No Clean Hands - by Matthew Okibe

I was asleep when the knock came. 5am, Friday. My friend's voice through the door, asking if I could travel to Benue for a decoration job. I had just finished coordinating an APC event that still hadn't paid me. I had pressing needs — the kind that don't wait politely while you recover from the last disappointment. I asked how much. He said fifty thousand naira. Back by Sunday. I said yes. Not because I was excited. Because I needed to be back Sunday for church, and I was already supposed to be coordinating a bus that day, and fifty thousand naira was fifty thousand naira. Sometimes the math of your life makes decisions for you. --- The job was roof decoration. We traveled, we set up, we worked. Then the rain came. I don't know exactly when the frame became too heavy for the roof to hold. Maybe it was always going to give — the weight distributed wrong, the structure not built for what we were asking of it. But when the rain arrived, the roof broke. Not cracked. Broke. We spent the rest of that day removing everything we had just put up and packing it into the car like we were cleaning up after a funeral. Saturday gone. Come Sunday morning, there wasn't enough space in the car going back to Abuja. I had promised to be back Sunday. Church. The bus coordination. Promises I had made before I said yes to this job, promises I now couldn't keep. I watched the car leave. I didn't get anything for that — not an apology, not even an acknowledgment that something had been taken from me. We left Monday, very early. Got to Abuja in the afternoon. I got home around 5pm, exhausted in the specific way that has nothing to do with sleep — the exhaustion of a weekend that happened to you rather than for you. The thirty thousand naira, when it came, disappeared almost immediately. Pressing needs don't wait. I had worked a full weekend, broken a promise to my church, missed my coordination responsibilities, slept in a place that wasn't mine, watched a roof collapse, and I was back at zero. Maybe behind zero. --- And here is the part I did not expect: I understood. Not excused. Understood. The man who paid me thirty instead of fifty — I could see his math too. Imagine traveling that distance, managing a job that went wrong, the roof falling, the client unhappy, and then still having to reach into your pocket and give people their share of a job that didn't fully happen. He was also trying. The money passed through his hands before it reached mine, and each pair of hands had a need attached to it. That understanding sat uncomfortably in my chest. I wanted clean anger. I had earned clean anger. But every time I reached for it, I found this instead — this exhausting ability to see the other side of my own wound. --- I picked up my novel that night to stop thinking. It didn't work. The thought came anyway, quiet and certain: No matter what path someone chose, another person somewhere would still curse them for it. And behind it, stranger still: Somewhere tonight, a hitman is praying before a job. An armed robber is asking God to steady his hands. A herbalist whispers the name of someone he loves in the dark. They are not cartoon villains. They are people standing inside a logic that makes sense to them. And somehow that disturbed me more than my missing twenty thousand naira. Because if everyone can explain themselves, where exactly does righteousness live? I gave information this time. I communicated. I traveled five hours on five hours notice. I worked through rain and a collapsing roof and a broken promise and came home with almost nothing. Does that make me righteous? I don't know anymore. And I think that not knowing is the most honest thing I have said in a long time. The world is not black and white. There is no perfect justice. No matter what you choose, someone will curse you for it — and somewhere, in the logic of their own life, they will not be wrong. Perhaps that is simply reality. Not a tragedy. Not a lesson. Just the shape of things.

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