Out of Africa

You don’t know how close this came to being my last column. It started last week when I received a letter from a Mr. Sanni Ani in Lagos, Nigeria. Mr. Ani said that he was about to steal US$38,000,000.00 from the Nigerian government and needed an overseas account to deposit the money into. If I sent him my account number, he would send the millions right away, and we could share it, 60% for him, 30% for me and 10% for expenses.

Now, as I have said before, the editors of The Nation are generous to a fault. But 30% of thirty-eight million is, well, it’s probably a whole lot, and my wife Mem has expensive tastes. As much as I enjoy sharing the insignificant details of my life on Phuket with 40,000 strangers each week, I’d prefer to spend my time laying in a hammock reading S.J. Perleman and P.J. O’Roarke, and 30% of thirty-eight million will buy a lot of paperback books.

So I faxed Mr. Ani, and told him I was interested. And because nobody is going to share their money with a newspaper columnist, I told him that I was a retired oil field manager named Rosenberg, with my own construction company and corporate accounts. He replied post haste, addressing me as “MY GOOD FRIEND”. (For some reason all of his communications were to be in capitol letters, and he would identify himself variously as Mr. Sanni Ani, Mr. Rasaq Yusuf, and once as Prince Rasaq Yusuf.)

He outlined the documents I would need to provide, and told me that there would be no difficulties in relieving his poverty-stricken country of thirty-eight million US dollars, as long as I was discreet. I used the Aldus Pagemaker program in my computer for the first time and generated some letterhead and invoice forms for “Far Eastern Erections, Inc.” My mother will be pleased to learn that my expensive Theatre degree, and ten years of experience as a prop man in the film industry, finally proved useful.

Mr. Ani/Yusuf and I enjoyed a very amicable fax relationship for about a week, and I shudder to think what my phone bill will look like next month. He sent me copies of an astounding variety of legal-looking documents, proving that he could have had his own career in the show business. There were certificates saying that Far Eastern Erections had paid income tax for 1992, ‘93 and ‘94, that F.E.E. was a public company in Nigeria since 1991, that F.E.E. was a registered contractor for the Nigerian government, and that the Central Bank of Nigeria had cleared F.E.E. to be paid moneys owed.

My African friend kept asking me for my phone number so we could talk. As forthcoming as I am on these pages, I’m really very shy, so I told him that I’d lost my larynx to throat cancer in 1987 and spoke through a ‘voder embedded in my neck, making me unintelligible over the phone. He sent his sincere condolences, and told me that I would have to come to Lagos next week to receive the check. It told him that I would be going to Scotland next week to look at manor houses, having just learned that I was descended from the Earl of Rosse, but maybe I would send my personal assistant to Lagos. This was one Gino Corleone, I said, a Corsican who I met on a drilling project in Libya in 1969. I was beginning to have a lot of fun.

Prince Ani/Yusuf said that he was interested in Scottish property too, and wondered how he could get in on the deal. Then he asked me to send some gifts to the board at the Central Bank of Nigeria. He recommended “GOOD QUALITY WRIST-WATCHES, LEATHER BRIEFCASES, WRITING PENS (as opposed to the kind that don’t write?), OFFICE SHIRTS AND TIES. I told him that my ex-wife runs the duty-free shop at Dulles airport in Washington DC, and I’d have her send some Rolexes by way of a pilot friend. I gave him the address of The Royal and Ancient Club and the name of my UK solicitor, and told him to send 10 pounds sterling for a real estate catalogue. The Club is the birthplace of golf, and the solicitor is a caddie there.

He responded that UPS was better for sending the watches, almost necessary in fact, and he kept mentioning that he’d paid the taxes for Far Eastern Erections. I knew that if he received gifts he would hit me up for the tax money, but that when he didn’t receive the fictitious watches he’d just give up on me. So I played my ace.

I changed the font on my computer and wrote him under the name of Gino Corleone, in the kind of English that Chico Marx used. I told him that Mr. Rosenberg “he’s a-dead already” of a stroke, and that the lawyers had frozen his assets. But, I said, “I’ve got it the checkbook and power of attorneys”, and that if I could quickly get to some other country I could withdraw the one million dollars in the account. To sweeten the pot I also said that I had Mr. Rosenberg’s stamp collection, insured to five hundred thousand US dollars. If he sent me one thousand dollars for a plane ticket, I said, we could split the old man’s estate.

This morning I got my reply. “AS REGARDS YOUR PLOT TO ACQUIRE STEVE’S PROPERTIES,” he said, ‘IS TO ME, LEAST APPEALING.” He went on to say “BY THE SPECIAL GRACE OF ALLAH, I’M WAY ABOVE THE US$1,000,000 IN STEVE’S ACCOUNT OR HIS STAMP COLLECTION. THE US$1,000 IS NOT UP TO WHAT I SPEND BUYING CANDIES FOR MY BITCHES.” I keep in touch with a lot of people, but it is not often that I receive a fax wherein the phrases “By the special grace of Allah” and “candies for my bitches” appear next to each other.

So that’s it, I imagine that I’ve heard the last of Prince Mr. Sanni Ani Rasaq Yusuf of Lagos Nigeria, fax number 234-1-452-8447. I’m left without my 30%, without my erudite African correspondent, and even without a punch-line for this column. I guess that I acted too rashly, asking him for money too soon. I’ll never make a good con-man. And I have a feeling that “Sanni Ani” is a joke in Nigerian. It probably means something like “African Erections”. 

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author. 

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