Phones at War

By Dumo Kaizer J Oruobu

Phones at War is a psychological study of man and the impact of technology on his behavior, his fortunes, and his misfortunes in the age of incredible advances in science and technology.

The novel opens with Tamunotonye, one of the dominant characters in the drama, sharing his joy and excitement about a telephone conversation that he had with Erefaa, the hero of the story, with his younger sister MaminaMamina is the mother of our heroine Ibife. Ibife, which translates to good market or a product of very good quality, also via the instrumentality of the telephone is a product of the age of the machine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Partridge Publishing Africa
• Release date: Nov 22, 2016
• ISBN: 9781482876826

Dumo Kaizer J Oruobu

DUMO KAIZER JOHNNY ORUOBU was born in Ogurama in Degema District of Nigeria’s Rivers State of Th e Niger Delta Region to Christie and Chief Kaizer John Oruobu on September 22 in 1952. He studied at Baptist Day School, Old Bakana, Zixton Grammar School, Ozubulu, Government Comprehensive Secondary School, Borikiri, County Grammar School, Ikwerre-Etche and Baptist High School, Port Harcourt between 1959 and 1973; and in 1975 went on to study English Language and Literature at Nigeria’s Prestige University Of Ibadan, graduating in November, 1978. He is an accomplished Singer, Poet, Inspirational Speaker and Preacher of Th e Word of God. He is a Prize Writer in all the genres, an accomplished Print, Radio and Television Journalist and is fi rmly rooted in Entertainment, Advertising, Marketing and Public Relations. He has written well over eighty Novels out of which sixteen have been published between 2016 and 2018. He is a Fellow of Nigeria’s Institute Of Corporate Administration and is a Member Of Th e Nigerian Institute Of Public Relations. He holds two Traditional Chieftaincy Titles – Anyawo XI Of Ogurama and Amaibi Dokibo Se Erena XII Of Kalabari. He loves Travels, People and Makes friends very easily.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Help Of A Friendly Foe’s

Sister meee! Sister meee! Tamunotonye called out very loudly as soon as the telephone conversation between him and Erefaa ended. He sounded so upbeat that he was almost like someone in a state of hysteria. He was not. Those who knew him well knew also that he was like that in almost every circumstance of his life. It was not for nothing that he was called abaji okporo or okporo for short, meaning noisy bamboo pipe. Drama was a veritable part of his life. Drama of unpredictability, making the possible impossible and making the impossible possible.

I’ve got him! I have got him where we all wanted to get him, can you believe it? Tamunotonye screamed into the microphone of the telephone he held delicately to his mouth, and listened hard into the earpiece as he waited with a mixture of anxiety and trepidation to hear his immediate younger sister Mamina talk to him in answer to his breaking news for her. Yes, breaking News! Unbelievable News development! What else could it be? What else but breaking News? And yet all he received was the silence of the grave of many a peaceful dead buried in peace on days when neither rain fell nor the sun showed it’s face hidden securely behind the clouds.

Sister meee! Sister ei ei! He called out again, hearing but the echo of his own voice bouncing back to him. What could be happening? What? Was there a conspiracy even of the heavenly bodies against him and in favour of Erefaa – Erefaa? He wondered, afraid. He was very much afraid.

Caustic! Tamunotonye said to himself in resignation as he heard the line go completely dead to his consternation. He waited for a while and then dialed Mamina’s number again. It was very important that he should talk to her today so that Erefaa the irrepressible man of many textures no one had been able to stop in any of his many designs and unstoppable bravado could be hemned in at last. Isn’t enough enough? It is! Enough is enough! He thought, feeling very angry and quite unsettled. Enough is enough!

Yes! Erefaa could be stopped in his own tracks. He should be stopped. And very well too. He must be stopped! And now is the most opportune time. No time can be better than now. Very good. He told himself. Very, very good! Strike the iron when it is red hot! Strike it while it is red hot!

I can hear you, brother? Mamina finally answered him, bringing happiness to him instantly. Thank you, Lord God Almighty. He said in his mind, looking up above him where God lived beyond the ceiling and beyond the clouds.

Good! Very good! He said. Please listen, Sister meeee! Listen! And before I continue, please go – go away from where you are now – go where nobody can hear you in what we are going to talk about now. It is very important. Tamunotonye said, as he waited feverishly for Mamina to confirm to him that she was on grounds safe and secure enough to hear him and for her to talk to him, but with no one else within earshot to hear their heart to heart conversation. For someone else to hear her – someone else, Ibife her daughter in particular, could be very dangerous. It could do harm – great harm to his pet project – the project to put Erefaa and Ibife permanently asunder. Whether I be a Deacon or Pope. He was overheard saying at one particular time. It does not matter. At one epoch in his life, Jesus Christ also cried, afterall. He said to justify his stance, he being but human. Only human.

Yes! Brother! Where I am now, I am quite sure that nobody can hear me! As for my daughter, don’t worry about her. She is not in the house right now. So, you can talk now. She said. She kept looking from left to right and behind her, and left and right again, just to make assurance doubly sure that she was right in what she had told Tamunotonye. You can never be too sure. You never can tell. That’s what life is as I have come to know. She told herself.

Good. Can you believe it, Sister me? Tamunotonye asked her, laughing mischievously. That Erefaa himself is the one who is now asking me – me of all people! To help him to broker peace, and to bring about reconciliation over the matter we have been trying to bring to an end almost forever – the matter about which all of us were solidly united only yesterday at our brother’s mother-in-law’s funeral in Ahoada to bring to a fitting conclusion? He breathed hard. Very hard. Anyone close to him also knew this to be true about him, his closest relations wondering on end as to how that could be brought to an end.

Ee eh? Is that so? God is finally on the throne on our side! Mamina said in excitement, not quite sure if she heard what she had heard him say very well and correctly or not. It had happened to her many times before. What she thought she had heard turned out not be what she had been told. Yes, Sister Mee! Her older brother said. God is on His throne! And He always hears the prayers of the faithful. Now, work very hard on our daughter. And very quickly too. Very quickly. Work on her! You know that she has a very soft spot for her husband the Chief. Do your bit to harden her heart. Let her heart be as hard as stone – rock against him! I shall call her to talk to her in the next two hours. Please set the stage right for me. Tell her that it is time for her to leave Erefaa and move on – move on in the interest of all of us – me, you, her father, and your younger sister through whom he had come to our view for the very first time earlier – much earlier than this season we know – for the very first time, to confound all of us! He breathed very hard again and then hissed. What passion of hate he harboured in his heart – a Deacon in The Church where God’s name is called! What animus!

I will do so! I will do so! She is my daughter, afterall. She is my daughter. I am happy. I am very happy to hear this! That Chief! This Chief! She said without saying what she had on her mind about Chief Erefaa Amagbe. It was a typical Nigerian way of speaking – saying everything you intend to say without saying anything whatsoever. The hearers should interpret it the way they want to. If it is rightly done, okay. If it is wrongly done, still okay. Afterall that was not what you meant! You would say as a ready made alibi. That man? That woman? That Chief! Being incomplete but indeed complete statements of fact – incontrovertible facts.

Thank you, Sister Mee! Tamunotonye said, sounding very happy too. I will call you again later this night to brief you on my conversations with her, and about the outcome. See you! He breathed very hard again. Mamina tiptoed back to her bedroom. Nobody should see her. Not her daughter should Ibife have walked in unannounced. No one. A secret can only be kept as a secret by one heart, not by two hearts. She told herself. Only a secret known to one person can be kept. Once two people know it it ceases to be a secret. It would be like any other ware on display in the open market place – market place of information.

Tamunotonye began to put his thoughts together. In two hours’ time he would call his first cousin Ibife to encourage her to keep her husband at bay for as long as she possibly could – forever if possible. Is it to encourage her? He thought. No. He told himself. Maybe to discourage her from continuing to stay in her marriage to him. That’s better. Much better. He thought. He would do much more than his very best to dissuade her – poison her heart against Erefaa. He would tell her that he would provide her with financial support so that she should not miss him on any score. He would fill any other vacuum that Erefaa could create in her mind by his absence in her space. Yes, two hours’ time. But what other vacuum would he be able to fill? Let that be hanging. Let that be hanging for now. He thought. He knew, also, that that too was a very important question. Very important. Nothing in life is very simple. There was problem on his hands already. A problem he knew he could not solve. Yes. A problem for which he had no solution.

Mamina was the one who called him about half an hour after their earlier conversation. She was excited and impatient. She had news of Breaking News proportion for him! Yes, Breaking News! Breaking News!

I have set them on fire! She said very happily. And the way things are looking, I think, this time, we will succeed. She told him. I even told Ibife that you will call her very soon. And she is very anxiously expecting the call from you – in fact she is waiting impatiently to hear from you! So don’t waste any time. Don’t waste any second. Call her right away! Call her! Call her, my dear brother! Let us solve this riddle that this our Chief and brother has become to all of us? She said, sounding philosophical to the delight and awe of her elder brother, Tamunotonye, Tamunotonye meaning The Will of God. But was he advancing the Will of God Almighty in the plot he was hatching? He was not sure. And he could not even think about it. Every soul knows where they are headed when they depart the physical human body – they head to one of two destinations – to hell or to heaven. They know. Everyone knows. And, therefore, the statement is very true that everyone is the Architect of his own destiny – the Architect of their destinies.

Thank you, Sister Mee! Tamunotonye said with happiness and satisfaction. I will do as you have said, immediately we hang up now? And then they hung up. Twenty minutes, thereafter, Tamunotonye called his Niece Ibife. He went straight to the point as soon as she answered. He had to. He had to. No beating about the bush. He spoke exchanging greetings and pleasantries just to make sure that the line was active and that the audio was clear enough for the two siblings to hear each other very clearly.

My dear daughter, Fe. He called her in his unique abbreviation of her name Ibife – Ibife meaning Good Market. He listened hard to hear her.

Brother. She had answered, but in a subdued tone. There was neither excitement nor optimimism in her voice. She sounded like soup with neither salt nor pepper in it. Plain soup or stew without any ingredients. Drab. I hear that you people have started to fight again? That you people have started fighting again! Is that true? My sister, is it true? And I have been asking myself as a Deacon in my Church now, as you very well know: is the Hand of God in this your strange association and relationship with him called marriage? Or else, how long will this your fight last before it comes to an end? Our brother, your husband, he has reported you to me as usual, as the one guilty of what you people are fighting about now. And he wants me to call you to order so that you will go back to him. Now give yourself enough time – plenty of time to think about this your relationship with Chief Erefaa. Do you want to continue to be in it? Do you honestly want to remain in it? And you are sure that you will be happy? Please consider everything in its proper context and in it’s proper perspective. Yes. From this night up to early tomorrow morning. I will call you late tomorrow morning. And if it becomes necessary that you should come over and see me at my place, I will not hesitate to ask you to come over. I am greatly worried myself about the turn this your marriage is taking, I won’t tell you a lie. I am quite uncomfortable with it. So is everyone of our relations everywhere that I know from here to the end of the world.

Then there was silence – an uncomfortable silence which none of them broke. They signed off in the end, saying good night to each other, Ibife not saying anything as their conversation, or more appropriately monologue lasted, apart from listening to her Uncle who she called Daddy and Brother interchangeably, depending on her mood at each time they interacted. She was not sure about which one of the two titles fitted him the most – whether Daddy or Brother, considering how dastardly and heartlessly he had treated her in different situations and circumstances that she could recall very vividly. She saw him as a Devil who she should always eat with - if they ever ate together at all, always with a very long spoon, in order for her to be able to scamper to very safe grounds at the least signs of the devil she feared him to be or to be in him becoming manifest in any likelihood.

Late the following morning, Tamunotonye saw Erefaa’s number on his phone as it rang. He cut it. But soon, thereafter, it rang again. After he cut it two more times, he saw that Erefaa had posted a text message to him earlier. He must have started calling him after the text message was ignored.

When a Patient goes to a Doctor to tell him that he is ill, He is doing so only because he expects for the Doctor to cure him of his illness.

That was why I called you yesterday, to intimate you with the problem I am having with your daughter Ibife.

Such Patients usually ended up taking other desperate measures – desperate measures that could make – make matters worse – instead of leading them to cure.

I am not saying that I am desperate…

No. I am not.

Tamunotonye was struck. No one can take from Erefaa the depth of his intellectual and philosophical acumen. He thought to himself. How do you tackle – how do you deal with such a man? Writing mesmerizing poetry and philosophy even in something as ordinary as a text message! Even in an ordinary text message? He asked himself. How? God and His gifts to people! He thought feeling sad and cold – dead cold.

He had received no answer to his own questions yet before he found himself placing a call to his Cousin, his Chief and the embattled in–law whose legal ties with his Niece Ibife, he had sworn to himself, to cut ab initio, without the Chief ever knowing or having an inkling about it. He was not too sure about the Chief being completely in the dark, though. Erefaa! You can never take things for granted with him. No. Never! You do so to your own peril. He waited with great anxiety for the call to go through. And Thank God it did go through in the end. Great!

My great Chief! He called Erefaa as soon as the call went through and the Chief answered. I am sorry. I was at a meeting in the office with my boss when your calls came in. That’s why I did not pick them. I had to ask for special permission to come out of the meeting to call you to let you know. He said. He breathed very hard as always. He breathed very hard again, clearing his throat noisily. He cleared his throat three times, each succeeding clearing being noisier than the one before it. It was a problem he was almost at his wit’s end trying to solve.

I see! Erefaa said blandly and incredulously. I was calling you because when we spoke yesterday, I thought that you promised me that you would call me back to give me a feedback on how far you would have gone. I didn’t hear anything from you from that time up to the time I placed the calls to you today. That’s why. So how far? Have you people spoken at all? You and my wife? Erefaa sounded very confident and determined, even very much business like and a bit haughty. He always faced situations head on. Head on collision, he knew, always produced results. Yes. Head-on collision. Face whatever problems you see staring you in the face head-on.

Yes, my Chief. Tamunotonye answered. There was no conviction in his tone of voice as he said yes. No. I placed a call to her many times on the two new numbers that you gave to me, but she did not pick them. It was much later in the night that she finally answered. She was feeling very tired after returning from Church and stuff like that, she told me, and so, it was too late for her to come over to my place for us to talk. Not to worry. I have a meeting with a few very close family Members later today. After that, I will convene another meeting involving the two of you, so that we can come up with a solution to this incessant problems once and for all? He said. He breathed hard again. Incessant problems. Erefaa thought with a bit of anger and misgiving. Incessant. Maybe. He thought. That’s fine? Erefaa said, but again blandly and incredulously. They hung up. And almost immediately, Erefaa’s restless mind went to work again. He had seen his wife’s mother’s name repeatedly showing on one particular telephone line among his many telephone lines in front of him. Why? He asked himself in anger. Soon it flashed again on another telephone line belonging to him. He ignored the twelve calls which registered on the phones as missed calls. He had no reason whatsoever to call her back or to pick her calls. No reason. No reason whatsoever.

Mamina had not called him on his telephone line for more than three years now. So why would she suddenly want so very determinedly – so very desperately to speak with him today? He wondered. And knowing her temperament the way he knew it, he did not want to engage her in a long distance learning kind of war of words. It could be too explosive.

He was much more older than her, he knew – he was much older than even her immediate older brother, Tamunotonye himself. Yes. But she could rain abuse and insults at him, and being but a lady – a lady much younger than him, but also, whether he liked it or not, his biological mother–in–law and cousin, he would not be free to retaliate the way he would and should if it were someone else. What a shame. He thought in a rather self defeatist way. What a shame. So it was better for him not to talk to her at all. He would wait for Tamunotonye to talk with him again before he would take the next line of action. A time comes when even the lion would allow rats and rodents to have a free reign in his kingdom. Yes. For very well thought out tactical strategic reasons. Meanwhile he had flagged off certain actions which had started making instant impacts. Very good. He told himself. He was a War Canoe Chief, afterall, wasn’t he? Yes, he was! And he had associated with many a Security Operative during the past forty years or even for much longer. And through those associations he had with them, he had come to know the importance of The Telephone in war situations, in particular, and in other situations like that as well. What a powerful tool the telephone was. He thought gleefully. In peace as well as in times of individual or national emergencies. Yes. His best friend was a Police Chieftain too. He would be a big fool if he did not learn any useful lesson from any one of them as of that date in the art of war, secrete operations and strategems – with the telephone as a veritable tool – weapon of destruction mass or not mass destruction.

He now had greater insight as to why whenever the Army of his country that was there primarily to protect the citizens as well as defend and protect their Territorial Integrity, cut off all communication apparati as soon as they struck – as soon as they carried out their erstwhile traditional, but now odious and out of fashion coups! He was very happy with himself for what he had done with