There are four principal groups of persons and the individuals contained in them who will not have access to my money because I will not patronize them no matter what type of advert, commercial, gimmick, showmanship that they employ to trick me out of my senses to part with my money. This is because I do not like what they do for a living and I detest them with all my soul and all my being.
The first group is: all brewers of alcoholic beverages. In fact, the first of their detestable gimmicks is to describe their brew as a ‘beverage’ which, I think, is intended to suggest that what they produce is an ordinary liquid food just like any other. I think that the word ‘alcoholic beverage’ is a great misnomer. It should, rightly, be called ‘alcoholic poison’ because some, if not all, of their products, poison and paralyze patrons over a long time and then dismiss them to the great beyond eventually in a pitiable manner. But sophisticated wool has expertly been used over the years to cover our eyes and minds to accept these friendly poisons as our best friends to go over our sorrows. How can any sane person use a sorrow to sorrow over his sorrow? Will he ever be sorrowed? No. he cannot.
When I was much younger, I was very nearly won over by a great TV advert sponsored by Star beer. I think it was a 1988-99 commercial and the lines went something like this: ‘’You are watching the TV and enjoying the show/ Millions of your friends are watching too, you know/ so make it party for your friends are here for the real good party, you know. Come on everybody wherever you are/ And enjoy the brighter life Star.
The lyrics or lines of this advert or commercial or whatever the experts call it does not do justice to its performance on TV of my time which gripped the minds of millions of Nigerians then. This show on TV is ranked among the greatest commercial I have encountered. It will make you yearn to be in a party where Star is the star attraction. But I did not fall and I will never fall to Star of any alcoholic poison.
The second group of people who will not be able to persuade me to part with my hard-earned money are pools better. Long ago before I became a man, it was prophesied to me that I will become a fabulously rich man by working with my hands and mind. And ever since, I have seen enough evidence of this prophesy. God blesses the works of my hands. One of them is this writing that I do. It has earned me and continues to end me income and may continue to do so until I die. I will never bet, cast lot or roll any machine or device in order to win a lot of money. For me, the saying that ‘’the best way to achieve a family reunion is to win a lottery’’ does not apply.
Between 1990 and 1993 when I was Editor of the CRSG –owned Sunday Chronicle in Calabar, I was confronted by a journalistic challenge that only God helped me to cope with. Because of my aversion for pools betting and such allied occupations, I did not know how pools predictions are made by ‘experts’. And my paper must carry two pages of pools forecasting. Every Saturday, these ‘experts’ with dubious sounding names, will meet somewhere near my office and engage in their debates in order to produce the stuff that will be published in my paper the next day. Throughout my tenure, I had to sign a paper whose two pages I never could read and understand. Yet this, I was told, was one of the selling points of my paper and that I could not go to bed without these essential pages!
The third, and perhaps, the most detestable, group of them all is prostitutes. It is not just prostitutes but comfort ladies of all descriptions such as concubines, sugar mummies, run girls, side or central chicks, widows, sweet sixteens, students or all school girls of whatever description. It is, therefore, safe and inclusive enough for me to use the word the Bible uses in describing all such women and girls: ‘’strange women’’. I have resolved that I will restrict myself to one woman who God showed me on Saturday, April 21, 1981 as my wife. Ever since a prostitute accosted me in Kano in 1994 in a hotel where I was lodging and asked me, Oga, you, you no de fuck?’’. And when I became tongue-tied and could not give her an answer, she added a bargain: ‘’if you wan fuck, I will give you at a better price’’. I was still too benumbed to ask her what the going, normal price for all male fuckers were and what her ‘better price’ was going to be for me ‘her special, shy or poor customer’.
The next group that will not smell my money is confidence tricksters, or con artists, or the people we call in Nigeria ‘’419 people’’. My reason for detesting this kind of people is allied to my earlier reason that I was told I will make it in life through hard work of the work of my hands so money doublers, or anyone that tells me he will double my money through the use of mercury or any other devices will not succeed with me.
I almost instinctively turn away from anything that promises to double my money without sweat. I was never a victim of perhaps the greatest of these con artists all called MMM or similar ones that have come after MMM disguised as something more noble and honest. If the matter is so easy and their sponsors are honest to us poor people who want to become wealthy, why do the doublers not double their own small money even if it is only one dollar and continue to double it and double it and re-double it until it becomes huge and they will not need to bother themselves to talk long talk to other people?
I have been swindled a few times, involving not huge sums of money and not because I want to be rich without working. My swindles came, mercifully for me, through my belief in God and the people of God. My first experience came in the year 2003 through a certain man I met in church who claimed he was a genuine prophet from Nasarawa state. Our relationship developed to a level that he was even sleeping in my house then in Wuse Zone 4. He told me one day that he had a challenge and needed N7, 000 to be able to solve it. That, I should loan him the money and he will return it exactly a week later. I made the money available to him. My monthly salary at that time was N13, 000. And that was the last time I saw or heard of Prophet Ezekiel! He just disappeared into thin air.
Others were undertaken by people who know me very closely and my relationship with certain men and women of God. They used that knowledge to obtain faours illegitimately from me. After I became wiser, I double-check things before parting with my money and no one has been able to swindle me again or is ever likely to succeed in making a fool of me again forever.
