Cubanamania, Cubanaities and matters related thereto - Ik Muo, PhD.

       The lion @ the den:With VC of UNN           one of the hotels…          The $100000 pendant

Last week we xrayed the concepts of Cubanisation and Cubanaism and linked them to the goat, which broke the pot any time it had the opportunuty because the pot had dealt and continues to deal wickedly with goatheads over the years. Today, we continue our discourse on the Cubana phenomenon and we start with definition of new Cubanistic terms. Cubanamania and Cubanaities refer to situations in which everybody and everything is possessed and overrun by the spirit of Cubana; these are situations of extreme Cubanaisim and Cubanistic tendencies. As for Cubanaities I hope you still remember Reggaemilities! One of my students, Muideen  enriched the definition of terms by introducing ‘Cubanalisation’, a situation in which one feels that he owns the state.

A lot has been said about the Oba carnival including the desecretion of the solemnity of burials and funerals; uneccesary showmanship and outlandish ostantatiousness, exhibisitionism and obscenity, abuse and misuse of the Naira( which is already battered beyond recognition in the marketplace), ridiculous behaviours like presenting 46 live cows and boxes of money, throwing bundles of money at people, promoting wrong social  values. ‘objectification of women as money and fun seeking sluts’( real BIG grammar) and turning the mothers burial into an ofala in the process of which the essence of her life and death was forgotten and unwittingly setting up another contest for the ‘Funeral Ceremony of the decade’ awards

 I believe the whole thing was peplanned.  This is evidenced by the noise-level, the enviable quantity and quality of attendies and evertything around the Oba affair. Even though Obi claimed not to be a noisy person, I belive that he, the Chief Priest or one of his ‘boys’ hired a social-media consultant for the show and that is why the list of all donnors of cows and boxes ofcash was published realtime online.He had told  one of his friends that after his mothers burial, some people would be in a hurry to die. But what is the guarantee that such people would attract a Cubanistic funeral? He had even explained that the mother died while they were planing  of an 80^th birthday celebration and thus the death before 80 was turned into a celebration.  However, I also believe that some of the plans were not undertaken by the man himself and that certain things took lives of their own, beyond his wildest expectations.

I have always loathed ostantatious funeral ceremonies. One of my first interventions when I started the ‘media-activism’ 42 years ago(I was at UI then), was a diatribe against onstentatious funerals. My original view on this matter was influenced by the novellet we read in Class1 at Awka-Etiti High School( also known as St Josephs). It was about the young Eze, who was withdrawn from school because  his late fathers assests were frittered away so as to give the dead, a befitting funeral. His greedy uncles who  inflated the prices of everything( you see,it did not start today!) even accumulated some debts which they obviously left for the fatherless Eze to pay ‘whenable’( Eze Goes to School, Onuora Nzekwu). Unforunately, when my father and later my mother were burried, we were a little bit guilty of the very act I had condemned. For my father, who died about 26 years ago, there were about 10 cows on parade while for my mother the services most exclussive undertaker was procured! So like madness; we are all Cubanistic but the degree of Cubanism varies with indviduals, place and circumstances. There is the old story Mike Adenuga who gifted a cow to every street in Ijebu-Igbo for his mothers funeral. You would remember the distinguished lady who ‘GLOed in glory’. There is even a young okoro man who just the other day buried his father with a fresh BMW worth more than N30m( some people swore that he would retrieve the car the following day but  I was not there to confirm!).

                  Burried with a car;      The Cubanistic ‘Horrible’ member… the future Cubana

As for spraying, it is in our character. But we all know where it started, those who are experts in it combined with Asoebi. If you don’t know, consult me privately. But we have been SPRAYING, which  was one of the reasons why the CBN rolled ou a ‘decree’ on the abuse of the Naira. Unfortunately, they cannot or will not enforce the regulation because the chief culprits are  those who are too big to be held accountable.  Some spray in Naira, some spray in Pounds and some spray in Euros.Just the other day, a ‘horrible’ member was spraying the thing like no man’s business from his balcony ( physically far from his people)to his  constituents  somewhere in the north. Unfortinately, he could only spray N200 notes. Do you remember why Governor Ikpeazu suspended a top government functionary the other day? Have you seen pastor ‘Indaboski’ Odumeje on duty? It is never complete without massive spraying.  Have you not seen some follows  ‘shooting’ soft and hard currencies with purpose-built, gold-plated machines?

Shooting the cash with reddish & Golden guns…. Naira Rain: Was this Cubana?

These are the one who did not like the stress of raising their hands up and down in the process of spraying and thus ordered for  gun-like machines to  do the spraying for them! Is this not wprse than Naira-stoning? Unfortunately the CBN did not notice the machine and the HOR sprayers!!! Some people even Cubanise with N10 notes!

$ Splash by Abidemi Rufai.Cubanising with N10.

In ana-Igbo, the funeral is a communal event, involving the immediate family, the kindred, all their inlawas, the religious stakeholders and  the ‘ikwunne’, especially when a woman is involved. However, in this case,  the whole show was over-Cubanised. It was all about Obi- Cubana. Nobody even knows the name of the dead woman, who was and is just known as mama-Cubana. We did not hear about his sibblings, his umunna or his ‘ikwunne’(mother’s relatives) especially the ‘umuada’ who always turned the  funeral ceremony of every  married woman into a warfront, where they would always exact a pound of flesh from the children, especially those who never came around or who did not take good care of the dead while she was sick.

 I am glad that Cubana himself is educated; he is a Lion (Graduate of UNN)! However, I also agree with those who argue that the extreme Cubanism and riotous ostentatiousness displayed at Oba will adversely affect peoples’ desire for education and the urge to go Cubanistic, and even  set new standards that would beat that of Cubana, without real hard work. These are people who would ask ‘Ichie Ik Muo, is always reading, writing and speaking big grammar; what has he to show for it?  The post-war group of Igbo youths did not go to school because survival was the key issue and as such there was no time and no money for schooling.  The other set were those who did not go school because they were misled by the ostentatious display of wealth by those who had made money from trading. By 1980 when I was ‘corpering’ at Azare, Bauchi State, my erstwhile classmates @ St Anthony’s Osumenyi, who stopped at Elementary 6 in 1970 already had Peugeot 404 pickups ( the  traders’ favourite then),  houses at home and in the cities, wives and children and had started ‘chairmanning’ occasions where donations  would be publicly announced. And yet, the son of man was earning a meagre   monthly allowance of N200, EXACTLY N2400 for the year because there was no  ‘kola  culture’ then. Thus, even though Cubana did not intend so, a group of young men would make greater unholy efforts to make it and even those who are already ‘on’ would plan to create another benchmark.

 Obi Cubana has money ( efforts have be made to show the sourcesof his wealth even when nobody was asking) and his taste has been shaped by his money-reality. So, a pendant of $100000 and a coffin of N30m might well be petty cash for him. About 20 years ago, I was travelleing to IgboUkwu  from Lagos with my small-boy( far less than 10) and I paid for a full seat for him in the luxirious bus. Some people told me to my face that I was  wasting money since I should have lapped the boy  at no cost or secured an ‘attachment’ for him for half the cost. In 1982 when I started work at CCB, Enugu, I rented a 3-Bedroom flat and furnished it with everything that pleaseth a young man. The beds( for all the rooms), chairs,  center and side tables,curtain box, dining table cost a princely N1000 only. The double-door fridge, the biggest in town cost N400; the gasscooker cost N250 and the ceiling fan was N35. My maternal uncle, with who I shared his one room face-me-I-face-you at Coal -Camp ( now late)came visiting one day and flatly condemned my extravergance. That was before I bought my good old 504( AN 3705ED) for N8800. When I bought a crocodile-skin shoe for N1000, slaughtered a cow and became the first to use the Hill-Station banquet hall (Jos) for my wedding in 1989( when a kinsman had offered his hotel hall free).people accused me of extravergance but my pocked bore the burden without Any scratch. So, extravergance and ostentiousness depends on the material reality of the person in question.

Our people say that he who has people is greater than he who has money,that the way the wooden gong would hail somebody is a function of the kind of person he is; that what matters is not one’s physical size but what  the person does and that a king whose booth is filled up( with gifts) when he goes a-visiting to another town is due to reciprocication by  those he had also filled their booths with gifts previously.  As somebody said, the crowd at Oba was not rented,it was bought with many years of friendship.

 The oba crowd: not rented!

I have not met Cubana before but I believe that he is a good and generous fellow who indulges in sacrificial loves his fellow human beings. The story of how he has helped several people, including those who had become billionairs through his intervention is a testimony. That is why he is titled Okpata-ozuoha; the one who  wealth spreads to, or touches, all. That is why I tend to agree with Moses Ochonu who sees Cubana as a constructive case of associative entrepreneurship (Big grammar). May be he is propelled by this saying: when you succeed, find time to light your family’s( and neighbour’s) fire  so that if your own fire goes off, they can also return the favour and re-light your fire because there is a risk of darkness if you are the only fire in the family/neighbourhood. His fire is not yet off but people have shown what they would do if it ever does

 My mother,  Nono Celina Ezeamaluchi Muo (Erico-Umuagbala) died in 2013. She  was an accomplished entrepreneur;  a forerunner in all sorts of businesses that have today become the vogue: rentals(before 1980) supermarket(as long as I can remember) fast food (chinchin, chop-one, etc), produce (oil, kola-nuts) since 1990 and fashion designing since the 1960s. She was an entrepreneur that changed with the times, probably in tune with the advice of Anthony Robbins that: If you do what you have always done, you only will get what you have always gotten.  Fr Dunu, (then PP of Our Lady of Fatima, Igbo-Ukwu,) who preached at the Vigil Mass on 21/3/12, declared that all we did in life including at the funeral, was just show(vanity, shakara, treating things that were not as if they are). I don’t know where Fr Dunu is now but I don’t know what he would have said if he had seen what happened at Oba!

 Cubana has  buried his mother but  he continues to Cubanise. He has Cubanised Oba youths, ( N300m for 300 of them ) Cubanised Anambra State Police Command (thank-you visit for providing security for the Cubanisation) and just the other day, Cubanised UNN ( visited the school to ask: what can I do for you), while his friends still drop publicly displayed boxes of cash for him. Why can’t they give him cheques or do cash transfers? May be one of the principles of Cubanism is boxed-cash donations.  He has also ‘Cubanised’ Kyari (the last public function before the fall) as well as CBN( which has made two contradictory statements on spraying in the last 1 week). Meanwhile, the National Bureau of Statistics should hurriedly measure the Cubana Effect: The impact of the Oba show  on the local economy( Oba & Anambra State), on the Events Industry( planning, rentals, ambiance, item7, security), Telecoms, especially data and other related matters. They should also compare the Cubana Extravagance with Yusuf Buhari Extravagance, taking into cognisance the Yusuf is  one of the lazy youths and that his father is our chief servant, who did not have enough money to buy his nomination form… just the other day.

 And   while ‘my people’ were busy revelling at Oba,  two new policies were unveiled. That only Dangote and NNPC would be allowed to import fuel and that only Dangote and BUA would be allowed to import sugar! This is regulatory ambush awaiting my trading brethren who went to Oba. How are they prepared   for such regulatory ambush?

Cubana  has created a record. Some see it as good, some see it as bad  while some remain on the indifference curve. I hope the Guinness Book of Records will soon come calling: Afterall, how many funerals have attracted such a number of live cows across the globe?

Meanwhile, I hope to see Obi-Cubana one of these days, even though our paths are far apart. What will I discuss with him? Till then! 

- Ik Muo, PhD. Department of BusinessAdministration, OOU, Ago-Iwoye. 08033026625

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