at the polling stations.
This innocent comment had attracted the ire of many communicators seen to be friendly with the Chameleon, at that time the President of Ogyakrom. The comment from one particular commentator, Kwesi Anopoma, had irked Kwaata very much when he said, “Foolish man, bring your children down from Dubai to come and do and die!”
Anopoma’s comment had irked Kwaata very much, even though his children indeed lived in Dubai, the United States and Switzerland, now being firmly established at members of the international jet set.
Now, this Chameleon, who insulted me for saying ‘Do and Die’, is now saying ‘All die be die”. How crass can one person be, Kwaata continued to fume.
“Yes, you are right. I will tell the Viper to reply him this evening,” he said meanly.
The First Lady gave a trilling laugh and Kwaata looked down and smirked. She asked, “Why do you keep calling him the Viper? One day you will make a mistake and say it in public.”
The Viper was the Vice President, Papa Kofi Banda. Kwaata had given the man the name because if his babyish looks but very deadly sting. He had a reputation for dropping vicious and poisonous stings on opponents, which asset had been priceless during the elections.
Kwaata laughed, “I won’t. I am too careful. Anyway, what is it today? It smelled like otwee. Did you make sure you put in enough of what I love?” he asked querulously.
“Yes. Today, you would need to wash your hands very carefully. You know the staff often complain that your hands smell of your soup all day,” she smiled. What they actually say is that his right hand begins to stink after a few hours. Which is why she insisted that there was a hand cleanser with him all the time.
To be continued.
(You can read Norman Goodman Misserial’s ‘ESCAPADES OF KWEKU ATTA, ESQ.,’ every Monday at page 9 of the Daily Searchlight or follow up on our Facebook page Daily Searchlight or on our website www.dailysearchlight.com).
