Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

Everyone needed him to do this right. Everyone in Lagos. Everyone in Nigeria. Maybe everyone in the world. He worked best when people needed him. And as it always did, this knowledge calmed him down. Since taking office, he’d found himself powerless to fight against Nigeria’s soul-crushing corruption. Wherever he tried to make changes, people around him were always trying to drain some sort of shady profit from his efforts. If he tried to create a program to improve schools or hospitals, someone set up a fake contract that would bleed money from the program. When he tried to address unemployment, healthcare, inflation, electricity, education, agriculture, any time there was money to be spent, it was the same result: the vampires always came. This had worn him down. It had made him feel futile, useless. Now, for the first time, he felt like a president.