Nasty, Short and brutish: the legend of foly

I am a fool, I am nearly dead yes, I can visualise red earth being churned by avid gravediggers. You can cry if you want, but I don’t recommend that instead you can laugh at me. I acted as if I was an illiterate rascal.

Remember I graduated from Mbalala University in Uganda with a degree in Mining Mechanics and you were thus not surprised when the uranium mining company hired me to lead the opening of the Kayelekela mining site. I got off to good start, folks, I was in the good books of many, labourer and manager alike. I saw the first batch of uranium selling at record prices on the international stock exchange. I was really contributing to my country especially to the district, which was after all development starved. I was playful such that I indulged in prostitutes, but it was never on a grand scale and I always used the most expensive of protection. That was or is a typical manager’s life. I was a churchgoer like you though I knew it was only a label to be accepted in the community. Why am I circling around the issue? Let me tell you why I am sleeping here with thirty minutes or so left before I die.

On one of my daily days I found a strange e-mail in my inbox. It was from one Fox Smith, it implored me to give him my phone number which I did. Later that evening, as I was watching a TV soap the man called and we talked for four hours on end, the man was some big man I tell you, how could someone sustain an international call for that long? Fox Smith or whatever his name was, wanted a kilogram of uranium, he said he was a CIA agent and that the agency wanted a sample Malawian uranium to analyse its potential so that they should not let it fall in the hands of terrorists.

Such a call was not uncommon or Greek, to my friends or me, I had received a similar one from a Colombian descendant of Pablo Escobar, but he had not deposited money as Fox had. A million Malawian Kwacha, imagine that money in Zimbabwean dollars! Folks, for Fox, I only had two questions before I gave in.

“Why have you chosen me and why not make an officially official encounter?”