I received in the morning mail a cordial offer, the kind you cannot refuse.Daniel Jiwaga wrote to me from Abuja, the new capital of Nigeria, that he had recently become the sole beneficiary of Samuel Jiwaga’s estate as his only son and heir. Samuel Jiwaga, an enterprising entrepreneur, made his billions from shrewd investments in hotels and real estate.
Samuel, who loved his gin-and tonic as much as his bricks-and mortar, had died recently from cirrhosis of the liver and left his entire empire to his beloved child. The fortunate son, Daniel, was now advised by his lawyers, that he would have the unfortunate responsibility of paying a huge estate tax, in addition to the other taxes his rich but careless father had neglected to pay. The same lawyers advised him to deposit a vast part of his bank balance to some other account to avoid paying those nasty taxes.
Having received a report of my financial probity from reliable sources, Daniel was requesting me to hold his money for a few years before he could safely retrieve it. He was offering a reward for my services. This was unquestionably a windfall. All I had to do was to hold in my account a sizable part of a multimillionaire’s fortune for a few months or years, and I would receive a handsome amount as my reward. It was too good an offer to refuse.
Admittedly, the offer was couched in a language a trifle stilted, as if one had written it in another language and used Google to translate it into English. A few words had been misspelled and the punctuation left room for improvement. But who was I to pick on such picayune matters where millions were at stake, just waiting to be scooped by my inept hands from a lavish Nigerian source?
Imagine having several millions suddenly in my account, raising both the eyebrows and respect of my snobbish bankers and the temperature of the cockles of my heart! Immediately, I set about drafting a suitable response to this gracious correspondent. I wrote to Daniel Jiwaga that I was greatly pleased to hear that reliable sources had said good things about me instead of spilling, as they usually do, nasty beans about me. I humbly added that I was even more pleased by the confidence he had reposed in my honesty both to hold the millions and then in due time to return them to him.
Of course, I did not give any hint of my lurking hope that the reward would be substantial and that not all of the deposit would be retrieved any time soon or, Heaven forbid, ever. I expressed my eagerness to be of assistance and willingness to perform the next steps suggested by his wise advisors.
Mr. Jiwaga was courteous enough to reply promptly. He thanked me profusely for trying to be of assistance and assured me that I would be duly rewarded for my cooperation. He added that the amount of cash had now been augmented because, on the advice of his financial advisers, he had sold several dozen gasoline stations that his father owned, as the estate was becoming an unwieldy responsibility to handle.
He was eager, he said, to make sure that I did not become the target of local tax inspectors on account of the sudden spurt in my bank balances. He was using a large team of adept lawyers who would make sure that the money was transferred quietly, and I would not have any obnoxious liabilities. Frankly, the idea of the government’s tax hounds looking askance at my sudden prosperity had indeed occurred to me. His assurance of extreme caution was music to my ears. I would not have to do anything, like hiring shrewd tax mavens, to hide or explain away the large fortune that would soon be in my bank.
Mr. Jiwaga then explained that the matter was very much in hand, and I could expect his lawyers to finish their work, depositing in less than a week a large stash of funds successfully in my chosen bank. The inter-country transfer, he added, would be steered through three banks to ensure that it was not traced to either him or me, and naturally it would entail an expense of $12,000. Mr. Jiwaga fully realized that this was being done to protect his wealth and he would bear half the cost of the fees. But, since I was also a beneficiary, he politely suggested that I should bear the other half of this procedural expense.
He felt confident that I would not mind paying the other half of $6,000 to a bank account in Cayman Islands. This was frankly unexpected. I had to regretfully tell Mr. Jiwaga that I did not have the amount readily accessible. He then generously offered to bear another $2,000 himself and let me pay the trifling sum of $4,000. It was rather awkward at that point to have to tell this generous person that I couldn’t cough up $4000 either.
He was then so kind as to say that he was prepared to go to the extraordinary length of asking what I could afford to pay readily. I then had to admit, to my great embarrassment, that, like a distinguished recent President of my country, I was in a bankruptcy proceeding and could not advance any significant sum toward the expense of money transfer. At this, quite understandably, Mr. Jiwaga sounded rather miffed and, to my considerable distress and disappointment, disengaged himself.
Sadly, it seems rather unlikely that I would receive the remarkable windfall from Nigeria any time soon. My hope to sit bare-chested in sunny Cayman Islands and sip numberless Piña Coladas looks – to quote a metaphor from my dear uncle who too, like Daniel Ziwaga, liked gin and-tonic and died of acute cirrhosis – like a derelict liver.
(The writer is a US-based international development advisor and had worked with the World Bank. He can be reached at mnandy@gmail.com)