Hostile waters. Episode 4: The conspiracy

Chief Kosoro poured himself some red wine and watched the melting ice cubes as they sank to the bottom of the goblet. He took a sip and licked the corner of his mouth.

\”When do the goods arrive?\” He asked Tiri Kolajo.

\”Matthew placed an order last week.We have ten thousand bags of cement on the way, all of appropriate quality. The first batch arrives this weekend\”.

Tiri simpered, pulling on his tie. He sat cross-legged on the red sofa facing the window in Chief Kosoro\’s spacious office. He looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one of Chief Kosoro and his late wife and their only son. The sickly woman had died six years previous, and poor Chief Kosoro had withdrawn from public life for almost four years. There were pictures of all the previous chairmen of Ifemekunu Local Government too, all of them men of timber and calibre, means and commanding presence. None of them worth comparing to the ragtag urchin the ignorant people elected.

Alex Akiwaju had begun a massive water storage project on the hills above oremeji village. That had put the Chief Kosoro camp into a veritable trepidation. Obviously, the boy was getting some good advice. And that was not good. The storage tanks would have the capacity to hold several years worth of water when completed. That would enable all-year irrigation farming, and also supply pipe-borne water to the villages.

\”What an elder can see while lying down on his bed, a young man cannot see it even if he climbs up a mountain\”. Chief Kosoro said.

Tiri Shrugged. He recognised a snag there. Alex Akiwaju had surrounded himself with a mix of elders and young men. For the moment, it seemed that he had a wider view of the horizon than everybody else.