A mission to Texas

Writing the biography of a famous Nigerian politician can be a nerve-wracking experience. It can also be fun.

Part of the challenges of this onerous task includes last minute cancelled appointments, unanswered phone calls, delay in responses to text messages and emails, difficult interviewees and surprisingly, funding issues.  

Five years and three books down the road, I can write another book on my experience as a commissioned chronicler of the lives of the famous and the rich. A good friend of mine noted for his cynical view of politics and politicians has suggested a title, VILLAINS AND VICTORS; IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF FAME AND FRAUD.

As a politician myself, I am very sympathetic to my colleagues—espirit de corps—they call it. I know where the shoe pinches them. Apart from busy and sometimes unexpected appointments as well as unfounded and unprovoked attacks from detractors, politicians are also prone to occasional ego massages, exaggerated claims of near invincibility as well as an uncanny optimism which critics have likened to appropriate skills for gambling. 

No wonder, many of them fail to exit the political scene at the appropriate time, thus corroborating Enoch Powell’s famous saying that “All political lives unless cut off midstream at a happy juncture end in failure.”

Hassles

In the course of my self-imposed profession, I have had to put up with a lot of hassles. From a last-minute cancelled appointment in far-away Katsina, to a scary air flight to Yola, an interview conducted in the middle of a campaign rally in Enugu as well as an angry wife in Port Harcourt who had protested my interviewing one of her husband’s numerous girlfriends!  

This is apart from the fact that the job takes you away from family and friends and turns you into an antisocial animal who is always cocooned in his writing world.

On the other hand, I had also had some good moments. Apart from interviewing and dining with the high and mighty in the land, my assignments have also taken me to places such as Ghana, UK, and the US, apart from several Nigerian cities where I made countless and invaluable friends. 

However, nothing in the business surpasses the exhilaration of the writing itself. Hunched over my laptop in the twilight or wee hours of the day, I enjoy the thrill of piecing together the fragments of other people’s stories, drilling into their beings like a surgeon working in the innards of a patient. I am also a historian of some sort for every biography is unique in its own way and the art of researching and writing it, a historical journey.

As much as I respect my subjects’ right to set boundaries for their stories, I am no spin doctor and will not embellish facts. Rather, I believe in ‘evidence based’ biographies, where friends and foes alike will be interviewed so that a balanced view of the subject will be presented for posterity and history to judge. 

Current subject

Thankfully, my current subject, a good friend of mine and a very popular politician (his opponents call him controversial) shares the same views.  Not only did he give me the leeway to interview people from all shades of political divide, he even went as far as suggesting names of some of his perceived political opponents for interviews.

During the course of working with him, I saw him as a brilliant, gregarious, hardworking and down to earth politician. Unfortunately, many of his critics don’t see him in that light. As far as they are concerned, he is an unschooled, arrogant and violent man who should be avoided like a fresh case of Ebola.

“Why do your opponents hate you so much?” I asked my subject one day after I had finished interviewing several of his family members and constituents who had eulogised him as a good husband, father and leader. 

“Envy” my friend, a writer’s delight with his effusive mannerisms had replied his eyes dancing with delight. “They are yet to come to terms with the fact that at my relatively young age, I have achieved so much in my political career but I don’t grudge them. It is all God’s doing,” he added.

Texas trip

Then one day out of the blues he called me; “My brother, please get ready to travel. We are going to the US. The university I attended wants to honour me. Since these people said I didn’t go to school, I want you to come and witness and record the event.” 

And so it was that together with a few of his aides, I accompanied my subject to Houston, Texas. It will be my second trip outside the country on the biography, having visited another country a few months earlier to interview some of my subject’s colleagues and friends.

It was not a really good time to travel abroad because of the worldwide hysteria over the Ebola scourge which had cast Nigeria and a few other West African countries in bad light. Luckily for us, just two days before our trip, Nigeria was officially declared Ebola free by the World Health Organisation. 

Even at that, some of my US-based friends were against the timing of the trip. “Even with the WHO clearance, you might still be embarrassed since the whole Ebola matter is currently driven not by scientific evidence-based ideas but by hysteria, anxiety and liberal doses of homophobia, xenophobia and possibly racism,” they cautioned.

• To be continued