Whenever I see any bank and the ill-assorted characters called bankers in their foppish coats I suffer an extravagance of laughter.
The Poet does not like bankers, and bankers do not like Poor Poet – you may call that “a one-one goalless draw”, in the lingo of the late sports commentator Walter Oyatogun, NTA News.
My tango with banking and bankers is not a laughing matter, especially in this “subsidy-is-gone” age when the Naira is so worthless that putting the currency in a bank is a bloody waste of everybody’s time.
Who even wants to put in a bank Nigeria’s Naira that has been globally declared as the worst performing currency in the whole wide world?
The more damaging aspect of the problem is that putting any money in the bank attracts interminable taxation from the ever-taxing Nigerian government.
Let’s just agree from the start that Nigerian banks and bankers are government approved tax masters of nonrenewable hope.
In my book, a banker with all the fine suits and ties and cuff-links is a glorified “maiguard” of other people’s money.
I believe in this simple philosophy: “Money will be sent sooner or later – why not now?”
It sure does not make sense for anyone to give money to the maiguard banker to keep before it gets borrowed for keeps by the Nigerian government that borrows more than Unoka in Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.
Trust the banker to raise his nose at my unpatriotic assertion that ranks my infinitesimal quid with the gargantuan borrowings of the regime not only from the IMF and World Bank but also from France, China and outer Mongolia.
Who cares – the point remains that the bank is at the mercy of money which happens to be “the root of all evils”, as has been written in the book.
I can afford to laugh at the banking industry because I have no use for the banks, whatever high-falutin names forge with English words such as zenith, access, fidelity, guaranty etc.
I belong to the Barkin Zuwo School of “government money in government house”.
Who will ever forget in a hurry the late Governor of Kano State, the unforgettable Alhaji Barkin Zuwo, who could not understand all the fuss when so much money was discovered in his house after the 1983 coup that brought General Muhammadu Buhari to power in his first missionary journey that conduced to double-decker disastrous missionary journeys?
Barkin Zuwo had rhetorically asked to know what was wrong in finding Kano government money in Kano Government House or Lodge.
Like Barkin Zuwo I keep my own money in my own house, and nothing is absolutely wrong with finding Maxim’s money in Maxim’s house.
This way, I can escape from the plentiful electronic charges of the banks and the “it’s-our-turn” taxation and more of the tax-mad government.
Even so, the bankers would not let me be, because they have been given targets to meet in their unbearable quest for dough.
Some of the young lady bankers imagine I have a cache of funds somewhere, and everywhere I go I am told that I must perforce come to open this tax-wrought savings account or that over-taxed current account in one Sopona Bank or that Okelekwu Micro-Finance House.
All the rage these days is letting loose nubile girls to nab potential depositors in the dire war to meet multi-billion cash targets set by banks.
Not a few commentators have put out the sob song that this reality only serves to further the cause of the oldest profession – prostitution.
Me, I am neither here nor there in the matter – being that the only thing I can fall for is temptation, like the Irish wag Oscar Wilde.
The bankers have had to perforce source for funds from all sorts of strange places such as the magic churches and juju covens.
In short, the end-time churches have somehow become the extension of the banking halls with micro-mini-clad young ladies hugging the limelight.
A sharp pastor friend of mine in one of the Jehovah-Sharp-Sharp churches has just told me that the prayer point is always “to meet the Target”.
Target is the word – Alleluia!
When the ladies are screaming “Target” in the 450 or so languages and dialects of Nigeria there could hardly ever be a better explanation of “speaking in tongues”!
There was even the celebrated case of a particular church service where the shouting of “Target” reached the ears of a hawker in Ajangbadi who had stored “Target cigarette” since he came to Lagos from across the Niger after the Biafra war.
Believing that his prayers for striking it rich had at last been answered – and ready to make the kill of a lifetime – he rushed into the church, shouting: “Here is Target!”
All the ladies descended on him, believing that their own prayers of meeting the inescapable “Target” had been answered.
They could not have enough of the man, each struggling to have the man until they discovered, much to their chagrin, that the man had only come to sell the expired Biafran cigarette named Target!
The Target man has since been certified as a demon in eternal need of deliverance, and the church pastor has decreed the flogging and burning of the demon of Target out of the man!
Oh Jesu, deliver us from Target!
A hot tear for banks and bankers!
Alleluia!