Which reminds me - story about how crazy Abacha’s rule was.

I did like 9 months industrial training working at Afribank in those days. Started off at their training centre in Alagomeji, Yaba.

While I was there, one random guy joined us. They didn’t tell us much. Just said he recently joined the bank and was to start off at the training centre. That office was incredibly quiet with not much ever going on there

Had this boss at the time, I’m struggling to remember if she was an Olateru-Olagbegi or Olashore. But typical sharp Lagos woman. Knew everyone’s gist in Lagos including those not yet born

One day i got to the office and I saw her in a kind of panic. Almost sweating and refusing to sit down. I used to be the first to get in so was surprised to meet her in the office already. Anyway it was just two of us there before anyone else came

She then told me she had her suspicions and they had been confirmed - the new guy was SSS who had been posted to the bank like they were posted everywhere under Abacha. She said she was like 97% sure but to get over the 100% line she was going to try to sort of bait him

Her ‘elaborate’ plan consisted of things like reading a newspaper and then pretending to read aloud a story about the SSS. Or just randomly starting a not too dangerous gist about Abacha and then trying to bait him into it

Me too I was feeling like part of the plan. My mum had this book about the underground church in Romania during communism that I had read. Because of the risk of infiltration by the state police, the church people had studied something called Body Kinesics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinesics 

So for example, when a new member joined, they would suddenly bring out a Bible and watch the person’s eyes. Apparently your pupils expand at things like that. Anyway, the plan was she would bait (read silly stories aloud), I would watch his reaction

I’m afraid this story has no terribly exciting ending - he definitely acted ‘funny’ whenever she brought up SSS talk. But one day she overdid it and managed to get him angry. Does this mean he was SSS?

The end of the story is that not long after that day he got angry, he just never turned up again. They simply told us he had posted elsewhere. No warning, no send off, no goodbye.

Just left work normally on a Friday and never turned up again.

End of story