Lagos Hustler

Kingsley Momoh

When the phone rang again, I didn’t bother to dip my hand in my rucksack to know who it was. Of course, I knew it was my boss, the MD; my MD. I had a special ringtone for his calls and I knew I was in for it. It was about his 30^th call that morning.

Of all days...of all the days since I was appointed the personal assistant to the famous business mugu... sorry mogul Dr. Joel Okon, it was that day my phone refused to alert me to wake up at 3:45 am. You can never imagine when I woke since I skipped 3:35am; I woke up or decided to wake up at about 6:45am! That, is an evil report if you understand the kind of job I do.

What did I then do? Obviously, taking my bath was out of it. I put on my clothes with similar speed Spiderman or Superman would use when there was an emergency and in less than10 minutes, nope...less than 3 minutes, I was in my kingluini Suit and my shoes that usually gave me stress in putting it on dared not that day, the shoes must have sensed the red light from my tension soaked face and they realized the urgency at hand, hence, they decided to cooperate with me, maybe they read my mind because if they had given me the stress I usually have when putting them on, I would have thrown them away without much ado. The situation demanded all the speed I could get because I was paying for not sleeping but sleeping!

I had slept...or better put, I closed my eyes to rest the night before at about 3am. I was with my boss at his monthly club meeting at the Hilton. The key materials to be used at the conference that our organization was going to host were with me. It is an international event and to get the hosting right, it took us a lot of input which of course does not un-include exchange of money, not just money, hard currencies.

And there I was on a bike on the third mainland bridge at 7:36 or thereabout with the full prospect of partly messing or messing the event up and probably my career along with it. The event was billed to start at 8am prompt meaning no African, Nigerian or any other time! The event must kick off at the scheduled time. That was part of the guidelines we were given at the time we won the hosting right even with the strong oppositions from big companies in the telecommunications and IT sector

And at that point, it seemed I was the devil we prayed about last week at the office, “the devil that may want to disrupt our plans for a successful hosting”. I remember my MD’s pastor who came to the office to lead the special prayer session said we should pray that such devils should die. I mean any devil that may want to disrupt the event.

“The devil could even be you” he had said, although not referring to anybody. He went further to say that anybody who pays laxity attention to his or her duty is being a devil and we should pray that we (the staff) will not be devils as we host this all important event. Indeed, we all knew a successful hosting of the event would place our company on a better pedestal and it could also translate to better pay for all members of staff too.




........Of course, this story continues.