There are moments in the life of a nation when reality abandons every pretence of seriousness and begins to imitate satire with such frightening precision that the satirist is left unemployed. 

News emerged from Katsina that a man allegedly collected N95 million from a notorious bandit leader with the promise of procuring sophisticated firearms, only to vanish without supplying either the weapons or an explanation. If the allegation is true, the story has all the absurdity of a satirical novel, except that the laughter it provokes catches in the throat because it is rooted in a tragedy that has claimed thousands of lives.

One is tempted to search the shelves of literature for a precedent. There are many novels in which rogues deceive rogues, where thieves become victims of theft and confidence tricksters discover that someone more accomplished has relieved them of their spoils. 

The spirit of this alleged episode is perhaps closest to Jaroslav Hasek’s classic satirical novel, The Good Soldier Svejk, published in the early twentieth century. Hasek, the Czech writer and humourist, used the misadventures of an apparently simple-minded soldier during the First World War to expose the absurdity and contradictions of imperial bureaucracy, creating one of the greatest anti-war satires ever written. It also recalls 

The Confidence-Man, the final novel of the great nineteenth-century American writer, Herman Melville, best known for Moby-Dick. Set aboard a Mississippi steamboat, the novel follows a succession of impostors and swindlers whose elaborate deceptions blur the line between honesty and fraud, suggesting that an entire society can become captive to suspicion and manipulation. But, neither Hasek nor Melville imagined a criminal marketplace in which an outlaw could complain that his supplier had failed to honour a commercial agreement for the delivery of instruments of death. 

I can hear the laughter of the reader who is wondering what the appropriate cause of action would be in such circumstances. Breach of contract? Fraudulent misrepresentation? Failure of consideration? 

Should there be an arbitral panel convened beneath an acacia tree to determine whether the supplier exercised reasonable diligence in sourcing assault rifles? Might damages include compensation for disappointment and loss of anticipated criminal opportunity? The imagination recoils even as the absurdity invites it.

Satire has always flourished where institutions become weak enough to permit the ridiculous to masquerade as the ordinary. The famousRoman poet, Juvenal, understood this well when he asked, “Who will guard the guards themselves?” Nigeria compels us to ask a variation. Who protects the predators from being preyed upon? If the allegation is accurate, then somewhere a bandit leader may have discovered that there are ethical deficits even within organised criminality. It is almost enough to provoke sympathy until one remembers the villages razed, the children orphaned, the farmers driven from their fields and the commuters kidnapped along lonely highways.

The alleged fraudster, if he exists and if the allegations are established, may inadvertently have demonstrated one of the oldest principles in criminal enterprise. There is no honour among thieves. Trust is a scarce commodity in legitimate commerce; it is almost nonexistent in the economy of violence. Criminal organisations survive through fear rather than confidence, coercion rather than enforceable obligation. 

Every transaction contains the possibility that today’s accomplice will become tomorrow’s betrayer. The deeper tragedy, however, is not the comic spectacle of a bandit allegedly being cheated; it is the existence of a market sufficiently organised for such a transaction to be conceivable. A man does not allegedly receive N95 million to procure weapons unless there are networks of financiers, intermediaries, smugglers, transporters and corrupt facilitators who believe such commerce can flourish beyond the reach of the state. 

The laughter of the reader therefore ends where the serious questions begin.

How did criminal organisations acquire such liquidity? How have supply chains for illegal arms become sophisticated enough for advance payments of this magnitude to be contemplated? 

What failures of intelligenceand surveillance on illicit financial flow make such allegations plausible enough to command public attention? These are not questions that satire can answer, however brilliantly it exposes the absurd. Good satire does not merely ridicule individuals; it exposes the contradictions of society itself. The contradiction here is painful. 

Law-abiding citizens often struggle to secure justice through slow institutions, while those outside the law allegedly negotiate multimillion-naira transactions with astonishing confidence. Farmers cannot safely cultivate their lands, but somewhere there are reports of businessmen whose clientele consists of men carrying rifles through forests. 

Perhaps, the greatest indictment here is that Nigeria has become a place where the unbelievable no longer surprises us. Each new absurdity competes with yesterday’s absurdity for public attention. 

We laugh not because the stories are funny, but because disbelief has become exhausting; and humour, our final refuge against despair. If the allegation proves false, then they should be dismissed without hesitation. Allegations are not convictions, and every accused person is entitled to the presumption of innocence. If it proves true, however, the episode should not merely entertain social media, it should also provoke serious reflection about the criminal economy that has taken root in parts of the country and the institutional weaknesses that permit it to thrive.

Satire teaches that every joke conceals a wound. The image of a bandit leader allegedly searching in vain for the man who disappeared with N95 million intended for weapons may invite laughter, but the real victims remain the ordinary Nigerians whose lives have been overshadowed by insecurity. Their suffering is no laughing matter. If there is any consolation in this strange tale, it is only that, for once, deceit appears to have visited those who have long dealt in terror. Even then, one hopes the punchline will not be written by another grieving family in Katsina or elsewhere.

Abdul Mahmud, a human rights attorney in Abuja, writes weekly for The Gazette