Overhauling systems: Reading Adejumo’s Underground Engineering

JUST  like his previous plays and two novels, Akin Adejumo’s new trilogy (christened Dramatrixmix) comprising My Lord Bigchop, She who must be despised and Underground Engineering, foregrounds different aspects of the Nigerian dilemma. In Underground Engineering), a play anchored on the menace of collapsing roads, we have an X-ray of the sociology and politics of road failure, the dynamics of corruption and the futility of an anti-corruption war devoid of the requisite moral high ground, but the overarching frame remains the perennial problem that many Nigerians are all too familiar with: the failure to evolve a functional system.

The play opens with a government contractor, Chief Layi, being grilled by personnel of the War Against Corruption Agency (WACA) over the collapse of a recently constructed road which had claimed lives, including that of a serving minister.  Accused of cheating the government by circumventing the thickness specified for the asphaltic concrete binder course ( an inch instead of four inches), he maintains his innocence and asks that the supervising engineers from the Ministry of Works be questioned instead, as “we executed the job according to specifications.” (p.152) But his interrogators are unimpressed: “We observe that the thickness of the granular base and laterite sub-base are just about half of the thickness specified in the drawings and bill of quantities.” Confessing his ignorance of the technical details regarding the roads executed by his company, he directs his interrogators to the quantity surveyor and takes a rather leisurely exit from the WACA office, much to their chagrin, as he has a meeting “with the vice president a couple of hours from now,” (p.153).

However, the Quantity Surveyor, as well as the supervising engineer, Engineer Layi, are promptly detained apparently because of their low social status and lack of connections to the seat of power. While the former maintains the position that the variation in the project cost from 5.2 billion to 7.5 billion was due to government policy and the hike in the prices of materials, and that the use of one-inch asphalt instead of four was by the variation order of the latter, the latter insists that the variation was both to save the government money and to strengthen the subgrade.  According to him, “the subgrade is very important to the stability of flexible roads. If it fails, the road fails—however good the bases and the wearing course are.” (p.158). The implication of this averment, namely  that most of the money that should have been used to build a four-inch asphalt supposedly went underground, is not lost on the WACA officials who are, of course, persuaded that a chunk of the contract sum actually went into kickbacks, and are determined to coerce a confession of the crime.

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For Engineer Layi, however, it is a case of double jeopardy: he collapses soon after the interrogation and, while being attended to by Dr. Smart at the WACA clinic,  he discovers that he will be forced to undergo  teeth extraction, even though Smart, who unknown to him has been suborned by his (Layi’s ) wife, is no dentist.  It is no wonder then that, as argued in the author’s note: “It is time we changed our approach to contract administration  of road projects and other civil engineering projects in this country, to reflect global best practices.  The civil engineers in the civil service and in private practice must be made to understand that they cannot be the purchaser and the payer in a business they do not own. This play is a call for restructuring  and overhauling of the construction industry in general and the civil engineering sector in particular.”

But the message of the play is much more complex. As clearly demonstrated in the play, the entire architecture of the country represented in the fictional world of the play (Nigeria) does in fact need an overhauling. For instance, instead of deploying forensic evidence, the WACA interrogators  are prepared to “Lock him (Layi) up until he decides to own up.”(p.164). As an interrogation method, this is apparently as tragic as it is unprofessional. How about providing water-tight evidence that will be unassailable in a court of law even in the absence of such a confession?

Again, Engineer Layi, confronted with the opaqueness of the contract award and payment method, quips: “We didn’t create the structure. We met it like that and it’s been working.”(p.163). Here then is the dilemma: if the system had been working, why the constant loss of lives?

The most stylistically prominent feature of the play is the dramatic, “sudden” ending co-opting the elements of surprise, shock and horror. At the end of the play, the horror is just about to begin: an engineer is about to go through the horror of a tooth extraction by a quack dentist working in an antigraft agency and aided by his (the engineer’s) wife who seeks to prolong her husband’s life by curbing his craving for meat, and is willing to  cut corners to do so. Thus, corruption thrives at the seat of antigraft drive.

As in William Goldin’s  Lord of the Flies, a novel in which stranded and badly corrupted children are rescued by a sailor, only to be transported home to a nation which is in all probability still trapped in a war, Underground Engineering utilises the shock/surprise element to clinical sophistication. Thus, as the play ends, the suspense is only about to begin. It is only 28 pages, but it is apparently destined for greatness. But this is only an introduction.