## Chapter 14: "Soldier Come, Soldier Go"
The Military Logistics and Reserve Command (MLRC) headquarters in Okitikupa occupied a building that had seen better days. The paint peeled in the Lagos humidity, and the air conditioning units wheezed like asthmatic babies . Second Lieutenant Elisha Oriade stood in the reception area, his transfer papers damp from sweat, watching a lance corporal argue with a photocopier that had jammed for the third time that morning.
"Oga, you fit wait small?" the corporal asked without looking up. "This machine na winch."
Elisha nodded. He had become very good at waiting.
Captain Rasheed Okonkwo finally emerged from his office forty minutes later, a man whose uniform seemed to be fighting a losing battle with his expanding waistline. He glanced at Elisha's file without reading it.
"So you're the one they sent from Yongo," he said. It wasn't a question. "Administrative duties, counseling requirement, restricted from field operations." He looked up. "What did you do? Sleep with somebody's wife?"
"No sir."
"Hmm." Okonkwo's eyes narrowed slightly, recognizing the particular quality of Elisha's 'no sir'—the kind that meant the truth was worse than adultery. "Well, whatever it was, you're here now. MLRC. We handle supplies, transport coordination, reserve unit administration. Nothing exciting. Nothing that makes the newspapers. We keep the military fed, fueled, and functional. Understood?"
"Yes sir."
"Good. You'll be working under me in the Procurement Analysis Division. Basically, you'll review contracts, verify shipments, ensure nobody is stealing too much." He paused. "I said too much, not at all. This is Nysaria. Everybody takes something. The trick is knowing how much is acceptable wastage and how much is theft."
Elisha said nothing.
"Report to Lieutenant Kolawole tomorrow, 0800 hours. She'll show you around." Okonkwo turned to leave, then stopped. "One more thing, Lieutenant. I read between the lines of personnel files. Whatever hero complex you had that got you in trouble, forget it. MLRC doesn't need heroes. We need accountants who can wear uniforms and fill forms correctly. Clear?"
"Crystal clear, sir."
---
The bachelor officers' quarters at Dodan Barracks hadn't been renovated since the 1980s. Elisha's room contained a metal bed frame that squeaked, a desk with one leg shorter than the others, and a ceiling fan that rotated with the enthusiasm of a condemned man walking to the gallows. Through the window, he could see the lagoon, its surface coated with the rainbow sheen of oil spillage.
His neighbor, Lieutenant Marcus Idowu from the Army Signals Corps, knocked on the open door. "You're the new guy from up north."
"Yes."
"Una get light for your side?" Marcus asked, gesturing at the dead bulb. "NEPA has been playing with us since Tuesday."
"I have a rechargeable lamp."
"Good, good." Marcus lingered in the doorway. "You fit play ludo?"
"Yeah."
"There's a group of us. Every Thursday evening at the officers' mess. Nothing serious, just passing time."
Elisha nodded. Marcus left, and Elisha sat on the squeaking bed, staring at the water-stained ceiling. Three and a half years at the Defence Academy, six months in Yongo, and now this—pushing papers in a logistics office. His phone buzzed. A message from his mother: "Hope you have settled in well. Your uncle sends greetings."
He typed back: "I'm fine. Everything is fine."
---
Lieutenant Amara Kolawole was nothing like the officers he'd known at the Academy. She moved through the MLRC offices with the casual authority of someone who understood exactly how the system worked and had made peace with it.
"Forget everything they taught you about military efficiency," she told him on his first morning, leading him through a maze of cubicles where officers and civilians worked side by side. "This place runs on relationships and reciprocity. You want something from Major Adegoke in Transport? Better know his daughter just got admission to university. You need files from Personnel? Hope you remembered Corporal Bello's birthday."
She showed him to a desk that wobbled when touched. "This is yours. The computer works most days. When it doesn't, there's a cybercafe down the road."
"What exactly do we do here?"
"We review procurement contracts. Make sure the military is getting what it pays for." She pulled out a stack of files. "For instance, this one. Contract for 10,000 pairs of boots. Unit price, fifteen thousand naira. Market price is eight thousand. The difference?" She shrugged. "Somebody's retirement fund."
"And we just... approve it?"
"We note the discrepancy. File a report. The report goes up the chain. Somewhere along the chain, it disappears. Then the contract gets approved anyway." She studied his face. "You have that look."
"What look?"
"The one that says you think you can fix this. Trust me, Lieutenant, that look doesn't last long here."
---
The first month passed in a blur of purchase orders, shipping manifests, and inventory reports. Elisha discovered that the military consumed enormous quantities of everything—rice, diesel, toilet paper, ammunition—and that each item traveled through a labyrinth of suppliers, middlemen, and contractors, each taking their percentage.
He learned to recognize the patterns. Inflated quantities that would never be delivered in full. Quality specifications that would be quietly downgraded. Emergency procurements that bypassed normal oversight. It was corruption, but corruption so systemic, so normalized, that fighting it seemed like trying to bail out the Atlantic with a teaspoon.
During his mandatory counseling sessions with Major Dr. Adeyemi, a tired-looking man who ran the base psychological services, they rarely discussed Yongo.
"How are you adjusting to your new posting?" Dr. Adeyemi would ask.
"Fine, sir."
"Any concerns you'd like to discuss?"
"No sir."
They would sit in silence for the required fifty minutes, Dr. Adeyemi filling out paperwork, Elisha staring at a water stain on the wall that looked like the map of Africa.
---
The ludo group at the officers' mess was an eclectic mix. Marcus from Signals, Captain Fatima Yusuf from Military Intelligence, Major Dotun Bakare from the Engineers, and a rotating cast of others seeking distraction from the monotony of peacetime service.
"You play like you're planning a military campaign," Fatima observed, watching Elisha methodically position his pieces. "Everything has to be perfect before you move."
"Na so some people be," Major Bakare said, capturing Elisha's bishop. "They think too much. Sometimes you just need to move and see what happens."
Elisha lost that game, and the next three. He was relearning something he'd forgotten: not every battle needed to be won.
---
Three months in, Captain Okonkwo called him into his office. "There's a situation. We have a shipment of medical supplies stuck at Tin Can Island port. Officially, it's delayed due to documentation issues. Unofficially, the clearing agents want an extra five million naira to release it."
"Medical supplies for where, sir?"
"Military Hospital, Yaba. Including insulin that's needed for diabetic patients." Okonkwo rubbed his forehead. "If we pay, we're enabling corruption. If we don't pay, people might die. What would you do, Lieutenant?"
The old Elisha would have had a ready answer about principles and standing firm against corruption. This Elisha said, "How long can the hospital manage without the supplies?"
"Maybe a week."
"And if we go through official channels?"
"Two weeks minimum. Plus, the clearing agents might 'lose' the shipment out of spite."
Elisha was quiet for a moment. "I recommend to pay them, sir. But document everything. Create a paper trail that leads back to them. Maybe we can't stop it this time, but evidence accumulates."
Okonkwo smiled slightly. "Haha, you're learning."
---
The call came on a Tuesday afternoon while Elisha was reviewing contracts for fuel supply to units in the North-East. His mother's voice was strained like she had cried.
"Elisha, come quick. Your uncle is in the hospital. Heart attack."
Elisha got emergency leave and took the next flight to Lagos. At Lagos State University Teaching Hospital, he found Uncle Femi looking diminished, older, tubes running from his nose and arm.
"Elisha," his mother said fatigued, she has grown alot older since the last time he saw her.
Uncle Femi's eyes focused with effort. "The soldier boy. How's the army treating you?"
"Fine, Uncle. "
"You look different." Femi's voice was weak but his eyes were sharp. "Not like before. Looks like you've seen things boy."
Elisha didn't answer.
"I was hard on you, before," Femi continued. "When you wanted to join. I thought I was protecting you. But maybe..." He coughed. "Maybe somebody has to try, even if the system breaks them. Otherwise nothing ever changes."
"Nothing is changing anyway, Uncle."
"Ah." Femi managed a weak smile. "So you've learned that lesson. Good. Now learn the next one—sometimes just surviving with your soul intact is victory enough."
---
Back at MLRC, the routine continued. Reviews, reports, documentation of discrepancies that would be ignored. Elisha developed a reputation as thorough but not troublesome. He did his work, attended the mandatory counseling sessions, played ludo on Thursdays, and slowly became part of the institutional furniture.
Lieutenant Kolawole was promoted to Captain and transferred to Defence Headquarters. Her replacement, Lieutenant Timothy Ojo, was fresh from the Academy, full of the same fire Elisha had once carried.
"This is criminal," Timothy said, reviewing his first inflated contract. "We should report this to the EFCC."
"Go ahead," Elisha told him. "The report will go through our commander, who will send it to brigade headquarters, where it will be reviewed by the same people profiting from these contracts. But file it anyway. Documentation matters, even if nothing comes of it."
Timothy looked at him with disgust. "Sir I read your files and this is not what you were ,you've given up."
"Not really. I've just adapted."
But that night, alone in his quarters, Elisha wondered if there was a difference.
---
The rains came early that year, turning the roads around Dodan Barracks into rivers of mud. The ceiling in Elisha's room developed a leak that dripped steadily into a bucket he'd positioned by his desk. The sound became a metronome for his days—drip, drip, drip—marking time in a posting that felt like punishment and refuge simultaneously.
He had received a letter earlier from one of the children rescued in Yongo, forwarded through UN channels. Written in broken English, it said simply: "Thank you soldier. I am in school now. I remember you."
Elisha kept the letter in his desk drawer, under the procurement files and inventory reports. Sometimes he would take it out and read it, remembering why he had broken the rules, remembering the cost of breaking them, remembering that sixty-nine children were alive because he had chosen action over protocol.
Captain Okonkwo found him one evening still at his desk, reviewing contracts by lamplight, NEPA having failed again.
"You know what your problem is, Oriade?"
"Sir?"
"You think too much. This job, this military, this country—it doesn't require thinking. It requires endurance. You endure the corruption, the inefficiency, the waste. You endure because the alternative is chaos. And in between enduring, maybe you do a little good. Save a life here, prevent a theft there. Small things."
"Is that enough, sir?"
"I don't know. But it's what we have." Okonkwo paused at the door. "That medical shipment we paid the bribe for? It saved three lives at the military hospme, soldier go. That was the saying. Soldiers came to your village, to your city, to your life, ital. Three people who are alive because we chose pragmatism over principle. Make of that what you will."
---
Six months into his MLRC posting, Elisha had settled into a rhythm. Wake at 0530 for physical training—alone now, running the perimeter of the barracks while others slept. Office by 0800, reviewing contracts and reports until 1700. Evenings spent reading or at the officers' mess, making small talk about football and politics, careful to express no strong opinions about anything.
The anonymous messages had stopped. The investigation into his actions in Yongo had been quietly closed, filed away in some archive where embarrassing incidents were buried. He was just another lieutenant in the vast military bureaucracy, pushing papers and marking time.
Then Marcus mentioned something during a ludo game that made Elisha's hand pause mid-move.
"Did you hear about the thing in Kaduna? Some colonel got arrested. Apparently he was running his own operation, using military resources for personal vendettas. They say he had a whole network of junior officers who thought they were saving the country."
Elisha moved his red button. "What happened to them?"
"The junior officers? Scattered to the wind. Different postings across the country. Far from each other, far from trouble." Marcus studied the board. "Makes you wonder, doesn't it? How many officers out there are sitting in logistics offices and supply depots, keeping their heads down, waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
Marcus shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe waiting to forget whatever they did. Maybe waiting for another chance to do it again." He moved his blue button. "Check."
---
The chapter of his life titled "heroic service" had paused. Now he was living in the footnotes, the administrative appendix where failed idealists were filed away. But sometimes, late at night, when the rain drummed on the zinc roof and the darkness was complete except for the distant glow of the Third Mainland Bridge, Elisha would think about those sixty-nine children.
They were in schools now, or learning trades, or simply living—breathing, laughing, growing older. They didn't know about military law or rules of engagement or the proper channels that would have left them in Lieutenant Jubek's hands. They only knew that a soldier had come in the night and taken them away from hell.
Soldier come, soldier go. That was the saying. Soldiers came to your village, to your city, to your life, and then they went, leaving change or destruction or nothing at all in their wake. Elisha had come to Yongo and gone, leaving sixty-nine lives changed. Now he was in Lagos, going through motions, leaving nothing.
But perhaps that was enough. Perhaps Uncle Femi was right—sometimes surviving with your soul intact was victory enough. Or perhaps this was just what he told himself to make the days bearable, one procurement contract at a time, one ludo game at a time, one breath at a time.
The rain continued to fall. The bucket continued to fill. And Second Lieutenant Elisha Oriade continued to endure, a soldier caught between coming and going, between action and stasis, between who he had been and who he was becoming.
In the margin of a procurement report, he wrote a single line: "The die is cast, but the game continues."
Then he crossed it out and went back to documenting discrepancies that no one would ever investigate.