to reply. I stood there for a moment looking at him, at the drink he was holding: an ice-cold, freshly shaken espresso martini. I was drinking the same; the glass would’ve been too cold to hold without my long, white gloves. Despite our icy beverages, I remember feeling the temperature in the room rise uncomfortably.
I don’t recall how I responded; probably with something lighthearted. After all, what was one supposed to say in reply to such a comment? And what was such a comment supposed to mean?
Around the time that I began my consultancy at SCL, I had started dating a lovely Scottish man called Tim. He was different from most of the men I had dated, and he reminded me somehow of Alexander. Tim, too, had attended British boarding schools, and came from old family money. Like Alexander in my professional life, Tim was more conservative than most people in my personal life. He worked in business development, as I had just begun to do. He was a social butterfly, the loudest and happiest person in any room. He dressed formally, in three-piece tweed suits, and was as handsome as any man gracing the cover of GQ.
I didn’t tell my family much about him—not just yet. I hadn’t had a very good experience sharing recent news. After all, when I told my mother about my new job, she had fretted.
“Oh, no,” she said, and told me she hoped I wouldn’t be giving up my PhD. I assured her I had no plans to.
There was really no home to go back to that Christmas. My family had already started packing boxes to leave our home. The idea of even trying was too dreary to contemplate. So, instead, I threw myself into my work at SCL, as if in those few short days between Christmas and the New Year, I might be able to stop things happening far away from crumbling. I followed up on the Nigerians. Perhaps that project would come through. I wanted it to; I wanted something to go right. I wished I could continue working through the holidays, to keep my mind off personal things, but the office was open only until Christmas.
In the end, Tim invited me to his family home in Scotland. Going away seemed a good way to distract myself. Tim’s parents lived in two adjoined turn-of-the-century country cottages surrounded by a perfectly manicured lawn. They were a warm and welcoming group, and I was diverted through Christmas Day with talking and drinking tea and sipping fine wine, with conversation and laughter. They made me feel right at home. Though, given what was going on with my family—something I didn’t share with Tim’s family or even Tim—this made me feel both wonderful and melancholy at the same time.
The house was so deep into the countryside that there was little cell service there. I’d asked Tim’s parents for permission to give out the number for their land line, in case of an emergency. I’d shared the number only with my mother, Alexander, Prince Idris, and the Nigerians. Alexander had said that if things went well in Madrid, we’d possibly be hearing from the prince or the Nigerian representative over the holidays.
“It’s now or never,” he had said before he left for Ghana and then a vacation with his family. The election was just over a month and a half away.
One night the phone rang. Tim’s brother ran to pick it up. I listened from the other room.
“We don’t want any of what you’re sellin’!” I heard him say in a gruff brogue. Tim’s mother was nearby, and I could hear her scrambling to take the receiver from him. She knew I was expecting important calls. When the scuffle was over, Tim’s brother returned to the room I was in, his face bright red.
“Uh, Brittany, it’s for you.” He paused. “It’s … a prince?” he said and shrugged.
Prince Idris. I gathered myself together quickly and picked up the phone. “Good evening, Your Royal Highness,” I said.
He had very good news. He had already called Alexander to tell him, and now he was reaching out to me. The Nigerians wanted to move forward—immediately. And they wanted to talk through the proposal in person. They were in DC.
Alexander, the prince said, was on holiday and couldn’t get away. “You must prepare to go and meet them yourself right away,” Prince Idris said.
After we hung up, I could hardly breathe. Surely SCL wouldn’t send me. They had senior people they could put on this. I was merely a graduate student who’d been working there for only three and a half weeks part time.
Suddenly, the phone rang again. This time it was Alexander. Before I could say anything beyond “hello,” he jumped in.
“Okay, Brits,” he said, using a nickname for me neither he nor anyone else had ever used. “Are you ready to prove yourself? These guys say they are ready to go but want to agree to the deal in person. Always close in person.”
I kept listening.
Everyone else was on vacation or unreachable, Alexander said. “That leaves you, my dear!”
I had no idea if I could really do it.
“If you really want it and you don’t think they are bullshitting us, then it’s now or never,” he continued. “If we close this, I’ll owe you one.”
JANUARY–APRIL 2015
The trip to DC went better than I could have imagined—better than anyone could have imagined.
Just after Christmas, I left Tim’s family home in Scotland and met one of the Nigerian billionaires behind it all. By the time I arrived, he had already met with government officials and businessmen from whom he was hoping to elicit a public outcry about challenger Muhammadu Buhari, but he had met with little success, and he was interested in a contract with SCL.
He was a large and physically powerful man, imposing, serious, and rich—the latter of which he made sure to impress upon me. I found him intimidating. He wasn’t used to doing business with women, let alone a young American woman, and I had the sense that he wasn’t entirely pleased that Alexander had sent me instead of coming himself.
I had my proposal with me, and I did the best I could to make clear what Alexander felt SCL, with six weeks left before the Nigerian presidential election, was capable of doing.
Nigeria was split down the middle between the two most powerful political parties in the country: Goodluck Jonathan’s People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and the party backing Buhari. There was no time to win over swing voters. Our work would be to activate Jonathan’s base to promote voter turnout and, more important, ensure a wide margin of victory in order to avoid an uncontested election and therefore prevent violence from breaking out afterward.
We’d use radio, one of the most reliable means of communication in the country’s rural areas, as our primary medium, filling the airwaves with ads, paid interviews, and vox-pop pieces. We’d do some TV as well as print newspaper ads and op-eds. Given that only 10 percent of households had internet, our digital campaign would be limited to urban areas, where we’d put out Facebook posts, tweets, and YouTube content and banner ads. We’d also rely on billboards in targeted areas, as there wasn’t enough data to microtarget in any way or enough time to do modeling, a scientific way of analyzing data to predict individuals’ behavior, even if the data had allowed.
Even with all these strategies, I told the Nigerian billionaire, SCL couldn’t guarantee a win for Goodluck
