Nwokediuko & Other stories… Vintage Facemasks for Auction - Ik Muo, PhD.

 Isaiah,4.1: Masamvu, his 12 wives & 79 children…   Better Mask-Up!

My transfer to Kaduna was with ‘military alacrity’.  I had just wedded (August 1989) and we were busy doing and enjoying all the things that newlyweds enjoyed.  I remember that we would climb a hill beside our house at Rukuba Road( Jos), watch as much of the cold and rocky city as we could from there and played some music, the most regular of which was ‘Remember Me’ by Lucky Dube. (By the way, woe to those who killed Luck Dube…). One morning, I reported for work at 32 Rwang Pam Street, Jos, where I was the Branch Accountant (Chief Operations Officer) for Cooperative and Commerce Bank PLC (now resting in peace) and around 10am, I received a call from our HQ in Enugu. It was an order to proceed, ‘with immediate effect’ to Kaduna and take over from the Branch Manager, with a warning that whatever happened in the branch from that day was my responsibility. I got home, informed my wife and left for Kaduna. It was a sad moment for both of us, even though a promotion was involved. I packed up and left for Kaduna at 140kmph (that was my regular speed then whenever I was on the highway: nothing more, nothing less) and ran into a team of FRSC  monitoring spirits, which accused me of overtaking on the  curvy road. I pleaded ‘not guilty’ arguing that since the axis was plain and grassy, it was easy to see more than 1km ahead and that no vehicle was coming from the opposite direction. We argued forward and backward until they left me for being a ‘first offender’ and informed me that my punishment would have been to go to their office and watch videos of accident scenes for at least 1 hour. (I don’t know whether they still have such offices today) By 4 pm, I had arrived at CCB, Ahmadu Bello Way Kaduna, taken over from the manager and checked in at Hamdala Hotel, where I lived for almost 1 year.

This is not really about my 3-year sojourn in Kaduna but I will share just one experience with you before going to the menu for today. I was an active member of the University of Ibadan Alumni Association, for which I was also the PRO. We had planned an end-of-year party, for which we constituted a committee of two, made up of husband and wife. At the subsequent meeting, the couple informed the house that they had nothing to report because the committee had not met! A committee of two, (husband and wife) could not meet for one month? We set up another committee to find out why they did not ‘meet’ to critically investigate the type of ‘meeting’ they were talking about and ascertain whether the meeting that failed to hold was really about our end-of year party. The second committee is yet to submit its report!

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Anyway, I had an assorted mix of friends in Kaduna including townsmen, customers, UI schoolmates, neighbours at Abakpa GRA, classmates at ABU (where I was reading for my MBA) and colleagues from the banking community. One of my friends then had as his surname, Nwokediuko, which literarily meant and still means: ‘men  (or males) are scarce’. It is easy to imagine why his parents gave him that name: he must have come from a family dominated by the female gender. Funny enough, Chike Okafor, one of my Kaduna pals, who now resides in the US, has just reminded me that Nwokediuko fathered three boys.   I remembered Nwokediuko after I watched  a video in one of my WhatsApp platforms  on 6/9/21. A lady ‘shot’ the video (everyone is now an actor, director, videographer, editor, marketer and all that), in which she was ‘seriously’ lamenting that Isaiah 4.1 had come to pass. She therefore pleaded with men to marry more wives as a way out of the quagmire. She specially advised Obi Cubana ( and others like him) to take up to ten wives, since he could take care of them.  I felt that the lady was late in this realization because as at around 1900, somebody was already named Nwekediuko. So, it is no longer a new phenomenon. But I wonder whether the lady is really a Nigerian and in Nigeria where the demographics indicate that women are more than men. However, I remembered that women are not just talking of men; they are talking of marriageable men.  Bearing in mind that they usually marry-up, women  do not count the area-boys ( excluding their ogas, whose kids school abroad) and male beggars as men. I also do not think that there is an agreement amongst women on this, because some are consciously destroying the male creative machineries; those things that make them men. On 24/8/21, one Nifemi Ajayi, of Oke-Soda, Ile-Ife, had a grouse with her neighbour, and the only thing she could do was to sink her teeth into his ‘wetin-call’( She bit his pennis!). The other day, a lady  in Zaporozhye, Ukraine, who suspected that the husband was inserting his sim-card into every available phone, screwed a nut into the aperture of the pennis! Specialised doctors were called in to use an angle grinder to undertake the gruesome removal

Some women do not even believe that men are scarce or that marriage is important as they are mercilessly kicking out the ones they have. Immaculate Nantongo, who described herself as ‘happily divorced’, recently celebrated her 6 year old divorce by setting up a lunch with her former husband. She even quoted Romans 8:28 as a prove that all things had worked out for good for her.

Happily Divorced, Age is a number with a dog …with a Chimpanzee… Dore & his catch

 

Another one organised a party to celebrate her successful divorce while Adie Timmermans a Belgian woman, took her emotions elsewhere as she developed a relationship with a chimpanzee to the extent that the zoo keepers had to ban her from the Antwerp Belgian zoo. The ‘affair’ lasted 4 years.  The old women will not make room for the young ladies as 61 year old Cheryl McGregor, recently ‘captured’ 24 year old Quran McCain and they lived happily ever after. Is this not cradle snatching? Also  the old men would not leave the young girls  alone or the young girls try to solve the scarcity problem by marring real oldies as when  Ahmed Dore (112) wedded Sefia Abduleh (17) in Guruduud Samalia. I am sure Guinness Book of Records has done the needful. There is even the case of a lady who married the picture of the man he met on Facebook while another lady was caught on camera, intensely romancing and kissing a dog. Another Nigerian celebrity was also caught in a similar act recently.  Some have resorted to marrying their brothers as Victoria Banes (38) married her 41year old brother after a legal battle that lasted 10 years.

 

These are some of the strategies which women adopted in response to Isaiah 4.1. I case you have not checked it out, here is it: ‘when that time comes,7 women will grab 1 man and say: we can feed and cloth ourselves but please let us say that you are our husband so that we won’t endure the shame of being unmarried’. Do you believe that the time has come to that or that the woman in the video was just raising false alarm?

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Other Matters: Vintage Facemasks for Auction

Before I go to the main issue, here is the Coro   news roundup. The National Bureau of Statistics has stated that about 20% of Nigerian workers have lost their jobs as a result of Coro. This is the outcome of a study it undertook with UNDP. As Edo state government continues its push for increased vaccination, it reported last week that 5 unvaccinated people had died within a space of 72 hours. There are also reports of unscrupulous criminal entrepreneurs selling vaccination cards to those who  are not vaccinated. Unfortunately, this is not only an Edo or Nigerian affair. It is global. Between March and April this year Tangtang Zhao, a registered pharmacist with ‘Company1’ in Chicago sold 11 CDC authentic vaccination cards to people who were not vaccinated. He even did it online indicating that a dog that is eager to die no longer perceives the smell of its favourite dish! The fellow had lost his common sense! Coro continues to ‘attack’ global celebrities and one of its latest victims is American TV host Wendy Williams, who had to postpone all her shows till next week, hoping she would have recovered by then. A Nigerian, ‘Onyedika-Anambra’ recently displayed the items which his school in the UK gave him to support his quarantining. If you see these items, you would ordinarily wish to be quarantined.

            Tantalizing Quarantine-support

Now, to the issue of the day.  Dr Uma Vaidyanathan, a  Senior Consultant at Fortis Hospital, Delhi recently warned and advised thus: ‘No nation in the world will be able to control covid by increasing beds, oxygen, ventilators and ICU. This is a temporary, impossible and very expensive solution. If healthcare infrastructure were the answer, then the developed countries wouldn’t have had many cases and fatalities. The long lasting, inexpensive and quickest solution is social distancing, masking and high level of hygiene. Remember that hospitals are not built to stop road accidents these can only be stopped by careful driving. It is the behaviour of people that would determine the course of this pandemic’

 So masking is it. But because we are different, with various tastes and preferences, some of us may not like to wear the same masks, which some of us, the  ordinary people, also wear. Since some of us want to be different, I have assembled  a collection of vintage face masks,  for discerning members of the public with distinctive tastes. This will be sold by auction, which usually goes to the highest bidder. The available designs include the ‘exclusive’(made of diamond and/or gold), ‘designers’( Louis Vuitton, Christian Doir, the Spirits ) the greens (made with sustainable, fresh and environmentally friendly  green leaves), the drinkers and smokers ( that allows you to sip a drink  or smoke while masked),  for the masses( hand-made  and with tick paper), the  distancer ( with a long beak so as to ensure distancing), the potted model( designed from a pot) and many more.

The auction starts on October 1, in commemoration of our independence anniversary. Interested and discerning members of the public should register in advance with exclusive distributors, MMCC Unlimited. (‘Muo & Muo Coro  Consortium’), 080419419419.   Registration enables you to indicate interest and preview the various designs and brands.

- Ik Muo, PhD. Dept of Business Administration, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye

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