“Stories that touch the heart”

I saw a cartoon of someone standing by the roadside, begging for alms and an outstretched hand was pictured dropping a condom in the bowl the beggar was carrying. The sign around his neck said “please help me, I have 5 kids!” Funny (or not) as the cartoon was, my immediate response was “abi o!” because I mean he’s saying he has five kids as if they happened to him like an automobile accident or he inadvertently printed them from a life-size color Printer and his paper shredder was faulty! What was he thinking? That they would feed, clothe and generally provide for themselves? To be fair to him, it’s entirely possible that his wife had quintuplets but many of us undertake projects without counting the cost and start running from pillar to post thereafter to ease the burdens that our presumptuous actions create.

When I was preparing for my wedding, my mum advised me to be sure I was ready financially and recommended that I keep it simple to help me achieve this. She told me the story of this guy who was going to get married and was very keen in the preparations and all but didn’t have much money up until it was a few weeks to the wedding. Seeing his predicament, his folks tried to get him to shelve it for a while so he could put his house in order, literally and figuratively. Our man however was having none of it. His mum became curious and upon inquiry was shocked to find out that the young man had “allocated” all his needs to different family members. “Uncle A is buying my suit and the bride’s dress, Uncle B is paying for the Hall, Uncle C is paying for the feeding etc. . .” and on and on he went. By the time he was done, everything was paid for! Meanwhile, none of those on his list were even aware that they were footing the bills he was banking on them to foot. If your wedding held in Nigeria then you realize how foolish he was. At least half of the people who make promises to you will not fulfill them, how much more if you conscript them without their knowledge!

The idea of counting the cost before embarking on a project is most commonplace to say the least but that’s in theory; you’ll be shocked at how low the level of its application is. I would have talked about the Government as an example here but I’m sure it’s not good for my blood pressure – Ajaokuta, the NIPP project, countless probes of looting of gazillions of Naira and bungled investigations into murders of public figures too numerous to mention– like I said its bad for my health, so I won’t go there. But it’s a national malaise from which it appears no one is free – from the guy who marries a second wife in anticipation of a pay rise at work to a Ministry of National Planning whose only planning is how to use memos to continue appropriating public funds for doing nothing, to private businesses that use resources garnered from Public Offering to buy official cars and renovate buildings only to go bankrupt a few months later – nobody seems to know how to gauge resources/responsibilities and contemplate a formula that makes for assigning them sustainably. As they say in hausa “ido ba mudu ba amma ya san kima”. Selah.

Sometimes it happens that when we start we really cannot tell where or how we will stop and get overwhelmed along the way when we find we are faced with more than we can handle, but those are the exception rather than the rule; more often than not we can and should have a reasonable grasp of what we propose to undertake lest we end up telling stories that touch the heart.

*roughly, the eye is not a standard of measurement but it can gauge moderately