a thousand and one obstacles.”
“It must be these qualities which the President finds irresistible,” Lilly Loveless ventured, then immediately apologised. Although Bobinga Iroko and Dr Wiseman Lovemore were not the company to be cautious about, she knew she must avoid airing her opinions or taking sides on sensitive local issues during her fieldwork.
“With a big fancy car like that and in his position, the Reg doesn’t need words to sleep with a woman,” Bobinga Iroko laughed cynically.
“How is that?” asked Lilly Loveless.
“The car speaks for itself, so all he needs to say to any woman he wants is: ‘enter we go’” Bobinga Iroko explained. “And for a man who stammers the way he does, the car is a real speech enhancer.”
“There’s no such thing as romantic language with him?” asked Lilly Loveless.
“Romantic language is for the poor,” Bobinga Iroko mocked, “those who are always suffering from an over-inflation of empty words. Power and money open doors that most can only dream of; they are the poetry of the dumb, the humour of those too busy or too important to flatter, the corrector of those ordinarily too ugly to be noticed. With the rich and powerful, it is all about instant gratification.”
“Isn’t that too hard?”
“The only thing too hard is their sex drive, which they use as evidence of the opportunities and impunities of wealth and power,” said Bobinga Iroko. “Thus the Reg’s persistent erections are as rock-hard as they are reckless. They’ve always been, only more so today with the advent of Viagra – ‘the secret weapon to empower little warriors of love’, that has made horizontal jogging his favourite sport. He is convinced women worship rock solid hardness and the prospect of all-night staying power that come with the feeling of bigger, wider and fuller that he believes he induces. He has a queue of university girls at his service every day, and is known to be familiar with many more resting places than meet the eye,” he pointed to his eye, as if to say, even for the investigative journalist that he is. “He knows how to keep himself busy enjoying small small things; each time he settles on one, he is consumed by an obsession of covering the face, hammering the base and hoping for the best. He is well reputed to pay girls with university petrol coupons, which the girls are forced to exchange for cash at various filling stations.” Then, as if he didn’t want anyone to overhear him, he whispered, “The Talking Drum is building a dossier on him, and we’ve made friends with all filling station attendants to take down the names of all the girls who come with petrol coupons to convert into cash.”
“Why are you doing it?” Lilly Loveless asked.
“Because we are a newspaper with a social responsibility mandate,” he replied. “And because we believe that the petrol coupons are meant for the university to function properly,” he added. “The man’s cell phone, bought and serviced by the university, has more room for the cell phone numbers of girls and female colleagues than it does for the numbers of his male administrative colleagues, deans and lecturers.” He spoke with such conviction that Lilly Loveless was amazed.
“And there’s another reason, which should please you, I believe. We want to render his poor wife a service. The fellow is known to have far more children out of wedlock than he can recollect. We don’t want his legitimate wife and children to suffer…”
“What does his wife do?”
“Her name is Victoria Aa-Shing. She’s also an academic. She used to teach at the university as well. But too many fights pushed the man to engineer her transfer to Nyamandem, under the fake pretext of a promotion to head the directorate of Degree Equivalence at the Ministry of Knowledge Production. Now he is free to go and come from home as he likes, except for the weekends his madam is around, or during public holidays when a former maid of theirs, with whom he has a child as well – the child that pushed his wife to push the maid out of the house several years ago, keeps an eye on him… It is an irony, as she had employed the services of the mannish-looking nanny precisely to stop him from playing hanky-panky with the maid in her absence. But when Dr Simba Spineless is determined to think with his penis, he thinks with his penis. He begs to differ with those who insist there must be more to a woman than being a writing pad,” laughed Bobinga Iroko.
“There is nothing the wife hasn’t done to stop him from noticing and embracing the charms of other women,” he continued. “She has framed and displayed photos of their happiest moments, told him stories about the pleasant past, cooked him his favourite dishes, spiced his meals with popular love charms, and loved him the way she believes no other woman can. But he is what we call ‘woman wrapper’, a man who darts from one woman to another like a nectar-seeking bee. Even then, she would rather give up on life than on her marriage: ‘I cannot back down now, no matter how unwanted he makes me feel,’ she tells her sympathetic academic sisters who in turn scream: ‘Men – terrible creatures!!!’”
Bobinga Iroko was certainly the investigative journalist he claimed to be. Or was he more of a rumour monger? Where did he come by his damning details on the private lives of others? Did those eyes and ears of his see and hear beyond the ordinary? These, of course, were questions Lilly Loveless could only ask herself in silence. She however wondered what Bobinga Iroko would say to her mom’s famous cautionary words: ‘the one who gossips to you about others, gossips to others about you.’
“What we hate most about him is the air of impunity he carries around. If only he were a bit modest, even his staunchest critics that some of us are would understand him and soften up,” said Bobinga Iroko.
“So he is a sort of arrogant bastard?” asked Lilly Loveless.
“Much worse, I assure you,” said Bobinga Iroko. “You need to see him. Imagine what he would say in the hearing of his own wife: ‘The mistake men make is to give all their love to one woman. This contradicts even the eating habits of the most poor amongst us. We all eat a variety of foods every week. Why should it be any different with love and loving?’”
“And what does his wife do?”
“What can she do? He threatens her with having the yam and the knife, and she knows just what he means. This is a lion’s den and he is one of the master lions. What I can’t understand is what women find irresistible in this master lion. I’ve always heard what makes a man appealing is good looks, sincerity, honesty, humour, intelligence, passion and tenderness. I’m yet to be convinced he has any of these qualities. And don’t tell me beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.”
“Bobinga Iroko,” Lilly Loveless said, a note of tenderness in her voice, “have many people told you that you have a sharp, impressive and sympathetic mind?”
“A few,” he replied. “But I’ve learnt not to trust what people tell me, until I know what they’re sniffing for.”
“So what am I sniffing for?”
“You tell me.”
“Nothing. Just your sharp, impressive, sympathetic, creative, rebellious mind. With a dish like your mind, I could eat until my tongue complains.”
“You see what I mean? Because you desperately want such a mind, you are determined to find it in the first man you meet in Mimboland.”
“You are not the first man I’ve met in Mimboland.”
“Really? How unfortunate. I was beginning to think of me, myself and I…”
“That proves my point…”
