There is nothing like
ogwu-ego (money-ritual); the only ogwu-ego is uprightness in your dealings. Chidi Okoli( Nippon America), 2017 interview on his Entrepreneurship Odyssey
Please ‘pause’ your ire; do not condemn for syncretism or
polytheism and do not stone or drag me
until you have read through. Just calm down as I convince (and not confuse)
you, that Ogwu-Ego not
only exists, but that that it works. Our people have always believed that there
are some supernatural powers and forces that influence the fate and fortunes of man(and woman too!).
However, this used to be seen as
occasional interferences in human affairs by
unseen and unknown forces, which
can be manipulated by umu-dibia( native doctors; Ndrs).
Unfortunately, of recent, the tendency toascribe everything to ogwu-ego
has become very pervasive. Everybody who is able to feed his family today is
perceived as a beneficiary of Ogwu-Ego (OE). Anybody who is doing
well is seen as an embodiment of OE, even those
whose compounds have housed ‘osisi na-ami ego’(the money-breeding
trees) for generations. There is a story circulating online in which the narrator
believed that a person with N50m balance in his account must have been a
beneficiary of OE simply because he did not dress impressively. In fact, one
day, along Ago Palace Way, a man in the passenger’s seat of a car moving side
by side with me in moderate hold up , saw
my redcap and told the driver: ‘nekwo
ha; ndi ogwu-ego’ (behold them, the money ritual people). I was seized
by a strange courage (I don’t have copyright over this) and I carefully
double-crossed them and asked the man to
come over to the police station
on the other side of the road and tell them how many heads I sacrificed
for my OE! The man started shivering (probably
wondering how to handle this onye ogwu-ego, live!) However, a
simple apology and visible penitential body language ended what would have been
an interesting drama.
Some people believe that
the recrudescence of the OE mindset was caused by Nollywood videos. Somebody
would visit an unkempt man, whose face is decorated with nzu (the
traditional white chalk), and body adorned with assorted dead or living
animals, who would make some mumbo-jumbo
of incantations, sprinkle some animal
blood over his face or ask him to drink it, request him to sacrifice the most
important person in his life and voila, he becomes stinkingly rich! Some will bow before a tree ‘dressed’ in a coat
of many colours (red, white and yellow,) and be ordered to produce 11
one-eyed snakes, 11 barren scorpions,
scrotum of 11 leopards, 11 strings of hair of a vulture, the bleeding tongues
of 11 crocodiles and 11 chameleons that changed not, just to
conjure OE. Some are directed to sleep with corpses of relatives( whom
they have to murder), produce body-parts, (for which booming markets abound),
smear themselves with sh*t, or even eat the rubbish, bath with blood in an public stream, walk
naked along busy highways in broad daylight or offer funny sacrifices at road junctions at midnight( when the spirits
operate), sleep at graveyards or browse the website of mentally deranged females!
An operational shrine,
living in Bondage, an eye for ritual
I hope you are old enough
to have repeatedly watched and savoured the epic Living in Bondage in
which Andy( Kenneth Okonkwo) sacrificed
his adorable wife (Merit) for instant wealth,
and lived miserably and in
regrets thereafter. If it were that easy, why wont the native doctors be
stupendously rich themselves? And seeing that people are sceptical about the
efficacy of the signs and wonders by these dirty and wretched
native doctors, who usually operate in
shrines inside the fear-inducing forests, a new genre of ICT-Compliant
native doctors, has emerged. Branded as celebrity
native doctors, they operate
with laptops, adorn designer wears, live in 5-Star hotels, ride the best cars
in town and circulate within the celebrity circle. One of them, ‘akwa okuko tiwalu aki(
the hen’s egg that cracks a palm cannel) was kidnapped the other day and he told us that he allowed himself to be
kidnapped so as not to endanger the lives of his clients. Some have combined voodoosm with pastoring
while some have merged yahooship
with rituals to manufacture yahoo+ and many of our young ones
have ‘joined them’.
Ibute-ike rams sacrificed at the
stream umentionable act
In ana-Igbo, the most popular craze
today is ibute-ike( to acquire ‘power’), a trend which Uche Nwora
x-rayed recently. Ibute-Ike? Of course, here and in other places,
money is POWER. The only difference is how the money is acquired, how the law
deals with frauds and the end to which it is deployed.. Things got so bad that
the House of Representatives in February
2022 discussed this matter extensively
and urged the Federal Government to declare a state of emergency on ritual
killings.
However,
I believe that this OE spirit circulating
all over the place is caused by the recklessness with which some of our
so-called celebrities spend money and then go ahead to broadcast it. Davido has just told us that Chioma’s ring
could buy 3 Rolls-Royce and that his watch cost $800000(who even asked
him?). Long before then, he had exhibited the 4TVs he bought for N68m
(just to view moving images?), his diamond teeth and his super-bike, announced that he had spent $46000 on Chioma
at a sitting and spoilt himself with $1m in a single shopping spree.
Regina Daniels, an expert in painting technology is either showing off the cars in their husbands garage or the $-Cake presented by her mother.( $-Cake? What madness is this?) or evidence that their husband ALERTed her with $100000;. Ann Idibia would post theN50m Valentine gift from her baby-daddy-husband; while Habeeb Okikiola, who says he is Portable, whose appearance causes convulsion among kids (luckily, I got one of his most beautiful pictures)boasts about his 20 cars, 10 houses, and a hotel( even when he was just arrested for indebtedness to a car-dealer’)!
Hilda Baci was harassing us with a refreshment bill of N1.2m, then came Eazi with a bill of N8m while Zubby Michael was intimidating us with his own bill of N8.5m but Yhemo Lee ended the discussion by displaying his bill of N41m on drinks alone. A 21 year old @boss_chinbackuppage is displaying her 5 cars, 4 businesses and a house; Whitemoney( but money is usually multi-coloured!) announcing that he had ordered a G-Wagon days after taking delivery of Maybach( I don’t even know what these strange cars look like); just as Lord Lamba Acquires New G-wagon weeks after buying a Lamborghini as Kcee buys 2 super full-sized SUVs for N500m. Wizkid buys N1.5bn neckless( I wan faint!); Cubana Chief-Priest is building a multibillion hotel for his 6 year old son; and Laide Bakry is annoyed that people did not notice her N1.8m human hair( how much the whole human being go cost sef?) just as Eniola Badmus showcases a N17m outfit as Blessing CEO spends N3m on his backside but Nengi finished her by announcing that she invested N17m on butt tattoo( how many people go see am?). and then, Offset ifts CardiB a $375k Audemars Piguet Watch as a one-off Valentine.
Shay Hajia4real Cecelia
Some of our
misoriented and gullible youths, who sleep and wake up in the social media
space, who want success without work (one
of Mahatma Ghandi’s social sins), now go
to EVERY EXTENT to make money so as to spray Dolars at events( EFCC has frightened the poorer ones who spray Naira)! They
asked those who made money through OE to show them the way, promising to do
whatever it takes. Unfortunately
for them, it doesn’t work that way, or
else, EVERYBODY would have been rich. One of my friends from Osumenyi had once asked
me mmadu nine buluchaa ogalanya, ole ndi je abo eghu? ( if everybody
is rich,, who would slaughter the goat bought by the big men?)
The yeye GMG the sturdy GMG
Sometimes in 2023, as I was preparing to travel to the land of
the rising sun, I bought a GMG ( Ghana Must Go) bag, stuffed it with this
and that but before I got to the park, the bag scattered and spilled
its contents, some not good for public display,
on the road. When I got to the park, they showed me a sturdy GMG,
costlier than the first but would last for ages and would survive
the most daunting torture-test (thrown down from an airborne
plane). I bought it and it serves me till date. The maker of that second GMG
has adopted the ogwu-ego strategy! He has given a come-back charm (value, peace
of mind and durability) to customers
like me, who would always come for it. I forgot to add that Nigerians
are the ones who must go now! So the bag should
undertake a change of name to NMG( Nigerians Must Go)
I have even applied Ogwu-Ego at Cooperative & Commerce Bank, 34 Rwang-Pam
Street Jos, as the operations manager (The
nomenclature then was ‘Branch-Accountant’) in 1987. Within a week of arrival, I found out that the
greatest challenge faced by our customers was the procurement of bank-drafts for their business trips to Onitsha.(online banking was
alien in those days). They would requisition for the draft first thing in the
morning( they would be there before the
bank opened by 8am) and then go into fervent prayers, to the extent of
fasting, casting and binding, just to ensure that the draft was
available at the close of business around 5pm. At times, they were
disappointed. I knew from experience that every customer requesting for a draft
had adequate credit balance, or would be at the counter depositing the money or had facilities that would cover the amount.
So, I designed my own OE. Before the clerks started processing the cheques, they would supply me with the details of the
drafts. I would then write, sign, code and emboss the draft, personally present
them to the manager for his signature( he trusted me 101%)and send them to the dispatch desk. Before then,
the cheques would have been processed and the customers would pick up their
drafts within 10-15 minutes. To them it
was plain magic and before long, all the Onitsha-bound traders in Jos decamped
to CCB. That was my own Ogwu-Ego.
There
is this young woman who sells ‘okpa’ & moimoi at Nkwo Igbo-Ukwu. She has
this infectious and natural smile (not the artificial, air-hostess smiles),
which she flashes generously at everybody. She is also friendly and courteous.
I patronise her because of her pleasant dispositions but I noticed that other people also patronise her.
The day I went to the market with my
running-mate, she sought her out and also bought from her. So, while other
sellers are busy driving away flies from their wares, people are queuing up
before her to make purchases. There is also a Sienna driver on the Lagos-Anambra
route named Ibu. While
others would wait for a week or 2 at the park for their turn, Ibu does 3 return-trips
weekly. He picks all the passengers from
their homes in the village and drops
most of them at their homes in Lagos. He is respectful, courteous,
friendly and neat, has the phone number of all his clients and freely delivers
messages for them at Lagos or at home.
He also drives smoothly. These two fellows have adopted OE, and they did not
visit any stinking native doctor and drank the blood of fowls and goats, or
sacrificed any rat, not to think of a human being.
I hope that
with these multidimensional points of
mine, I have been able to convince( NOT confuse), that Ogwu-ego exists and that it works. It
involves creating inimitable value for stakeholders, customer-centric culture,
regulatory compliance, commitment to the business, integrity and being
contented with what you have while working for improvement. That is the
Ogwu-Ego that I know. It exists, it is sustainable and it works. There are some
other low-grade
and unsustainable ogwu-ego
in town. This includes drug trafficking
(which is now certified as better than
human and organ trafficking,) oil theft,
subsidy and TAM rackets, state and regulatory capture, kidnap for ransom, consulting
for bandits, palliative management and
budget padding, fake drugs, spare-parts and consumables, baby factories,
following AGIP( any government in power)
and standing
on their mandates, even when there was no mandate yet or it is a rogue mandate. These are all variants of Ogwu-Ego but as I have
argued, they are not sustainable for the simple fact that the beneficiaries of
this later type do not have peace of mind and in any case, ALL IS Vanity!
By the way, I am the Chief Consultant and sole distributor of this new and improved Ogwu-Ego, the fruit that endures (John, 15:16). If and when you need it just get in touch. Do not worry about the financial implications, because my yoke is easy and my burden is light( Mt,10:11).
Meanwhile somebody whom I have converted to this new-improved Ogwu-ego is now offering this shrine in perfect working condition for sale. Location? Sambisa Forest! Contact me confidentially on 01419419419. Terms and Conditions apply!
Other Matters: Thumbs-up
for AA Falade
I rejoice with my friend of 46 years, Mr Adeoya Amos Falade, whose book, Introduction to Life Insurance, Pension and Annuity came second in the 2024 edition of African Insurance Organisation book awards. My your keyboard never get tired.
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