On Saturday, April 20, in my village Gakem, where I have been since February, I attended a wedding ceremony of one of my lovely cousins, Lawrence Adie Achine, whom we lovingly call Adie Imaji after his mother’s name. At the reception, my phone was stolen. This is the first time since 2005 when I prayed fervently to God that I will not lose a phone again that this has happened to me.
When the GSM came and established itself as a part of social and business life in Nigeria, I lost series of phones between 2001 and 2005 when a phone I bought in Abuja a week before I traveled to see my family then in Calabar got lost. I am not a careless or carefree person. So my awful experience or carelessness with telephone surprised me and some of those who know me well. Well, I could not be blamed too much. This invention had just come to our shores and it came along with many adept thieves who did not appear to know the pains they were inflicting on those whose phones they were stealing.
When this particular theft took place in 2005, I just told myself that I have had enough of these loses. I was particularly devastated by this loss and resolved there and then to pray that I will never again loss a phone. And God heard my heartfelt cry and supplication. The fact that this has happened nearly 20 years after the last one is a testimony to my carefulness and my adaptation to contend with the ugly trend in our country.
When this latest, and I must assure myself, last loss, happened, I did not believe it. But in my shock and unbelief I asked no one in particular the question ’’do they still steal phones in Nigeria? Because it had not happened to me personally for such a long time I thought the malady was no longer in existence in our country. How mistaken have I been proven.
I must confess that losing a phone can be so devastating. It is not the cost of replacement that is so worrisome but now that the cost of the lost phone is said to be over a hundred Thousand and Fifty Thousand Naira, that too is now a challenge. But what is even more distressing is the discomfort that comes from being almost effectively cut off from much of society for the length of the loss.
When you add to my nightmare the fact that I have also suffered the damage of the ATM of my active and main account, you will agree that when sorrows come, they do so in battalions! Because I have been away from Abuja for good four months now some of my subsidiary accounts have atrophied. I need to be in Abuja or some other big towns where ‘’network’’ is not a challenge in other to revalidate my accounts and the ATMs that are a part of them.
But who knows with God? Who can tell why he has allowed this small misfortune to happen to me? Could he be shielding me from an even greater calamity if the phone is with me? Or is he setting me up for a bigger and better phone? Or is there an important lesson that God wants me to learn from this loss?
You see, phones and some of these modern gadgets make you feel that you are so important. That, without your inputs some things cannot happen. But so many important things have happened in the two or so weeks that I have been effectively disconnected without my say so. If your modest enough to acknowledge that you do not matter so much, the gadgets themselves appear to say they are so important to us. That, without them you cannot function effectively. But who told them so? When they never came did you not exist maximally?
Whatever illusions I have of myself, this loss has, once again, cured me of my vanity. Mr. Idang Alibi, you are not nearly as important as you thought you were. Once in a while, we need to be brought back to the earth from the balloon high altitude we were soaring in. Some of these gadgets may be hindrances and not helpers. They take us away from our God and from members of society we really need.
What, in reality, have I lost for the exactly two weeks old today that I was in forced isolation? Is there anyone of you my friends and associates that called me for an appointment and I was not found? I think that as an engaged citizen the thing I really missed was I was cut off from the major conversations of my country. I did not hear of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu or Vice-President Kassim Shettima . I did not hear of the usual grumbling about price hikes. I did not hear of American or Israeli bombings. What exactly did I lose? We are not as important as we suppose ourselves to be.
During the course of this disappointing phone loss, my dog, Remember God, gave birth to six puppies in a neighbour’s uncompleted house a few metress away from my home. One of them, the male, died because she could not properly leak the plague that covers the puppy’s eyes and I did not know nor have I the expertise to go and remove this covering as I was told later I should have done. My neighbor, a lady, confessed that she had to pack her hen and her chics from harm’s way because a mother dog nursing her newly born puppies can be so hungry and would find it hard to resist the temptation of devouring her hen and her progenitors!
My being without a phone for two weeks speaks of man’s adaptability. You can always become used to what you have been deprived of and your life can go on without your thinking that an end had come.
