Confessions of a Third World Peace Merchant
Photo: Vasilios Muselimis
In my Manhattan apartment, it is half past midnight, and I’m hastily packing for an urgent flight to Africa with my boss, a world-renowned peace ambassador. I work for POOP Matters, which stands for People Organization Of Peace. I can’t remember why we added Matters after POOP, but it must have been important. You may mock us for our bizarre, uninspiring, possibly repulsive name, but we are the world’s leading peacemaking think tank in the Dark Continent. Our headquarters is here in New York; we have no office in Africa. That is a story for another day, but to summarize, we are in New York because this is where the money is.
Our speciality, since our founding twenty eight years ago, is to negotiate a way out of power for obdurate African dictators who are voted out by long-suffering, fed-up citizens but refuse to leave office. We also negotiate lopsided power-sharing agreements with younger dictators in their thirties, forties, and fifties who if voted and forced out, don’t die quickly of natural causes and keep meddling in their country’s affairs from exile. It’s the only way to keep the fragile peace. At POOP Matters, we love African dictators and despots; they make us a lot of money. Oops, I am not supposed to disclose that, but it slipped off my tongue, so don’t tell anyone. It’s against POOP Matters policy to publicly admit we love African dictators; you will understand why later.
Our current problem is a sixty-nine-year-old fetish-obsessed and obese African dictator who has refused to leave power after thirty-six years of misrule. His nation is poor but rich in educated technocrats and minerals that he loots with his cronies and light-skinned young mistresses appointed to run key positions. The dictator was recently voted out by a landslide but has refused to concede. There are bloody riots and looting in the capital city. As I pack my bags, I hear he has locked himself in the toilet of the country’s statehouse that over the years he had converted to personal property.
Since election results were published, he has been rambling at press conferences that western witchcraft was used to brainwash citizens to believe he lost. The witchcraft he refers to is the internet. Hypocrite! At night he uses the internet that he periodically denies citizens to buy blue pills to boost his virility to rival his role model King Solomon.
Unfortunately, the dictator is not intelligent enough to recognize that King Solomon ate kosher all his life—that’s why he had the energy for the many women he had. The obese dictator eats like a vulture, making it hard to keep up with the ravenous groin appetite of his youngest wife. Poor guy. All those demands, yet he still has to run a fractured and poverty-stricken country to his own skewed version of utopian glory.
Lately, he has become very pious, misquoting religious texts to justify his misrule and claiming his version of god is on his side. That’s typical of many dictators about to lose power: they become very pious. Few minutes ago, I spoke to a POOP Matters agent in the country who told me the obese dictator is locked in the toilet crying, wearing socks and a golden crown and clutching a mace as he calls for his dead mother. I don’t want to imagine that sight, but these African despots become very dramatic when they sense they are losing their stranglehold on power. In the meantime, his loyalists in the army are pummeling and killing citizens peacefully demonstrating on the streets.
From his current toilet fortress, the dictator is threatening to smear anyone who bursts in with his rear effluent which he has long claimed has powers to annihilate enemies. Oh, this dictator loves what comes out of his ugly, freckled sinkhole of a rear end. Once, he announced to his citizens that his poop had mystical powers and could stop prolonged droughts if applied on farms. So for two months, he ate pricy shrimps and lobsters imported from Jamaica and had his aides sell fifty grams of his poop for one dollar to poor farmers. All his outrageous antics were broadcast on national TV for hungry citizens to watch.
From selling his poop, he made 1.2 million dollars, but it had cost the country three million dollars to import the shrimps and lobsters from Jamaica. What a fiscal genius the dictator is? No economist in the country criticized him as they valued their lives. When the poop ruse didn’t stop the drought, he blamed it on the failure of western-educated agricultural extension officers to follow his instructions on how to apply his vaunted poop on farms. They were thrown into a gulag where they met two brilliant doctors who had advised the dictator to stop eating junk food and to have a gastric bypass after his heart attack. Their advice hurt the dictator’s feelings, and he threw them into the gulag. The doctors and extension officers are still in the gulag because our obese fat dictator has very thin skin. The Western media nicknamed him the poop dictator much to his chagrin.
I hate that the think tank was named POOP Matters; he gives us an appalling reputation because he is full of it in real life. The toilet the dictator is hiding in has a twisted significance to his household and the nation. Its cistern, piping, bowl, and cover are made of pure gold. When his youngest wife gave birth, she demanded a golden toilet be made for her because the low class, customized two thousand dollars Japanese ceramic toilets gave her a “dangerous” rash that she worried could pass onto her baby. So the dictator ordered a golden toilet be made to please his twenty-one-year-old light-skinned trophy wife.
About the money for the 1.5 million dollars toilet, where did it come from? A Hollywood rock star donated it towards building a children’s hospital in the dictator’s country. Before you laud the rock star for his magnanimous gesture, you need to know the motives behind his donation. At the height of the #metoo movement, the rock star was accused by more than twenty women of grooming them when they were teenagers, not to sing backup or play instruments, but for seedy indulgences that I’ll censor for now or leave to your wild or nosy imagination and Ronan Farrow. After the rock star got #metooed, lucrative gigs for his band got cancelled by companies and promoters, and album sales tanked.
So he called me at 3 am—yes, celebrities know me—bawling endlessly like a two-year-old toddler thirsting for a bottle and a mother’s gentle touch. Thank goodness I’m not his mother. For all the macho and alpha male bravado he publically projects on stage while shirtless, he actually is a pathetic and insecure wimp. This rock star wanted to know how he could salvage his shattered public image and his barely-there character.
Then I recalled that years back I visited a rural village, with high child mortality, in the dictator’s country. Together with the local leaders, I saw a need for a children’s hospital there. The dictator “donated” land for it, and the event was publicized by the nation’s government-controlled broadcasting house. The land was fenced and all that remained was money to build the much-needed children’s hospital.
Enter the beleaguered #metooed, drug-addled rock star. I advised him to fly to the country and donate the money needed for the hospital. I accompanied him there, and he met with the dictator who assigned a team to drive him to the land where the children’s hospital would be built and to meet with local leaders. A ceremony for laying the foundation stone took place at the site, and the drugged rock star gave a slurred, great in his opinion, speech extolling his generosity. I knew the idea of donating 1.5 million dollars was killing him on the inside—his stinginess is well known in celebrity circles.
But the drugged rock star had a sleazy reputation to resuscitate, and at the foundation stone ceremony, he shed tears over the high child mortality rate in that region. In his Mother Theresa mode, he misquoted religious texts, mixing them with his band’s spiteful lyrics. Talked about how he would satisfy all the villagers’ urges with every inch of his generous love. Luckily the puzzled translator obscured that filth with his own garbled translation. All that was an act, since that morning, the rock star had asked me if the natives stank and wondered if there were enough guns to shoot them, should they lose their minds and decide to cannibalize him for his nutritious white meat. He was also bothered about how long the ceremony for “that pathetic children’s hospital” would last as he needed a cocaine break every forty-five minutes.
Like any celebrity doing charitable acts, the rock star publicized it on his social media pages for likes and validation from his millions of followers. He had his social media team take videos and photos of him giving a big dummy check to bewildered, traditionally dressed local chiefs and elders. His social media team added a few photos of him interacting with local poor children with dirty and tattered clothes. Had the dude read Mathew 6:2-3, he would have had a heart attack induced by a reality check higher than his drugs’ high. As with all self-serving celebrities, he added hashtags like #imverygenerous #ifedthem #luckytheymetme to his posts and photos, which all started trending shortly thereafter. After the ceremony, the rock star promised the puzzled elders he would return because he has witnessed lots of voluptuous potentials. I knew that was my cue to whisk him out of there before he begins to misbehave.
The rock star wired the 1.5 million dollars, and unbeknownst to him, it went to the dictator’s bank account. That was the time the dictator’s pesky fifth and youngest wife birthed a baby, and once she knew about the money, she went ballistic and demanded the golden toilet. The dictator obliged and had the toilet made by Silvio, a Milan jeweller, who delivered it on a private jet and installed it at the State House toilet in honour of the dictator. The installation was broadcast live, and it was justified: the dictator needed the golden toilet to reduce stress levels accruing from leading the nation marvellously. The children’s hospital was not built, and not long after, elephant grass grew all over the proposed site. The villagers promised the hospital never forgot, and as their children kept dying, their anger towards the dictator kept festering.
On a “positive” note, the rock star’s #metoo indiscretions in America were gradually forgotten, in part due to his “generosity” towards poor African children, plus other notorious hashtags came along and killed the #metoo momentum. To his credit, he adhered to my advice to lie low until his ills were out of the public psyche. He also followed a wisdom nugget my grandma shared with me, before choking on chicken gizzards and dying: “Grandson, never think with your groin in tempting moments; use your brain instead.” Boy, I miss how she fried those gizzards, and I miss her too, of course.
We, my boss and four assistants, are cruising at thirty-two thousand feet on POOP Matters chartered private jet, heading to Africa to talk peace with the dictator. Let me tell you a little about my boss. He is seventy years old and a former political prisoner. After sixteen years in prison, the first words he uttered to the press on his release were: “I will eat rice, beans, and mashed potatoes spiced with pepper with my enemies.” The world’s press took these words figuratively and thought he meant he had forgiven his enemies and was willing to meet them. What the press didn’t know was that the long prison incarceration had messed with his cognitive abilities, so he was just rambling incoherently.
What my boss truly meant was that he had missed eating rice, beans, and mashed potatoes spiced with pepper; he added the word “enemies” because a reporter asked if would forgive them. Since only his family and I knew he had lost his mind in prison, we played along with the media hype. And that was how his first foolish words after his release from prison became notable. Somehow, they have bizarrely become a clarion call for world peace. Today, anytime world leaders or celebrities utter them at peace conferences, I chuckle. Jilted women and men cry at talk shows as hosts urge them to utter those immortal words: “I will eat rice, beans, and mashed potatoes spiced with pepper with my enemies.” Those words have accidentally healed many love relationships. Long live my boss.
Time Magazine ranked my boss’s words ninth of the five hundred greatest peace quotes uttered by the world’s great statesmen. Mandela quotes were first to eighth; Martin Luther King Junior was at tenth. So, hey, at POOP Matters, we are not complaining. But how the press pronounced garbled words as one of the greatest peace quotes of the 21st century will baffle me for life. My boss’s family and I could not let that popularity wave end if there was the possibility of a prolonged gravy train. So after my boss became healthy, his family asked me to be his handler, and I began to get ideas, shrewd and devious ideas.
Photo: Andrea De Santis
At my urging, he founded POOP Matters and became its public face, but I’m really the one in charge here. On our website pages, we used words and phrases like equality, war, black people, racialism, existential, oppression, police, consortium, gender, oppression, reparations, vegan, grassroots, historical injustices, intersectionalism, pivotal moments, systemic, pay gap, watchdog, institutional, and of course, women. Honestly, I don’t care for those words or know what most mean. But they get us taken seriously and attract lots of donor funding from foundations run by western billionaires trying to pacify their guilty consciences in old age. We also have very moving war casualty pictures on the website. For my boss’s website photo, I hired, fed, and clothed nine actors in ten dollars second-hand suits. They posed for a photo around a round table with a pointer and a world map spread on it.
I had my boss point to an obscure African country that he didn’t know. I didn’t know, either. As he pointed to that country, the actors gazed at him with worried looks on their faces, hands on chins. For my picture, I posed with a projected PowerPoint presentation that I pulled from a website online. The presentation had a huge graph with numbers that to date I don’t know the meaning of, but they make POOP Matters think tank look credible.
We are not perfect as a peacemaking thinktank. I hate to disclose this, but behind closed doors, we argue more about money and our mistresses than peace in Africa. For mistresses, it’s how to hush and keep peace with them. Much of our clerical work is handled by poorly paid but bright Ivy League interns. Some do our accounts, and others write peacemaking proposals that I send to rich donors and foundations to solicit funds for making peace in Africa.
My boss doesn’t know what goes on in the office, since he comes rarely. When he does, it’s mostly to calm down an African dictator who has perhaps suffered heartburn and decided to pummel his own citizens. Actually years back, we had to send a parcel of laxatives to a West African dictator who had a stomach upset and blamed the opposition leader and almost hanged him. Turns out the first lady had undercooked jollof rice, and it gave the dictator food poisoning. He calmed down and halted the hanging in the nick of time. These dictators are strange creatures. All these are very confidential issues I’m disclosing; I hope I don’t get into serious trouble.
What makes POOP Matters world-revered as a peacemaking think tank is my boss’s natural traits. When he clears his throat, it sounds authoritative and people listen to him. I know he is a fruitcake, but since the public doesn’t know that, I don’t care. He has a piercing gaze that disarms the African dictators we deal with. That gaze makes them feel like he is dissecting their rotten conscience, and that is our moneymaker. Those traits and his over-glorified prison sentence are why POOP Matters is widely sought in Africa to make peace. I also limit his media and public appearances to make him rare, which is a good thing if we want him revered as a statesman.
Come on now, I don’t want our Manchurian statesman to be responding to every other petty African crisis, for instance, a mere ten people dying while protesting bad governance, especially if there is no much money to be made. That would cheapen his image, and at POOP Matters, we are big-time. We handle dictators who kill in almost genocidal proportions. Few deaths don’t draw in much money from our western donors, so we don’t care for such. If his response is needed, I craft and release a statement on social media of how my boss is appalled by dictators killing demonstrators. Most times he doesn’t even know there is a crisis; he is one soft head bump away from being medically declared a vegetable.
The great thing about me is that I know how to manipulate the media, I got experience. I was a former spin doctor for two African dictators, now deceased, who committed mass murders in their countries. I kept their public images clean in western media. As is the norm, once a dictator’s image is clean, western politicians kiss their armpit, at least until they get tired of them and topple them. Those two now-deceased dictators were killed by western countries, but I served my purpose and made my money. Not all dictators I sanitize end up getting killed; some are thriving on the world stage and make me very proud.
My most successful client is an Arab peace envoy, oh the irony. When he reached out for my services, he had just been overthrown and exiled in Dubai. He was haggard and wanted to know if there was hope for him. I wasn’t going to say there wasn’t; I had money to make. Each time he opened his mouth, it looked like an abandoned garbage dump. So my dentist flew to Dubai and for five weeks worked on his teeth. Removed the bad ones and put ceramic ones.
When the dental work was done, he no longer looked like the bloodthirsty vampire that he was. The new teeth were white, and he had a great smile. My dietician put him on a healthy crash diet. After six months, he almost looked angelic, and invites to peace conferences started coming. Today he flies around the Arab world making peace or appearing to do so, so I’m really good at my job. And I get paid well for it.
*
After a twenty-two-hour flight, it is early evening, and we’ve just landed in the country of our deranged dictator. Once we convince him to get out of the toilet, preferably fully clothed and showered, peace talks will start. We are awaiting a hotel van to pick us up from a sidewalk that is poorly lit. A citizen I met at the airport whispered to me that money for the floodlights was pocketed by one of the dictator’s cronies. The crony bought low-quality lights that flicker like they are lighting a dance floor. The flickering is irritating our eyes, and that counts as peacemaking hardship according to POOP Matters policy. So I’ve started mentally computing our hardship allowance, fifty dollars for me and two hundred dollars for my boss. Our accompanying staffers are not allocated a hardship allowance. Making peace is not easy, so stop thinking we are greedy.
“On our website pages, we used words and phrases like equality, war, black people, racialism, existential, oppression, police, consortium, gender, oppression, reparations, vegan, grassroots, historical injustices, intersectionalism, pivotal moments, systemic, pay gap, watchdog, institutional, and of course, women. ”
On missions like this, we book a country’s best hotel. The best here is a two-star hotel that once was a five star under the Hilton Hotels chain. Once, the dictator dined there and claimed he couldn’t taste the eggs in the pancakes. In a rage, he expelled all foreign hotel managers and nationalized the hotels in the country and gave them to cronies. Today when he dines there, he claims he can taste the eggs—from indigenous chickens reared in the country—in the pancakes. The hotel is poorly run by unmotivated staff. The great thing about this is we are going to claim lots of hardship allowances from POOP Matters donors. At my last count, it will be one hundred and sixty dollars per day for me. My boss is double that.
Our schedule is set for five days, but I’ll drag it to ten days, which equals more money for POOP Matters. I’ll come up with futile but hard tasks to keep our dictator and aggrieved opposition leader and their teams busy, like filling long peacemaking questionnaires and having vain press conferences every four hours. In the meantime, my boss will be baiting the opposition leader and the dictator with power-sharing deal nonsense. If that fails, the dictator will be threatened with the possibility of being jailed by the World Court or flushed out by a foreign army. The first five days are basically shouting matches between dictators and opposition leaders. Little gets done, and I love it just for the per diem allowances. These shenanigans are what POOP Matters peacemaking process is all about. They are long drawn activities that drag the days and increase our coffers.
*
It is day seven in our peacemaking mission, and there are random gunshots around the city. I’m at the lobby, and my boss is with the dictator and opposition leader, plus four former African leaders in the negotiating room. I don’t go into negotiating rooms; I send our assistants there to take notes. I find the negotiations boring, plus these dictators pull all the tricks in the book to scuttle negotiations and hang onto power.
Once, a West African dictator had a prolonged bout of flatulence in the negotiating room after deliberately eating boiled beans. He justified it by saying that in his tribe, that’s how they bless and appreciate visitors. So my boss and his team sat for six hours with that skunk, negotiating and getting blessed and appreciated every fifteen minutes in that stuffy room. When my boss left the room, we put him on a drip for two days to replenish his vitamins and burned his suit in a bonfire as the stench wouldn’t leave. That suit was highly flammable, and it lit up like an overturned burning oil tanker.
Huddled at the corner of the hotel lobby are the opposition leader’s loyalists. They are discussing in low tones how they will share political positions and multimillion infrastructure tenders. When they first started agitating for democracy, their motives were pure. But after fifteen years of constant clobbering in the streets, fighting for democracy killed their conscience. Their hearts are hardened, and they don’t care anymore about uplifting poor citizens. They want to get into power and enrich themselves. The opposition leader has promised three sisters that they will be supplying ripe bananas and avocados at state events and conferences once he is in power. Each banana or avocado will be priced at ten times its cost. No wonder these countries are dubbed banana republics; soon there might be avocado republics.
On the domestic front, the opposition leader is dealing with a grumpy wife. She locked him out of their bedroom after he told her she wouldn’t hold an official position. Finally, he caved and promised her a useless but highly salaried position in the health department and a plush office. The once stubborn reformer and technocrat is today a puppet to greedy loyalists within and without his immediate family and friends.
I get a wonderful greedy feeling in my stomach that POOP Matters will be back here once the opposition leader gets into power and gets drunk with it and morphs into another problematic dictator. They all usually do. This cycle recurs in Africa, and POOP Matters is called in to negotiate peace. That means more money for us, so I’m not complaining; we will be back here.
It’s the evening of day nine, and as I’d planned, negotiations will finish tomorrow at noon, day ten, with a press conference. The dictator agreed to leave power; he had no choice. Leaders of three neighbouring countries threatened to send in their army and oust him by force. Of course, it’s a bluff: my boss called them at midnight and asked them to threaten the dictator. After the noon press conference, the dictator will have his last glory moment and walk with his youngest wife, on a red carpet, to a plane and fly to exile. I procured the carpet from the son of my boss who inflated its price to three thousand dollars. Ideally, it costs a hundred and fifty, but my boss has to care for his family too. The good thing is POOP Matters donors get billed not us.
It is 1 am on day eleven. The sixty-nine-year-old dictator has now landed in exile and is going through the culture shock of having no servants. I cannot help but imagine the kind of rash the youngest wife has contracted now that she is no longer relieving herself on the golden toilet in State House, poor woman. The great thing is, with the dictator’s bad eating habits, I’m sure he will die soon of a broken heart induced by despot cholesterol. So he won’t meddle in his country’s affairs from exile. We are flying back to New York, ready to bill our donors. Mission accomplished. This peacemaking mission will net POOP Matters three million dollars. As I sip coffee from my reclining seat, I’m thinking it’s high time POOP Matters expanded its peacemaking portfolio to other continents.
Next week I’ll fly to South and Central America to conduct a feasibility study on the viability of national leaders there becoming dictators. I’m sure with a little encouragement, some leaders there will be wonderful dictators. And once they destabilize their countries due to paranoia, POOP Matters will move in and make money . . . peace. Meanwhile, I will get someone to teach my boss Spanish, in anticipation.
No doubt, life is good for POOP Matters when African dictators are in power. You might wonder: who is this sleazy lunatic that has come clean and confessed that it’s in his interest that Africa is unstable so he and his ilk can make money making peace in Africa? I’m not some white saviour. I may be Black, Hispanic, or Indian, but I’m every one of us that is greedy. Skin colour is irrelevant here; the only colour that matters is green. All I can tell you is that Africa enriches us and that is why we keep scrambling for it long after the historical 1880s scramble ended.
With peace restored, POOP Matters donors bring in their conglomerates that loots the minerals, oil, and rubber tree plantations while destroying the environment. Most of the money they make will go to offshore accounts; morsels will be invested in the host country: a borehole here, a latrine there, two classrooms here, feeding natives’ hungry kids at national holidays. All done to portray conglomerates as charitable. The CEOs will bribe local politicians with seared consciences to shut up about injustices meted to natives. These can include guard dogs being unleashed on locals who trespass on lands now possessed by the conglomerates—lands that used to be owned by natives. Or natives being clobbered to death for stealing a pineapple.
The citizens will get tired, demonstrate on the streets, and POOP Matters will show up to make peace and get paid by donors, with money their conglomerates looted from Africa in form of natural resources. So basically we are making peace in Africa with Africa’s money. A never-ending cycle of war and peace aimed at keeping disadvantaged Africans in poverty.
You may wonder, after this confession, if my conscience is dead like those of African dictators? Please don’t judge me, understand me. Perhaps baring my soul as I have means contrition is gradually overriding my seared conscience, and I’m on a trail to compassionate redemption. War is big business; shouldn’t peacemaking be too? At POOP Matters we’ve reinvented peacemaking and made it lucrative, but at what expense? Trust me, I got scruples, but I got a family to feed and prestige to maintain, so I need the money. But I find myself asking myself if life is all about money, if there is more to life than money.
Is there hope that a reprobate peace merchant like me can find salvation? And how much will it cost me to change? Until the change happens, I just hope you understand why I love African dictators. They are big business to a few elitist us. Sorry, Africans, but #longliveafricandictators #longlivethedespots. They are good for my rogue peacemaking business.
About the author
James Karuga is a fiction and script writer from Nairobi, Kenya.
