New People in Rice Farms

Draft   

CHAPTER 1

Suma Benu couldn’t believe his ears. Never could he have thought, not even in a bad dream, that Ando Kajere, his patron, his friend, and his father, could speak such words to him. Did Ando really call him a fool? The words were like acid which burnt and hissed through his ears, his heart and his bowels. When an hour later he stumbled down the creaking staircase, hardly hearing Fatimah the receptionist wish him good evening, sir, he was unsteady on his feet like a man who had narrowly escaped drowning.

Suma had begun to feel uneasy as he waited in the managing director’s office.  Meanwhile he passed the time flirting with the Executive Secretary.  Kajere’s Ando had been the Managing Director of Aluju General Cereals Company for seven years.  Suma Benu  had counted the passing time which had been so vexingly long. When at last he was called in, the usual day of smiling welcome did not light up Ando’s face as Suma crashed through the door and raised his fist in royal but familiar greeting. Nor did Alhaji Ando begin with teasing and happy familiarities as was his habit.   The man who lived behind that door had a heart which may jump in unpredictable direction.  He was nonetheless resplendent in a freshly laundered blue buban riga  and a beautiful hand woven dipcherima cap to match.
 Ando sat motionless, his jet black face bent over a file as Suma walked down the dark green carpet of the executive office.
“I have read your seminar paper but I do not understand it”   Ando reacted to the younger man’s unexpected thrust on the door.  Suma Benu was locating a chair to adjust himself“ You know that I am not too clever. I did not go to America.” Ando was unduly sarcastic.  
Educated at the School of Agriculture, Kabba, Kogi State, Alhaji Ando  later earned Bachelor of Science (Honours) at the Faculty of Agriculture, Ahmadu Bello University, Samaru, Zaria, Nigeria.  Furthermore, he studied and practiced surveying in addition to many top management programmes he attended at home and abroad. 
Alhaji Ando was contented, attaching prime value to experience but rather suspicious about multiple university degrees earned outside the shores of Nigeria.
Thirty four year old Suma Benu paraded with confidence, multidisciplinary higher degrees earned in the United States of America, England and Sweden.  He was an agricultural scientist and an economist who was returning from Michigan. Alhaji Ando Kajere had taken the unheard of step of going to meet the young man at Murtala Muhammed airport and returning with him to Aluju in the company’s Dornier. A colleague in Kaduna from Suma’s home village had put in a good word for the young graduate. From that moment, the managing director had taken Suma as his protégé, quartered him officially in the Karaworo guesthouse.  Suma lived to all intents and purposes in Alhaji Ando’s home.
“For a successful person, what education was better than native wisdom supplemented by practical learning?” Ando often surmised, beating his chest that there was he as Managing Director while Suma Benu with his Master of Science degree in agronomy would develop a career under his supervision.  Suma Benu was an aggressive intellectual who would stir controversy by method of radical propositions in seminar papers that would clearly hurt Alhaji Ando.  But the Chief Executive realized the need for urgent injection of competences for strategic growth of agro industry in the part of the country.
Life had not been the same since the General Cereals Company came on stream and Kajere and Suma Benu were sadly aware.  Neither research staff nor money for rapid development of rice plantations could be raised.  Equipment for irrigation of the plantations was also in a state of disrepair. In several fields, especially those near the factory and the warehouse, the sprinklers had cased to work. And although sack full of fertilizers still filled sheds they were just any fertilizers and not the special nutrients which the alluvial sand of river bed needed to make it nourishing to greedy rice.  In the mills, de stoning machines which were a part of the original factory design were never installed. Poor yield and deteriorating marketing environment compounded the problem.
“Our rice is not competing with imported long grain variety.  Domestic producers have always been vulnerable.” Ando lamented that the political environment was unfavorable.  Importers manipulated the market.  Nigerian food wholesalers preferred imported rice to cheaper domestic production.
Suma Benu reminded Alhaji Ando of conversations they had over the   short sightedness of bigwigs in Lagos who were ruining the commercial network of the nation. Ando himself had wondered how policy supported continuous importation of rice which diminished capacity for self sufficiency and pauperized rural producers. The two men had identical concern about the capacity of the nation to feed itself and institutionalize food security.  Suma Benu had enjoyed Ando’s confidence. It became Ando’s habit to draw Suma into discussion on critical official matters.  Suma became instantly a power in the establishment. He was knowledgeable and he controlled information on global agriculture, food prices, shortages and trends in the production of survival crops.  As an agronomist who robbed shoulders with men who had rice production in their blood, a compulsive searcher of the written word, Suma Benue  had delved into the history of Aluju rice fields and perused the politics of global production of the crop.
Having settled in operations, what did Suma not owe Alhaji Ando? His commanding position in the company, the lovely bungalow he occupied which was originally intended to be the chairman’s lodge, a chain of contacts in Ilorin, Kaduna and Lagos and load of  expensive gifts. One year after his arrival in Aluju, Suma was promoted to take the place of the foreign consultant, Dr Robin Banks who had been chief agronomist since the beginning. The following year Suma became field manager. It seemed as if it was only a question of time before Alhaji Ando himself would move into a higher orbit leaving the managing directorship to Suma.
Suma was fully conscious of his debts although he did not ask himself what the ultimate cost of these good things would be. Not to acknowledge Alhaji Ando’s abounding love would have been most rascally attitude to take.  But relationship had not been continuously smooth in view of erupting occasional skirmish which arose from Suma’s interpretation of change strategy.  His expectations of subordinates’ output were rather ambitious for the workforce that must be carried along.  During a visit to the office of the managing director and seeing  how angry and distressed his patron was, Suma rose from his chair and would have thrown himself prostrate on the floor in remorse before the chief executive.  Alhaji Ando observed the antics in restraint but proceeded to advise Suma to review his tactics in handling relationships at work.  The message did not quite register but Suma accommodated the admonishment.  
Indeed Suma did not know for how long he stood speechless before his boss who, after mopping his sweat soaked face with a handkerchief, returned to his file. Perhaps Suma stood there only a moment. Perhaps he stood there for an hour. From the secretary’s room, the chatter of the typewriter was like the barking of a mad baboon.  Staring with difficulty as if he had been in a drugged sleep, Suma walked unsteadily out of the room. The shimmering heat of the September midday subsequently beat upon him repetitively.
Furthermore it had become obvious that technical and strategic discussions between Suma Benu and Alhaji Ando had leaked to the consultants’ base in India.

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CHAPTER 2
Suma was not a handsome man and he knew it.  He wore big black scars  around his forehead.  But God rewarded him by an encounter in Alhaji Ando’s house.  Saratu, a light skinned, beautiful, lanky and shy niece of the head of the household would always rise from the chair in which she stationed herself and left the room whenever Suma Benu entered during his frequent visits. In her silence and childlike graces, Suma saw the refinement which American women, with all their cleverness and noise, had forfeited. But Suma had no chance of talking to Saratu.
When Saratu’s first arrived in Aluju on completion of the National Youth Corps programme, life was not easy.  She studied Botany in University of Maiduguri and worked in a palm fruit plantation in Edo state during her service.  Her mother shared parentage with Alhaji Ado.  At first Saratu had nothing to occupy her mind in the solemn environment in Aluju.  She was indeed bored to tears. But after one agonizing month during which she was practically alone in the house from morning till evening, she told herself that being an unemployed university graduate did not mean that she had lost her poise.  The stepmother, Hajiya Rakiya, her domineering uncle’s wife had after all treated her as a daughter. So Saratu began to spend her mornings following Hajiya Rakiya from room to room learning the secrets of wife craft and womanhood. Hajiya Rakiya teased her for being so sleepy in the morning. Nonetheless Saratu turned Hajiya’s two daughters Bilkisu and Safiya into pets.  They were eight and six years old respectively.  Saratu showered them with care and affection.
Suma Benu eventually worked into Saratu’s mind through Hajiya Rakiya’s observation that Suma’s frequent visits to their house was not strictly for official purpose.
“I am sure you have something like a pending agenda with us in this villa,” Hajiya teased Suma during one of frequent unannounced visits.
Suma pretended to be shocked but rather amused and encouraged to open up.
“Hajiya, you have always been my mother, I am sure you know that I did not return alone from America for nothing”
“You mean your eyes do not deceive you”
The brief interchange was loaded.
Suddenly, Suma saw the possibility of sharing his heart with a loved one, an occurrence he had not hitherto imagined.  Up to the moment he had conceptualized an inaccessible relationship between him and Saratu.
Suma Benu assessed himself as tough, skillful and well-educated. He identified Saratu as a rather weak young lady who needed masculine protection.  Suma imagined himself toiling day and night, even abandoning his vocation, to give security and position in society to a wife of his dream who could be beautiful Saratu.  In return he expected the love of his life to cling to him because she needed him. But while Saratu thought of future dependable relationship, she clearly understood the matter differently. In fact developing a concept about Suma Benu the young lady had consistently classified the agronomist as subordinate of her uncle, indeed the appendage and parasite? She mentally defined Suma as a hustler, some drowning man who had to cling to her as the   niece of the managing director to save himself from the open sea? Unknown to Suma, in spite of the lady’s silence and her flirtatious shyness, Saratu seemed to nurse a consciousness of the strength of her position.   Nonetheless Suma was overtly conscious of his status as Field Manager, the passport he intended to use to win the lady’s heart.
It came to pass that love blossomed between Suma and Saratu.  Hajiya Rakiya, her husband and Saratu’s parents had accommodated the entreaties from Suma’s immediate family who trooped into Aluju from Osimapa along the confluence of the Rivers Niger and Benue.  Suma’s kith and kin asked for Saratu’s hands in marriage.  The birth of three lovely girls in quick succession and Saratu’s staying in the house all time had filled, smoothed and polished Suma’s rugged life.  Saratu’s  eyes were deep pools which radiated a cooling light like the mist raising from mountain brooks at midday. Her walk was a lazy swagger which was at the same time proud, weak and sensual.  Suma Benu was full of joy.