The Retirement of Inspector Taribo: A Short Story from In the Middle of All This Fire
The Retirement of Inspector Taribo by Richard Ugochukwu Anyah is a short story from In The Middle of All This Fire, the Noirledge anthology of short fiction that examines power, violence, survival and moral collapse across imagined and recognisable African futures. Set in New Lagos, a hyper-surveilled city born from climate disaster and political betrayal, the story follows a retiring police officer whose long history of brutality collides with the cold precision of automated justice.
Read on to follow Taribo through his final day on the force, as decades of choices collide with the cold, unyielding systems of New Lagos.
The Retirement of lnspector Taribo
Richard Ugochukwu Anyah
NEW LAGOS IS A SAFE city. Its streets, patrolled by the drones and orbs of its police force, had long been cleared of criminals. Its inhabitants had learnt that computer-powered justice was swift, impersonal, and very precise. Once an offender is apprehended — usually without much drama for the drones could accelerate faster than a human could run — a dull, computerised voice would read them their offence while flying them in a pod to the courthouse. At the courthouse, a judicial robot would run the offence through its algorithm and pronounce a judgement immediately. Pronouncements were thought of as high-handed, especially among those who remembered the days before the purchase. Those days were long gone, and in their wake, the Republic created a utopia out of the sinking mess of a Nigerian city. It was, like most things Nigerian, the product of a grand failure and the machination of a particularly foul fate.
As the earth warmed and sent her coastal cities to their submerged end, the Nigerian government had no plans for Lagos. So, the Atlantic Ocean began its slow embrace of the coastline, starting first with the obnoxious enclaves the wealthy had long since abandoned for the hinterlands. In time, the sea had moved past Lagos and was threatening the whole of Nigeria’s Southwest, and it was at this time that the Republic came with an offer the Nigerian authorities couldn’t reject. The Republic offered to build the series of Dykes and Levees needed to hold the ocean back, in exchange for a hundred-year lease of what was left of Southwestern Nigeria. The Nigerians agreed rather quickly, for the Southwest had no natural resources and its industries had long since moved away. Besides, the Yoruba had to be punished for the War of the Unspeakables, and their constant protests.
The Dykes were built quickly, and what was left of the old cities were connected by trains into some sort of conurbation and renamed New Lagos. In time, New Lagos came to be known for its culture of surveillance and the absence of any political activities. The Republic ruled, and the New Lagosians did what they were asked to do. At first, some took it upon themselves to protest, but they quickly learnt that those sold by their kin have their voices taken from them as well. Repression was swift. The city flourished, but within it, the people withered, sold by Nigeria and re-colonised by a foreign power.
The young Taribo had been a rather lucky man. Having joined the Nigeria Police in Ibadan, he spent the first few years of his service bullying the homeless. Lagosians had taken over his city, and he took it upon himself to whack a person or two, just to communicate to them that the ocean taking over their city was proof of their despicable nature. He knew deep down that the Earth had rejected a people hated by water. Imagine his Ibadan, now full of those Lagos businesses, and all the money that should have gone to Lagos? Through the weird economics of the barely literate, and a pocket greased by bribes, Taribo did not see any of the sufferings around him. All he knew was that no matter how much the prices of goods increased; he could afford a can of Pepsi. Those times were good to Taribo. When the world is falling apart is perhaps the best time to be greedy.
When the Republic purchased the Southwest by building Dykes, Taribo was incensed. How could the government have failed him so? First, he had believed that in the days preceding the purchase, he would be transferred inland, but instead, he found himself working for the Republic. He kept wondering why Asians, and not Europeans? The Oyinbo knew how to treat people better than the Asians who refused to pay their staff and walked around with a barely disguised air of contempt for the Africans.
But today was not a day for reminiscences, Taribo was retiring from the police force. He was one of the last remaining Africans left on the force, one of the last humans too. And after his forty years of labour for the Nigerian government and then for New Lagos, he knew that he was bound to have an excellent retirement. Perhaps he would find himself a job consulting for what was left of Nigeria across the New Lagos border, and he could even help the insurgents at Ilorin procure weapons from the New Lagos government. The Ilorin people were angry that they were not part of the New Lagos purchase. Taribo found it funny because many New Lagosians were jealous of the llorin people because they are independent. But what is independence without true freedom? And what is freedom without money? Taribo knew money; he had been bribed and cajoled and had had his palms greased with corrupt money all his career. Now, he was about to hit the mother lode with his retirement.
Taribo left his home after wolfing down his breakfast, and he barely greeted his wife. She was his fourth, a small, insignificant woman he had arrested and seduced with his uniform. He liked to look at her legs only more than he loved to hit her face. She was terrified of him. Nonetheless. she shouted her goodbye after him, and he grunted in reply. Stepping off the landing, he waited for the orb patrolling his street to scan his face. It flashed his name and identification number at him and floated away. Taribo hated driving, the new cars without tyres always freaked him out. He missed the old tyres and their now redundant hubs. So, he waited by the bus-stop for one of the new-fangled floating buses to take him to the Republican Ministry of the Interior for the Territory of New Lagos.
The large stone facade of the ministry loomed over the bus as it pulled over for its only occupant. Nobody ever came to the police headquarters and the Ministry of the Interior because swift justice was meted out elsewhere. Taribo looked out the window wondering how much was wasted on the drab behemnoth nobody ever used. Taribo knew it mattered little because the Republic saw New Lagos as a business and would never Spend its money on worthless ventures. Taribo went inside the tall, drab building. He caught sight of a few people heading into and away from offices, but the building was practically empty. It didn’t need to be staffed, because there were large filing robots occupying rooms, while orbs and sentinels were flying and floating about. The large hall was filled with holographic receptionists and secretaries ready to furnish an automatic answer in computer-generated diction.
Taribo did not need them, though, and he knew where he was going, So, he just walked on, past a large room, and into a corridor where the sentinels were scanning old, dog-eared documents into room-sized computers Taribo came upon a door marked “Force Welfare and Benefits”, and he walked in. There were people in the room, which surprised him, but as he looked at the walls and saw the files and folders stacked on shelves, he knew why people and not computers staffed the department. He walked up to a uniformed clerk who was typing into a slate-like computer.
“My name na Taribo na today my work dey end,” Taribo spoke to her in the English of New Lagos.
She looked up at him while adjusting her glasses.
“Wetin be your papa name?” she asked, handing him a piece of paper. “Write am down, make you put your rank for di side.” Taribo always found the little Asian women speaking New Lagos English funny, but he wrote his name down nonetheless and went to sit down where he was asked.
While seating, he busied himself by looking at the women work, and on the face of the woman who had taken his name, he saw a growing look of puzzlement that began to alarm him. His alarm grew even more as she left her seat to call another lady who he knew was her superior. The new lady looked intently at the screen being shown to her by her subordinate, and then she walked to Taribo angry about something.
“When you join police?”
“Who take your finger picture?”
“You no be policeman, you con dey copy copy police.”
“You be thief.”
“You wan take Inspector Tariba money.”
The angry woman raised the little table computer to Taribo’s face, and he saw his old police recruitment form. He remembered the form being filled by an angry clerk who was writing all his details by hand forty years ago. He looked hard at the scanned copy being raised to his face, and all the details were correct as far as he could see, there was even his younger face in a passport photograph, with a full head of hair. And then he saw his name, the little mistake that he knew had now ruined him, his name handwritten in a precise cursive had been misspelt as Constable Dauda Tariba.
Taribo immediately knew that he was going to be arrested, and as a retired policeman, he also knew that the Republic saw itself as perfect. If the name on the form was Tariba, then there had to be an inspector Tariba. He blamed himself for never changing what he thought was an error in his identity card while he still worked for the Nigerian government. When superiors called him Tariba then, he answered promptly with a salute, and a great deal of flattery. It was never a problem, his salary even got paid into his bank account monthly.
Before he could even begin to protest, an attack sentinel had entered the room through the door and locked him up within its holding pod. A mechanical voice started reading him his rights.
“You be insurgent, and I don dey record you. Anything wey you do now na upload I dey upload am for inside government drive. You dey copy copy police na why we arrest you.“
Taribo knew where the sentinel was headed, the Department of Corrections. Taribo was surprised that he was not being taken away to be sentenced by a judicial bot. He thought maybe there was some hope for him, but he was not sure. With the Republic you just could never be sure. The sentinel transferred him into a holding cell, where the lights immediately dimmed to a weird green, and he felt himself fall into an unnatural sleep, where his dreams felt like they were being manipulated by a person who was flipping intently through the most incriminating scenes from his life.
He dreamt of the #EndSARS protest that had rocked the old country when he was still a constable, remembering how he had shot at the protesters. At first, he did it out of fear, but the fear gave way to an intense feeling of glee. He dreamt of beating beggars in his old Ibadan when it was a city and not just the largest district of New Lagos. He dreamt of collecting bribes and selling narcotics. He dreamt of raping women and beating young boys for money. He dreamt of his wife when he broke her tooth; he dreamt of beating a dentist and forcing him to give her a dental crown. But also, he kept dreaming of the rebels of Ilorin, his meetings with them, and his secret stash of guns.
Taribo woke up with the feeling that his dreams were now uploaded into a computer drive. He was afraid. He wished he had just called himself Tariba and saved himself all the trouble. He didn’t know what would happen to him now. They kept him locked up in the holding pod for a few days, feeding him the tasteless, white calorie packs prisoners were given.
On the third day, a sentinel came to take him away to a room marked “Manual-File Error Corrections” where a man was waiting for him. As soon as the sentinel let him go, the man spoke, “Why you no change your name when dem make the mistake?”
But as Taribo made to speak, a finger silenced him. “I no wan hear wetin you wan talk, I don see your hallucination exhibit.”
“You no change your name; now we don sabi say you be thief.“
“You wan collect retirement money?” the man asked half in jest, and when Taribo answered in the affirmative, the man laughed and brought out a form for Taribo to fill.
The form was an error correction form, of a type Taribo had never seen. After he was done filling the form, the man smiled and brought Taribo a tablet computer that showed that his retirement tokens had been paid into his token account. Taribo was momentarily rich until the man with a few flicks of his fingers reversed the whole process and drained Taribo of all the tokens he had, including the few hundreds he had left from his last salary.
“Where all my money go?” Taribo asked.
The man answered, “Republic no dey pay thief.”
When Taribo moved to plead with the man, the sentinel returned to bundle him out through many corridors and open doorways and out a window into the street below. He stood up to walk the five kilometres to his house. Now that he had no money, he could not ride the floating g buses. He could not afford a home either; he knew that he would have to live like the beggars he had spent his career bullying. He thought of running away to the Nigerian territories in the North, but now that he had fallen from grace the Ilorin insurgents would not be kind to him. Taribo had nowhere to go.
When he got home, his wife who had worried for three days over his whereabouts cane out and flung herself upon him. He held her close in a hug, and they both cried together from different heartbreaks. Breaking off, Taribo said to wife, “Dem don finish me.”
Richard Ugochukwu Anyah (1982–2022) was a Nigerian writer and PhD candidate in African Studies at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. He wrote fiction and poetry, with work featured in anthologies and literary magazines.
