President Muhammadu Buhari
As the economy takes a bashing, Nigerians who groan under its weight design positive and negative survival strategies. The situation, however, is not beyond redemption as the government and experts (Henry Boyo, Ayo Teriba, Ifeanyi Uddin, Odia Ofeimun, Tunde Babawale and others) posit
BY ADEMOLA ADEGBAMIGBE
It is usually the face-me-I-face you tenement where I- better- pass -my-neighbour smoke belching electricity generators whine away in high decibels and compete for space with kitchen cupboards, fowls and goats. Apartment rats here do not respect territorial integrity. Twitching their you-can -do- me nothing whiskers, they dart from room to room, wreaking havoc on cloths, carelessly dropped Naira notes, exposed loaves of bread, biscuits, uncovered amala and, most disastrously, toes of sleeping tenants. Cockroaches, the eternal paratroopers with brown jackets and nauseating exoskeletons, fly from one end to the other as if on war reconnaissance. Worse still, toilets and bathrooms are used on first come and first served basis. In such environment, short fuse is ever on display and trouble or mayhem is sparked at the drop of a hat.
To complete the stereotype, it is possible to know whose mother’s stew smells best or who uses the most delicious crayfish or locust beans or shrimp or periwinkles to temp many olfactory lobes. And so, on 21 September 2016, a man could not resist the aroma of his neighbour’s jollof rice at Ifite, Awka South Local Government Area of Anambra State. Hunger was gnawing at his internal organs and playing rumba within him. He was in his own apartment when a woman, Mama Ebuka, was cooking jollof rice, its good smell wafting all over the compound, creating admiration or irritation or envy or a combination of the last two. Only God knows what spices she put, he thought as he peeped through the window with the leer of a professional thief.
The man lifted his nose in the air like a supercilious camel, his Adam’s apple making horizontal clicks as he sniffed the way a bloodhound would, near the hole of a rabbit. Then he hatched a plan in his own delicate brain matter to the effect that Mama Ebuka would not eat that jollof rice alone! A neighbour, Mr. Emmanuel Okafor, narrated what happened to New Telegraph that when the woman finished cooking, she left the pot on the stove and went inside her apartment. But, according to Okafor, when Mama Ebuka came out to dish food for herself, she discovered that the pot had developed wings.
September edition of TheNEWS magazine
In Okafor’s words: “She started asking who took her pot of food but nobody owned up to it. But a young girl told those who had gathered that he saw the man take the pot into his room. When the girl said that, we all rushed with the owner of the food to the man’s room only to see the pot of rice half empty.” He added that the man, a bricklayer who usually works at construction sites, “confessed he stole the jollof rice because he was very hungry and “had not eaten for three days. The man knelt down and started pleading with Mama Ebuka to forgive him. Mama Ebuka, being a religious woman, forgave the man. She even told the man to tell her to give him food next time instead of stealing.”
A neighbour, flexing his muscles and tendons, offered to deal with the food thief, but the jollof rice owner, a religious woman with deep sense of piety, promised she would not invite the police. For this reason, according to the report, people, especially those living in multi-tenant houses in the state have devised new ways of protecting their pots of food. “They either lock the pot inside a small cage or padlock the pot itself with a cross bar until they are ready to eat.” Okafor also added: “I know the man very well. He is not a bad person but I think the situation in the country is pushing people into things they would not ordinarily do. I am certain the worst is yet to come.”
True, the economy of Nigeria has taken such a whack that many Nigerians have devised different ways of survival by fair or foul means.
President Muhammadu Buhari, on 1 October, Nigeria’s Independence Day, made a broadcast to the nation, admitting that indeed, the economy is on crutches. In his words: “I know that uppermost in your minds today is the economic crisis. The recession for many individuals and families is real. For some, it means not being able to pay school fees, for others it’s not being able to afford the high cost of food (rice and millet) or the high cost of local or international travel, and for many of our young people the recession means joblessness, sometimes after graduating from university or polytechnic.”
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