I was born in the latter part of the '70s. Many Nigerians of my generation would readily tell you that those were some really good years. Things were a lot easier back then and even as kids, that fact wasn't lost on us.We still had coins as legal tender, in fact most things on the table of the common man at that time were sold in kobos. I remember that all I needed to stuff my tummy during recess at school was just 15kobo. And that was during the 'wet days' of the month- a period usually situated close to payday or days immediately following one- for my father. Usually, I got 10kobo for 'pocketmoni'.
My recollection of that time was that we didn't aways have everything we wanted as a family but my father's salary somehow took care of things- things that people do for several hundreds of thousands in today's Nigeria. Life was a lot easier back then.
I was chatting with one of my cousins who is of the 'Whiz Kalifa/ Justin Bieber' generation a couple a days ago and boy, did I feel like an old man! I can't remember how we arrived at talking naira and kobo and it was like someone hit me with a cudgel on the head when he asked me "uncle, this kobo that they talk about, is it the full-spelling of naira?" Meaning, is 'naira' a short rendition of nairakobo? The poor boy probably thought kobo was some kind of suffix that people normally leave out in order to make naira sound 'cool'! Na dat time I com know say we don enter am for dis country!
If this poor boy had been born some scant 15years before his time, I'm sure he would't have asked such a question but here he was- blameless and clueless! The leaders that led his country before and since he was born did not feel the need to better the economy enough for the kobo to have at least some kind of relevance as a legal tender, long enough for him to actually hold some in his hands! "Hey",someone must have said, "who needs a bunch of heavy metals when you can pack your pocket with some cool banknotes? To hell with the kobo, jare!" And fiam! The kobo was gone, never to be seen, spent or given to a young kid as 'ice-cream money' ever again.
In 1981, I was there when my father bought a tear-rubber Peugeot504 for 5,000naira and his friends came around the house to wash the buy. Alas, he only needed 25naira to do the 'washing'! All I guess a would-be car dealer would require to start business as a seller of new cars at that time, would be 50,000naira-or a little more. Today, I would need 20,000naira more to change the tyres on my tokunboh car! That same car that sold for 5,000naira thirty-one years ago now sells for between three and four million naira.
Hey, I agree that things are changing the world over and even the most established economies of the world experience their share of inflation, fluctuation and what have you. But what justification is there to explain away the reason why a bottle of Coca-Cola went from 20kobo in 1981 to 70naira today?
Today, I look around and I see the fate of the kobo mirrored in the defunct Nigerian Airways, Oodua Textile Mills Ado-Ekiti, Nigeria Railway Corporation, Bata, Kingsway Stores,Dunlop,Michellin, just to mention a few. Unfortunately, these were institutions whose stories inevitably romped with our stories as kids- what we bought, where we went, what we saw, where our parents were e.t.c. They gave us things to say, stories to tell. It was fun...until something gave.
They say don't criticize if you don't have the recipe that puts back the pieces of the crumbled pie but I'm afraid I can't help it. I don't have the training to take the economists on an informed debate of how Nigeria went from a boisterous economy thirty years ago to a decrepit import-everything-under-the-sun 'warehouse' contraption today but I think even illiterate me can tell when a whole country has slipped and impaled itself irrevocably. I think the real tragedy would be if my kids that'll be born in 201* or something don't get to buy ice-cream and get their change back in coins- kobo; never carry them in their pockets or having to 'Google' the kobo to know what it looks like! Boy, I pity my pikin dem, no be small!
No comments:
Post a Comment