Nigeria’s growth industry: Fraud
It has happened to all of us. We open our email in the morning and there is an “offer of a lifetime” from someone in Nigeria: a prince, a businessman, or a young woman in trouble. The anguished message pleads for help, requests you transfer money from your bank account to one in Nigeria or begs you open your bank account to receive millions of dollars for safekeeping — with a gratuity for your help. The reason you’ve been contacted, the email explains, is that you are honest, reliable and have a good head for business.
Together the scams are known as 419, named after a former section of the Nigerian Criminal Code. Most of us delete emails like these, recognizing they are clever ways to heist our money, but a surprising number don’t, making 419 one of the most lucrative economic pastimes in Nigeria. Will Ferguson peels back the covers on these types of scams in his new novel 419, cleverly looking at the wretched ruse from both sides — victims and perpetrators.
The story he weaves is heart-wrenching, fascinating and scary, a thriller with a raw nerve ending. It opens with the police investigating an automobile accident in a Western Canadian city. The driver, an elderly man who dies in the accident, is a retired school teacher who has blown his life’s savings in one of the Nigerian frauds. His naiveté has left his wife penniless and has conduced anger and confusion in his two adult children.
No-one had an inkling the upright Henry Curtis had been shipping his retirement money out of the country, naively trying to help Miss Sandra, daughter of a Nigerian businessman who was supposedly killed in a helicopter crash. Miss Sandra’s tale was a tragic fiction authored by clever 419 operators, and when Henry learned, after months, that he’d been wiped out he saw no solution but suicide, driving his car off the edge of an embankment.
While his children try to find out what happened to their dad, Ferguson takes us into the harrowing landscape of Nigeria where we are introduced to the swindlers and their fractious lives. Some of them are likeable, some pitiable, some just cruel. Ironsi-egobia, akin to a Mafia Godfather, makes Tony Soprano look like one of the Care Bears. He has a similar omertà to the Soprano crew but none of Tony’s sense of humour. Nnamdi, the boy from the Niger Delta, is a charming character whose life becomes circumscribed by the advance of the petroleum engineers and the need to leave his oil-slicked fishing village to find work.
But no one, no one in Nigeria is to be trusted. Not government officials, not the police, no one.
Ferguson, who has written other novels and humour and has won the Leacock Medal three times, dazzles us in 419 with an intricately woven, urgent story. It is an unflinching, ambitious work, flinging us back and forth across the Atlantic, and taking us into danger when daughter Laura Curtis heads to Nigeria to seek revenge on the scammers who forced her father into suicide.
It is a persuasive work of fiction based on a very original premise. Ferguson who swings so deftly from humour to thriller is a writer who can genuinely surprise. jhunter@thestar.ca