On January 10, 2014, I wrote a piece in this column entitled: “A saint in a Sin City”. The commentary followed a December 27, 2013 CNN report on a Las Vegas cab driver named Gerardo Gamboa (I nearly wrote Damboa, a settlement located along Maiduguri-Biu road), who returned to his employers a huge sum of $300, 000 which a passenger forgot in his taxi.
The company he drives for, Yellow Checker Star, named him Man of the Year and handed him $1, 000 and a dinner for two at an exclusive restaurant as a reward for his incredible show of honesty.
According to the report, Gamboa, who has been a cab driver for 13 years, first thought that a passenger had left a bag of chocolates on the back seat.
He soon discovered that the big brown paper package contained thousands of dollars in cash. Rather than seeing himself as a prince of Serendip, Gamboa turned in the money which was eventually passed over to the rightful owner.
The owner did not immediately reward Gamboa but I was dumbfounded by his reaction when interviewed by the Las Vegas Sun: “I am not waiting for any kind of reward in return. I just wanted to DO THE RIGHT THING (my emphasis), and I appreciate what the company did for me.”
“Do the right thing” is a familiar catch phrase being sloganeered by the National Orientation Agency (NOA) that nobody cares to embrace. Gamboa is not a Nigerian based in the United States, yet he was caught in NOA’s web.
What made his show of honesty so unbelievable was that it involved a cab driver operating in a notorious gambling milieu like Las Vegas dubbed as the Sin City of the United States. If Gamboa were a Nigerian cab driver operating in a City of Iniquity like Abuja, he would have melted into thin air with the cash on that lucky Friday only to surface on the altar of one of those Pentecostal churches the next Sunday with a testimony of how an angel of God had lodged the cash in his cab! Some years ago, I was shocked when a worshipper came to thank God for a mouth-watering sum wired into his account by an unknown source he believed to be an angel of God. The entire congregation rose to their feet and praised the Good Lord for the financial miracle experienced by one of them.
I was even more flabbergasted when the pastor stepped forward and concurred to an obvious human error committed by a careless bank staff. He actually said that the angel attached to that church was the one depositing money into the bank accounts of the members!
Then on Friday, July 8, 2016, a story on page 22 of the Daily Trust caught my attention. Another US cab driver with Taxi Operators Association (TOA), Raymond “Buzzy” MacCausland, was in the news for exhibiting a rare show of honesty. A passenger had got out of his cab to see a friend, intending to return to the taxi. “Buzzy” waited for about 30 minutes but the passenger did not return. He then drove to the man’s hotel to locate him. Unable to find him, even with the help of the hotel staff, “Buzzy” ransacked his passenger’s bag for identification.
There he found three bundles of $50 and unspecified wads of $100 bills, totaling N51m when converted. Rather than thanking his stars for becoming the latest prince of Serendip in town, he immediately drove to the nearest police station to turn in the cash. Police found the paper work indicating that the cash was part of the passenger’s inheritance.
Upon establishing the rightful ownership, the police returned the money to Raymond’s passenger who handed him $1, 000 as a reward for his honesty.
It was the second time that the hackney driver demonstrated lack of greed. About 30 years earlier, Raymond returned the sum of $10, 000 which a passenger he drove to the airport left in a briefcase. Although he got no reward, that did not discourage him from the latest return.
Some 32 years ago, a similar temptation was dangled before me. The Plateau Printing and Publishing Company Ltd., publishers of the Nigeria Standard newspaper of Jos, had accumulated three months salary arrears of the staff.
The arrears followed the inability of the company to pay its workers in the first three months that the Buhari/Idiagbon had toppled the Shagari regime precisely on December 31, 1983. The cashier who paid me my arrears made a costly mathematical error. He simply calculated the salary of one of my bosses he had earlier paid and added it to my own arrears. Going by the amount of cash in my hands, I became curious. I retired to one corner and counted the money. It was in excess of my arrears. Melting out of sight with the cash would be tantamount to dishonesty and a big trouble for the cashier.
After praying to God to deliver me from the temptation I had already been led into, I (painfully) deducted my own arrears from the money and handed over the excess to the cashier. He was shocked by the cash return because there was no way he could have traced the excess payment to me.
Then in 2003, I went to a branch of the defunct Afri Bank in Jos to transfer some cash to my elder brother in Ibadan. There I met N200, 000 in excess of my legitimate balance. At first, I felt like shouting hallelujah but when I thought of the possibility of the police coming after me upon being found out, I panicked and let the sleeping dog be.
If it were in these days when honesty, the fear of God and the fear of the police have been relegated to the background, perhaps my pastor, possessed by the spirit of mammon, would have passed me as a foolish man. And that I should have acted like many of my fellow churchgoers whose bank accounts were credited with cash lodged by unknown angels. Then I would emerge at the church to give testimonies about the financial miracles and hand him fat envelopes as thanksgiving gestures.
May God save the church system.
