Greetings!
This is the prequel of Elsie's gremlinlore bonus. The fascinating landscape, the background of the prince.
Breast yourself. Brace. Yourself. 🤔
As Transcribed by an Unwilling Witness
It is a truth universally acknowledged — though seldom spoken aloud in polite company — that every scoundrel of remarkable persistence must have begun somewhere. And Prince Adekunle Obafemi began, as most remarkable things do, in a place that was simultaneously nowhere of particular consequence and everywhere that mattered enormously to the people living in it.
He was born on a Wednesday.
This is, perhaps, the single most important fact of the entire affair. For it is well known — or ought to be, among those who know such things — that Wednesday children are possessed of a peculiar and ungovernable restlessness of the spirit; a quivering dissatisfaction with the ordinary, and an extraordinary talent for locating opportunity in places where no reasonable person would think to look.
His mother, the formidable Madam Celestina Obafemi — a woman of considerable girth, considerable opinions, and a headscarf that commanded more respect than most municipal governments — took one look at the infant Adekunle and said, with the quiet certainty of a woman who has seen rather too much of the world:
"This one will be trouble."
She was not wrong. She was, in fact, so profoundly correct that the observation scarcely requires elaboration. Yet elaborate we must, for that is the nature of the thing.
The matter of the Microsoft employment requires some explanation.
It was Adekunle's uncle — one Emmanuel "Uncle Em" Obafemi, a man of narrow shoulders, wide ambitions, and a business card that had been redesigned no fewer than seven times in a single year — who first introduced the young Prince to the world of information technology.
Uncle Em had attended, at some considerable expense and his sister's reluctant financial contribution, a three-day computing seminar held in the function room of the Hotel de Magnificence, Lagos — an establishment whose magnificence was, one felt, largely concentrated in the name alone. The seminar had been conducted by a gentleman whose qualifications were, upon reflection, somewhat impressionistic in nature, but whose confidence was utterly beyond reproach.
Uncle Em had returned from this seminar transformed. He now spoke of firmware and cache systems and AI sensor mechanisms with the serene authority of a man who has glimpsed the infinite. He understood approximately eleven per cent of what he said. This eleven per cent was, however, delivered with such magnificent conviction that the remaining eighty-nine per cent simply tagged along, too intimidated to raise objections.
Young Adekunle, aged nineteen and already possessed of his mother's talent for identifying the main chance, sat at Uncle Em's knee 🤔 — and listened.
"The computer,"
Uncle Em declared, with the gravity of a prophet delivering tablets from the mount,
"is the new oil."
Adekunle considered this.
"And Microsoft,"
Uncle Em continued, stabbing a finger at the middle distance for emphasis,
"is the new kingdom."
And there it was — the collision of his father's lesson and his uncle's revelation, meeting in the impressionable mind of young Adekunle Obafemi like two great rivers joining, or perhaps more accurately, like two questionable substances combining to produce a third, entirely unexpected, and faintly alarming compound.
A Prince. A Kingdom. A new oil.
The arithmetic, to Adekunle, was perfectly straightforward.
The Microsoft Lagos Provisional Annex — as Adekunle would one day grandly style it — did not, it must be confessed, begin as such.
It began as a plastic monobloc chair.
White, originally. Now a colour that told a long and complicated story about several rainy seasons and one incident involving a mango that was best not revisited. It sat upon a concrete veranda of a compound in the Surulere district, beneath a ceiling fan that rotated with the weary, philosophical resignation of a thing that has long since made its peace with inadequacy.
The laptop was acquired from a market stall operated by a gentleman named Pius, who guaranteed its functionality in terms that were enthusiastic if not technically binding. The screen bore a crack in the lower left corner that, in certain lights, resembled a bolt of lightning — which Adekunle chose to interpret as an omen of a thoroughly positive nature.
The generator was a third-hand Mikano that ran on petrol, determination, and the occasional prayer addressed to no deity in particular but delivered with sufficient fervour to cover most of the major ones.
And it was here — in this palace of his own devising, beneath a Lagos sky of extraordinary and indifferent beauty — that Prince Adekunle Obafemi, Senior Security Engineer, Microsoft Royal Division, Division of Royal Jelly, sat down one sweltering Thursday morning, cracked his knuckles with the ceremony of a concert pianist approaching a Steinway, and began to compose.
Dear Most Trustworthy Esteemed Sir or Madam —
He paused.
He looked at the ceiling fan.
The ceiling fan offered no opinion, rotating with its customary philosophical detachment.
He looked back at the screen.
A slow, magnificent smile spread across his face — the smile of a man who has, at last, found his true vocation — the smile, one imagines, that mediaeval alchemists wore in the precise moment before they accidentally set the laboratory on fire.
He typed on.
And trapped. Inside a lavatory. Including his "digital fund". Somewhere else.
A Brief and Reluctant History
It ought to be noted, that the "Prince Nigeria" scheme itself was not of Nigerian invention. It had arrived from America — fully formed, cheerfully packaged, and entirely without shame. And in the above tale, it is combined with the Microsoft bit.
The scheme itself, however, is considerably older — tracing back to the Prisonero de España of the 1500s, a Spanish con in which a nobleman wrote desperately from captivity, begging funds for his release. Same bones, different costume. Certain entrepreneurial individuals merely modernised it, dressed it in Nigerian aristocracy, and posted it to the internet.
Nigeria's response was Section 419 of their own Criminal Code — a law written specifically to prosecute exactly this sort of fraud committed in their name. The world promptly borrowed the number, named the scam after it, and blamed Nigeria entirely.
Nigeria got blamed twice. The culprits got blamed not at all.
Dame Agatha knew this.
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