When Trouble Sleeps|Leye Adenle
Leye Adenle’s When Trouble Sleeps, the sequel to his debut crime novel Easy Motion Tourist, follows the travails of Amaka Mbadiwe, the resourceful protagonist whose non-governmental organisation helps sex workers, as she tracks down Ojo—the son-in-law of an ultra-powerful political party leader—for the deadly assault of a prostitute. As with its predecessor, the story is set in present day Lagos and features the points of views of several characters.
With no concrete evidence to pin Ojo to his crime, Amaka seduces and drugs him before stealing his phone’s memory card containing videos of him raping preteen girls. Things take a complicated turn when Ojo, following the death of the current gubernatorial aspirant in a premeditated plane crash, is plucked from obscurity by his wife’s father, to become the next governor of Lagos State.
In a bid to ensure his skeletons remains in the closet, Ojo sics the brothel owner who had helped him bury his crime as well as his friend on Amaka. However, the memory card is stolen when Amaka attempts to stop a rampaging mob from exacting justice on an innocent woman. Without any proof of Ojo’s sex crimes, she enters a questionable deal with the opposition party to ensure Ojo loses the election.
When Trouble Sleeps’ portrayal of Nigeria’s political class and the filthiness of the country’s politics is spot on. Godfatherism, a prominent trait in Nigerian politics where aspirants are beholden to their financial sponsors, makes a cameo in the form of Otunba, Ojo’s father-in-law. Otunba unilaterally selects Ojo as the party’s gubernatorial nominee not for his intelligence or his political experience but merely for his malleability; demonstrating why politics in Nigeria is largely seen as a selfish and unscrupulous endeavour.
Longevity in Nigerian politics is often predicated on one’s willingness to kowtow to the demands of one’s godfather. It is a lesson the beleaguered real life Lagos State Governor Akinwumi Ambode was forced to relearn, having lost the endorsement of kingmaker and party chieftain Bola Tinubu for his reelection bid.
The sordidness of Nigerian politics is further reflected in the manufactured riot both political party leaders plan in order to manipulate the Federal Government into disbursing emergency funds, which they along with the State Governor will share. Such nefarious partnerships would never transpire in a system where political parties have distinct manifestoes that members are expected to honour and defend, proving when it really comes down to it, Nigerian politicians are not necessarily bound by ideologies, ethnicity or religion but their access to wealth.
Amid this political aberration, the complicity of the citizenry in permitting grand theft by government officials and their puppet masters is queried. Nigerians barely register public outrage nor demand accountability when millions of naira disappear from the public coffers, yet are swift to mete out jungle justice to small-time criminals with little interference from the police. It’s a troubling paradox Amaka reflects upon after witnessing a man chased down by an angry crowd, then necklaced and set on fire.
“Their leaders loot the treasury dry on a daily basis and they do nothing about it,” she says to her friend Eyitayo, “but some poor chap is accused of lifting a wallet and they burn him alive.”
The novel also spotlights the corrosive symbiotic relationship between politicians and the corrupt Nigerian press, which is viewed as the mouthpiece for highest bidder. In one scene, Otunba advices Ojo not to take questions from the press about his party nomination until journalists have been bribed into conformity.
Democracy without a truly independent press is no democracy; particularly, if the fourth estate, whose job it is to speak for citizens and set the government straight, is bound to the political class. But in such a system, the government is free to run roughshod over the electorate, and because commerce and politics are intertwined in Nigeria. As a result, newspapers that are critical and have to depend on adverts for survival can’t thrive—a sobering fact Nigerian journalist, Kadaria Ahmed, alluded to in a recent Humans Of New York (HONY) post.
Like most crime novels, the modus operandi of law enforcement officers takes significant space in When Trouble Sleeps. In true Nigerian fashion, conventional police procedures are routinely discarded such as when Ibrahim, the police chief, oversees the torture of a suspect to extract a confession. A brothel is burnt to the ground in an unauthorised raid; even Amaka’s investigative efforts with the police—in her zeal to protect her own client—sometimes borders on the illegal.
When Trouble Sleeps makes no attempt to prettify the political realities of Nigeria, its sham elections and questionable police tactics. As in the real world, winning is all that matters, and it’s the quest to win at all cost that drives each character, animates the plot, and makes for a riveting read from the first page to the very end.
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