In the throes of frustration and disappointment, all a woman remembers are the negatives in the relationship.
All she can remember is the pain and all the ‘downs’.
How did I get here?
How could I have been so dumb to marry this kind of man?
Did he use juju on me or what?
Look at my friends, look at me, I’m the only one living like this, permanently in this dog house.
Every woman feels like this once in a while. Those are the days she wishes she were somebody else’s wife. On those days, she simply suppresses or can’t even feel all that lovey-dovey mushy I’ll love you forever things. In fact, it is taking all her willpower not to walk out on this handsome devil she married with her eyes wide open.
Fortunately, it is a feeling that soon passes though it is likely to come back sooner than later again. But we are a forgiving lot which is why there will be more women in paradise than men. Oh yes, you’ll see when we get there.
Seriously, men are not like women. We forgive and move on. Even the sins that should attract the death penalty, we forgive our men and still serve them dinner without cyanide or rat poison. We are that kind and that is why God loves us so much. When men impregnate the house help, sleep with their wives’ friends, marry their secretaries as second wives, use their rich wives’ hard earned money to take their undergraduate girlfriends abroad for holidays, we still forgive them. All the time or almost all the time. Unlike men. Just imagine a husband forgiving his wife for any of the above sins. Oh oh, did I hear the men say tufia kwa?
But really, unforgivable sins and unforgiving men will have to wait for another day. I am just comparing the way we all feel now as Nigerians with that of a wife wishing she had married somebody else. The pain and frustration of today’s present Nigeria is suffocatingly suffocating. Ignore the pun if you want. All I know is many Nigerians right now wish they were somewhere else. And in our pain, all we can remember are the bad times. But it hasn’t always been bad, it is even not totally bad and it won’t be always this bad. But it is okay to feel like a frustrated wife. It is only human. However, we need to encourage one another. We cannot take residence at this sorry pass because even this shall pass. They don’t call us Nigerians for nothing. This present storm we will weather and the sun will rise again.
There is so much to cheer about even if all we want to do now is suffocate somebody with a pillow. Yeah, we do not have any great emergency response transit camps but there is no Hurricane Matthew heading our way. We are lucky in more ways than one. We just need to look back, appreciate how far we have come to celebrate where we are. Peering into the future all the time sometimes robs us of the pleasure of today.
Remember how much we bought our first sim cards for GSM phones when mobile phones finally berthed in Nigeria about 16 years ago. I think I bought mine for N30,000. I remember my first flip Samsung phone, cute cream pocket-sized thing. It was selling for about N70,000 then in 2001! Yet we all rushed to buy sim cards. We saved up for it. Calls were billed at N50 per minute. And we made them. I guess we were all too excited about the new deal that liberated us from NITEL and its myriad of issues. You had to travel to go and queue at NITEL to make international calls that were not even clear. The only phone in our compound then belonged to Mr Aba, a NITEL official. All calls went to his phone. He or any member of his family would pick the call and then someone would run to our flat to inform us that we had a call. Of course you dropped everything you were doing to go and wait for ‘your caller’ to call back. Sometimes, the caller may not be able to reconnect. Even when the Abas wanted to sleep, they couldn’t because we were there waiting for our caller to call back.
So, of course, when we finally could afford to install our expensive sim inside Nokia 3310, it was like we had finally arrived. At 50 per minute, all we were doing was make calls and send text messages. There was no Facebook or Twitter, Instagram or Whatsapp. But we felt good. The GSM phone became a status symbol. The calls were shorter than they are now because then GSM talk was not cheap.
And then Globacom arrived on the scene with the per-second billing we were told was not possible because of the huge investment involved in getting a license. Whaat? Everybody exclaimed. With one dizzying blow the Guru, Mike Adenuga, changed the Nigerian GSM landscape. Talk became really cheap. The other operators had no choice but to conform to the Glo regime.
From then till now, sim cards have dropped to N100 naira and in many instances they are free. Per second billing has continued to drop with all the operators trying to outdo one another with one promo or the other.
But the Guru was just starting. He went on to lay cables under the sea from coast to coast. I’m not going to even pretend to understand how that was done or how it works. All we know is it made talking better and cheaper still.
And now, Globacom’s gone an outdone itself with the country’s first world-class nationwide mobile 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) network after a successful multi-dimensional test-run of this advanced network
According to Kamaldeen Shonibare, Head, Corporate Sales, Globacom, ‘the best we can do for our people who believe in us and made us their number one data network is to give them the best technology. What we are offering is the new speed of life,”
That is something to celebrate in a season like this. Technical recession or not, paucity of foreign investors or not, this is one Nigerian company still doing us proud.
“Our subscribers today already enjoy downloading music, video and movie contents and streaming contents on their phones and other devices. But the new Glo 4G LTE network offers subscribers a significantly improved experience. The video and voice quality in video calls on different applications like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Viber etc is a lot clearer while the picture quality is crisper, and the transmission is faster,” Shonibare further explained.
And if it true that this network already has 150 million subscribers, then this new technology will soon go beyond the few cities where it was launched.
I know you were looking forward to reading something about Fayose, Tinubu, President Buhari’s book and the controversies surrounding it. Yes, I also feel like biting somebody’s head off about our tattered naira. Did kidnappers not just swoop on a school in Lagos? There is so much to moan and groan about but not today. Once in a while, we will encourage ourselves with what is good while we wait for what is better.
Credit: Funke Egbemode