My new papa had his own dreams for me.
He believed I was destined to become a great man, which was why, though he wasn’t rich, he sent me to the finest schools. I never told him that I wanted to spend my life drawing—with Thula wedded to her mission, I was my parents’ only chance at a joyful and proud old age, and I longed to give it to them. Papa spent hours helping me with my homework, and when I passed my tests he gave me cash gifts. When the time came for me to get into a career training program, he went to the biggest men he knew in government, seeking help for his gifted son. He couldn’t do it alone, being that he was but one of thousands of small men sitting at the bottom and striving for their sons to get to the top. Mama cooked and assembled baskets of fruits, and Papa took them to these men in their homes, along with bottles of alcohol, goats from the open-air market, and stuffed envelopes. That was how I got into the sole government leadership school in the country.
During my days at the school, I wrote to Thula about what I was learning, the conversations I was having with my classmates. I told her about all the ways my being in government could help villages like Kosawa. What the country needed was a government made of people like us, those who had suffered the consequences of bad policies and knew how things ought to be. We needed a leader who would put citizens first, place all businesses under state ownership. We needed to direct all funds from exports into the nation’s coffers. If we put in measures to prevent the coffers from being pinched, they would eventually overflow. We would use our abundant wealth for healthcare, for education, jobs creation. There was no reason why citizens should lack when the country had bauxite to the north, oil to the west, timber to the east. With a visionary leader, a prosperous country was possible. Wasn’t it evident, I asked her, that good government was the solution to the ills of our nation? I told her I believed we could do it, our generation. We could be the ones to uplift and equalize, no citizen greater or lesser than another. We could create a beautiful country. But first we had to wait our turn; the older generation’s turn was not over yet. Our current leaders were men for whom the word “change” elicited chuckles, but there wasn’t much we could do to force them and their archaic mentalities out, we had to wait for their eras to end. The past would soon be gone, and the future would be ours to design.
Thula did not dismiss my hope, though she said it was unlikely a country like ours would transition effortlessly from a wretched government to an upright one. She said our nation did not have the foundation for such a progression, because it lacked a constitution; what every country needed was a declaration made by the people, all the people, about what sort of country they wished to live in so that they could build it together. If you look at countries with a history of stable governments, she wrote, you’ll see that they have solid foundations created by those who came before them. The Americans are standing on a foundation created by their founding fathers. European monarchs created foundations for the kinds of countries their descendants would live in. Who created a foundation for our country? No one. We were different tribes thrown together with no common dream. We were forced to build upon sinking sand, and now we’re crumbling from within.
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Despite my sister’s wariness, I harbored hopes during my years at the leadership school for what I would do in government. My classmates were like me, convinced that we would never be corruptible like the older generation, determined to hold steadfast to the ideal that the emphasis on the title “civil servant” should be on the second word.
It did not take me long to realize, after I began working, that my hopes would not come to be. I could see, even from my first day of balancing budgets, that the past and the future of our country would be identical. Repeatedly, I was told my job was to clean up numbers, not to ask questions about why large sums of money could not be accounted for. When I asked what would happen if the deficit was discovered, I was told that the problem was for another day—my responsibility was to worry about the present.
I learned, within my first year after leadership school, that political theories and their applications existed in separate realms. And that Thula was right—ours was a country with no foundation upon which a better country could be rebuilt. I slowly began to accept, just like my colleagues, that, ultimately, we had to do whatever suited us best. Only I didn’t know in those days what suited me best. I didn’t know what I really wanted.
Nubia knew what she wanted—five children who would one day study in America, health and prosperity, happiness for herself, for me, for our families. The country meant nothing to her. What good is this country to anyone? she asked me often. In our school days, I used to argue that the country stood a chance if we gave it a chance. Then I went into government and realized that no one in my office, from my lowest-ranking colleague to my biggest boss, gave the country a chance. They diverted all the money they could into private accounts, took whatever supplies their children needed for school, sent
