by Eyiamoni Apeji
I was born right. I was born with a superior opinion. Life would be so much easier if you could accept this. But you see you were also born right. You are also correct, your opinion is also superior and sometimes it is superior to mine. Sometimes, you are more correct than I am. Except when you aren’t.
Two Saturdays ago, my older brother and I decided to treat our little brother to a swimming trip. The closest swimming pool to our home is a fifteen minute drive away. Fifteen minutes is no bother to a person who owns a car. My little brother wanted to stop by a supermarket to buy his favorite popcorn. The bumpy roads to the supermarket are no bother to a person so skilled in premature driving. We laughed and we listened to music despite our faulty stereo. We had our phones and there was a prevalent air of humor in the car. My older brother held the steering wheel, and his cell phone. He was both driver and DJ. This is how swimming trips are supposed to be taken. We were correct, we always are. The police men who pulled us over were unaware. They accused us of making phone calls while driving. They spoke over our words and our defenses. Our evidence was there: my brother’s phone had no recent call logs. They insisted. They demanded to see my brother’s license. I knew he didn’t have one. He knew he didn’t have one. The officer bent over the passenger side window knew he didn’t have one. Nevertheless we waited the obligatory ten seconds as my brother rummaged in his pockets, patted his clothes and looked up in realization that he had conveniently ‘left his wallet at home’.
The conversation shifted. We had broken two laws: driving without a license and distracted driving. The officer demanded we be lead to the police station. We were never supposed to have been pulled over in the first place. There were no recent call logs. We were being punished for imaginary phone calls. I was calm. Calmness is a side effect of being correct. That is until we were asked (unsubtly) for a bribe. This was obviously the reason for the entire encounter. I looked into the greedy eyes of the law enforcer and smiled my sweetest, most innocent, most helpless smile. We were students visiting our aunt for the holidays. We had no jobs, and our aunt was unaware that we had borrowed her car. We were only taking our little brother swimming and we were in absolutely no position to give out any money. In fact the only money we had, a five hundred naira note, we were willing to give the officer for his understanding. For the favor he would be doing us if he let us go on our way.
This irked me. How corrupt these men were. We had done absolutely nothing wrong. We were the victims here. We should never have been stopped. We are above corruption. Except we aren’t. We were the ones who offered the bribe. Yet we were the ones who would recount the tale to our friends later as just another incidence of “corruption in Nigeria”. We are the ones who will strongly disapprove, and raise our privileged noses up while engaging in pretentious conversations about how bribery is disgusting and destructive.
We could have gone to the station. We could have followed those officers. We would have deserved the fine. It could have been a legal encounter. But we had to be right. We had to be correct. And for five hundred naira the police officers let us pretend that we were.
Eyiamoni Apeji is a 19 year old student of Media and Communication in her 3rd year at Pan Atlantic University. She is a creative writer and poet, and was the Editor (and features writer) of her College Magazine (Atlantic Noise) in June 2016. She has an interest in advertising and marketing and has recently completed an internship programme with the Digital Marketing Agency, Sponge Limited.
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