When the loyal and skilled manpower in Bossman became fugitives

GEORGE KAGAME

Meneja, in the ambiance of a good office perched up on the fourth floor of the marble tiled building in downtown Citi swiveled in his custom made chair. The chair itself was one of the few changes at the workplace in recent days among other things at the office. The consignment of the new office furniture arrived after news of excellent performance from Banana Inc. The good ‘practices’ agricultural cooperative had impressive postings in recent statistics and was nowadays placed in good light with government authorities and crucially, donors.

Meneja whose real name is Mwamba Wa Kuku had coined his title to his name, he was an ambitious countryman in Bossman Republic who at some point in his life turned the village corner and set up shop in the high places of the Bossman's capital far away. He now made decisions that influenced people and events, he was a powerful man.
The cooperative, formed by a local government authority initiative aimed to assist small scale businessmen and farmers in Minazi Province to grow better quality seeds and, at harvest, have appropriate avenues from which to earn a good living, Meneja headed the cooperative.

Good living was a major component of programmes put in place and effectively demanded by the highest authorities in the land.
Meneja had himself benefitted from a recent decision by the authorities to identify, search, attract and employ competent and skilled Bossmans in strategic positions in the management of the good old country. Citizenship in Bossman was not by conventional methods as other countries in granting their residency. In Bossman citizenship was open, you stood a chance without much effort and documents to acquire it. As such Bossmans were a unique lot, they were brought together in this wonderful country by circumstances of mutual interest and worked hard to develop and uphold those interests.

A national skills audit-like that for Big Brother Africa was undertaken to attract Meneja’s kind. In fact a whole national commission was established to survey, analyze or determine which sectors in Bossman’s economy were lacking of skilled manpower. As a result it had not taken much for Meneja to climb the corporate ladder. The moment it was established that he could wear well pressed trousers and polyester shirts on top of a sprinkling of a few English sentences, he easily made the grade. But it also helped that he was related or was claimed to have been born on the same village with the Director of Finance in Banana Inc.

As Meneja turned in his chair analyzing a new report, his palms were sweaty. Somehow his fortunes had turned in the immediate past and he figured that he did not have long to be hanging out in his chair. He was not only due to vacate this sweet chair, he was also facing prospects of jail with details coming in, painfully slowly, that Banana Inc was marketed very properly on paper reports, but inside funds were being fleeced by Meneja and some of his trusted corporals in management.

As a result, Meneja, until recently a brilliant example of the success of programmes and policies of the government of Bossman and the province of Minazi, was now facing the possibility of being designated as one of its terrible failures. He was not alone, like him, many of the newly established officials as per the skills hunt were yesterday villagemen turned business executives today.
A bunch of his colleagues in other cooperatives, commissions, agencies and public offices were now undergoing a new drive to replace these 'skilled' individuals who had turned corrupt and swindled from the hand that fed them. This group was now being hunted down vociferously, not really to recover the funds they had fleeced but to show other Bossmans that being corrupt was not good, and if done by government and public officials it should not be seen to be done.

The performance of Banana Inc was itself achieved after a comprehensive research and grassroots survey carried out by the respected National Institute of Statistics of Bossman-NISB. However, in a sad turn of events, the director general of NISB was himself facing arrest and prosecution for corruption, therefore even the information contained in his his statistics or their lack of was disputable. Making the glow of Banana Inc a fake.

If anyone was caught in the business of corruption they faced a few nights in police custody, the humiliation of appearing in the media as the bad apple and they also stood a chance to be unemployed for a while. The punishments for being corrupt ranged from being out of the group that will bring good life to other Bossmans and living in the ‘wilderness’ like King nebuchadenezer. The authority would ultimately have the mercy to bring you back to the good life planning group in later stages, but the immediate effect of the arrest could swing several ways and so Meneja was right to be comprehensive in his choices.

In his wisdom Meneja schemed to find a way out, to run and escape the over zealous police pawns themselves eager to be part of good life. The cops were taking their sweet time deciding first to take his ‘file’ to the national prosecution office. The PO was very eloquent in its pursuit of those it deemed sabotaging the desire to achieve good life and would gladly issue the arrest warrant.
Meneja knew with conviction the sequence of events preceding and following the copy of paper and the information it had. He was ready to take a way out. Having been a member of good life project for a while, he was assured that in his passport their was a Visa that could take him to the safety of not just one country by several of them. And his escape plan depended on his passport being near his heart and wallet and yet far away from the zealous cops.

As events unfolded, it was discovered that the head of police along with his chief of spying was under unexplained circumstances also booted and rumours were presently doing the rounds that he also faced a stunt in jail. A city mayor and an esterwhile governor in the same province were also currently doing the police and prosecution dance with a possibility of detention cells serving as a dance floor.

The mayor in particular was an interesting case, the man that had supervised his rise to mayorship was now his boss, while his former boss who had risen to higher places and left him in the province and had then fallen back. Investigations were rife that as governor, the former boss was alleged to have let one eye close as funds were being fleeced. Bossman was undergoing a serious shift of gears, starting from skilled manpower who changed into corrupt and now they were turning fugitive.

The tune of police and prosecution was a loud one in recent days. It had started with the ministry in charge of administering and or regulating, supervising, envisioning and spying on local government authorities. Two senior officials in this ministry had withered, one ending up in jail and the other utilizing his well kept passport properly to escape the prying eyes of the cops. The cops had to be fast because even the ministry official that ended up in jail was arrested while attempting a Carlos Jackal at the airport.

To be continued.......