"Please don't come to my house, I don't have food"
I thought my aunt was joking when she said this on Thursday morning but she wasn't. I had been experiencing power instability at my house so I reached out to her and asked if I could come spend some days at her place.
Source
"But I'm going to be there for just a couple of days, please?"
I could sense her hesitancy over the phone but since she couldn't successfully refuse me anything, she let me come.
My aunty was a generous woman, just like my mom. They had probably received certain orientation growing up that no one must get to their houses and be in want, especially food so I was expecting to meet a hot meal waiting for me but when I got there, nothing was going on. No meal preparation, no already prepared food, nothing.
I exercised patience for some time, hoping that my arrival would make her consider preparing a meal but she only offered me cold water and went over to see a movie. It wasn't until 6 p.m. that she called me over to the kitchen to assist her with dinner.
I had to stop myself from asking her why she was using beef instead of her beloved goat meat to prepare soup and why she was going to serve processed cassava otherwise known as 'garri' instead of the wheat meal she preferred as starch to go along with the native soup.
"Please help me put some water on the electric cooker"
And since when did my aunt use an electric cooker? She had told me once that it was both stressful and dangerous to manage certain electrical appliances which was why she wasn't going to get an electric stove. When she began to re-portion the already portioned meat into what seemed like seasoning cubes, I couldn't hold it in any longer.
"Aunty, do you want to kill the meat? Why are you dividing it into smaller pieces?"
She laughed heartily and then asked me when last I went to the market.
"A couple of days back, last weekend to be precise"
She laughed again.
"Go back to the market and get what you went for last weekend. It must have doubled in price."
I was already aware of that fact. The rate at which prices of items were skyrocketing on a daily basis was alarming and according to an agitated caller on one of the radio stations I was listening to in a vehicle I entered, "Things will not get better because the government knows that the masses have high adaptation to situations. They will simply wait for our complaints to reduce to murmurings and eventually, everything will fizzle out into becoming the new normal".
I sighed and headed over to drop the food in the dining. It didn't make much sense to me that the income rate stayed the same while prices of goods and commodities increased without caution.
Later that evening when the power supply was seized, my aunt pleaded with her husband to turn the generator on because the heat was making her twin babies restless but he was reluctant.
"Fuel goes for N660 per liter now. If we use two litres this night, that would be N1,300. We'll need it more for the car so we don't get stranded"
I felt really sorry for her and offered to assist in manually generating ventilation using hand fans. They eventually fell asleep after almost an hour.
My aunt and I returned to the sitting room when we had successfully lulled the children to sleep, I thought I would be able to get some work done then but she began another engaging discussion about her small provision store.
"You know my friend Tina?" She asked referring to the small, light-skinned woman who said "Lice" when she meant "Rice". I nodded in affirmation. "She wants to buy some goods in bulk now that the prices are still reasonable and keep them. When prices of those goods become unbearable, she would start selling and make a lot of profit. I think that's a really good idea and I was looking for who to discuss it with before telling my husband. What do you think?"
"That's a good idea" I was nodding my head in deep reflection "But what if the prices of things eventually go down? Won't you be at a loss?"
She shrugged.
"It's better to try than to do nothing at all and keep allowing these people to exploit us"
I wasn't sure who and who comprised of "These people" in her statement but my conversation with her had exposed me to what businesses and families were going through. People were barely surviving.
"Do you know I took M10,000 to the market the other day and I could barely buy foodstuffs for my family? Sometimes my husband gets upset when I ask him for outrageous amounts of money and return with almost nothing from the market…."
She must have been holding all of this in for a long time for her to be that chatty. I couldn't help the laughter that escaped my lips even when I knew it wasn't funny.
"....Last month we decided to start living on a budget. We even portion milk these days! Imagine my kids taking one sachet of milk per cup of tea…"
"And those sachets are almost empty" I cut in.
"Exactly!" We burst into another bout of laughter. "We will survive eventually, we will find a way" She shrugged her shoulders with an air of finality.
The agitated caller from earlier was not wrong after all. Things may not get better because the masses will definitely find a means to survive
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