The idea of housekeeping came up in a chat with a friend a week and some days ago. Having just concluded a phase in our lives and subsequently parted, we had no other means of interacting but via chats. But this phase that brought us together was a remarkable one, if for no other reason, the fact that it lasted a year than it was expected to last on paper. Yes, it took us five years to complete our four-year degree course.  This friend of mine left school before me because I was not as fast as she was with the completion of my long essay. Caring babe, she thought it good to check on me and my work. On telling her that I was already home and on the verge of spending my second week at home, she said that thing that has got me thinking since we ended our chat. 'Welcome to the club of housekeepers,' she said, and added a LOL.

So there is such thing as the Club of Housekeepers? It was a joke, or it sounded like one. But it is true. Whatever she meant by 'housekeeping' or by extension, 'housekeeper', I established my own meaning for the term. For me, being called a housekeeper does not necessarily have some denigration attached to it. You may disagree, but I think this is where the idea of things being relative to different people comes in. So, what does housekeeping mean to me?

I will start with what it is not. Housekeeping is not waking at 10am and going straight to the dining table for breakfast. It is not sitting all day with African Magic and its ilk while you punch LOLs and OMGs over Instant Messaging applications. It is not having the whole night to dream and fantasize about your crush. It may not be attending all church services there are. And it would definitely be stepping on toes and learning to tender warm apologies…

Housekeeping is having the burdens of a whole household – Oga (your dad), Madam (your mum) and their pikins (your siblings), as it is in my case - on your neck. God help you if yours is a lanky one. Hence, housekeeping is waking before the first cock crows to have your devotion. It is not dozing while the devotion lasts because another round of sleep might spell doom.  Another round of sleep kwa? OYO is your case if you do that. Housekeeping is taking extra time on the toilet seat just to make sure you read blogs and know what the latest from Sambisa is. It is cooking up your next blog post, in your mind, while washing Oga’s car. It is enjoying Norah Jones, John Legend or Gladys Knight while making toast for breakfast. It is reading Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Charles Bukowski’s Women, and typing your blog post. You would rather do these than have a nap at that time when everybody is out. 

Housekeeping is resolving to delay your nap till later at night. It is also taking selfies and attending to your Facebook, Twitter and Blogger accounts while munching on your toast. It could be flouting table manners. Housekeeping is preparing for better days, and with a good job. It is making the right connections. Housekeeping is cooking lunch and swaying your cute bum to Dorobucci. It is cooking dinner, your ears and mind plunged into your pool of downloaded podcasts. Housekeeping is joining Oga and his family in watching evening soaps, for just one hour o. Housekeeping is preparing for another day. It is going to sleep early, and happy that you have maximised a day. It is calling your girlfriend and asking how her day went. It is muttering that ‘I love you’, just as it is hearing her do her favourite ‘kiss kiss kiss’ before closing your eyes.

Housekeeping is multitasking; it is getting the most out of the moment while you clear the path that leads to your comfort zone. As at present, housekeeping is what I do. My comfort zone - getting a better engagement - isn’t far away. I know. Yes, I’ll just maintain my reputation as a good housekeeper, till I can gladly sing Suurulere.

I don’t know what all the fuss about getting married is these days. Like it is easy to be married. All these yeye boys, they have nothing else in their heads but to imagine walking along some aisle with their beloved, extravagantly gowned and smiling like a boxer short that is torn somewhere around the crotch, with a/an something something karat diamond ring glittering on her finger. To do all that is easy, they should ask Japheth Omojuwa. He is not even married yet, but he knows how easy it is to propose with an 18 karat diamond ring.  It is as easy as giving a head on the night of your wedding. But, to be a father, ehn, is not a joke. If you have decided, like I did decades ago that you’ll be a father, or you are one already, then you will be doing yourself great disservice by not reading this.

First, you don’t need a job to be a good father. Your being a father does not begin until the day your wife breaks the news that she is pregnant. That is the day you take on a new career, fatherhood. Hence, you are meant to resign from whatever job you are doing. Fatherhood is an occupation, a good one. Your years of experience in it begins from the day your wife announces that she is heavy with her first child. You shouldn’t worry about financing the home. I heard there is a Bank of Industry in Nigeria. You could apply for a loan from the bank. Make sure you give the bank’s officials an apt review of what your business, fatherhood, is all about. Thunder fire anybody that does not value such business. I have told a couple of men this, but all I get is a nauseating ‘Ehen?’ They come back later, after regrets o, to attest to how valuable my little kobo of advice was to them. You will come back to share your testimony too. By the time you’re done fathering all your twelve kids (by ‘fathering’, I mean training them up to university level as well as marriageable ages), you should be getting close to being a septuagenarian. Then, you can start applying for jobs in different big firms: Shell, Total, Glo... Your years of experience in fathering will fill in the gaps of the Masters and Ph.Ds. other applicants may come with. In fact, that you raised a dozen kids could be equivalent to being the MD of twelve different branches. Just make sure you document your achievements in fathering well. What else do you want as a father? 

 Your loan? Don’t worry about it. Your daughters’ bride prices will cater for it. You should also be smart enough to decide at the appropriate time, what percentage your sons will contribute from their salaries to the family pocket every month. Who says having a family is not a business?

In the business of fathering, I have come to realise that there are principles that work in the raising of some children that don’t work for other kids. The moment you raise a child that does not respond to the style of child nurturing that you have adopted, I have a mechanism that would work. All the mechanism needs is you, your wife and a bed. A bed is even a luxury, you can do it – you know what two adults do with a bed - without one. And no condoms will be needed. I call the mechanism GBB: Going back to the Bed. It’s an adaptation of the ‘going back to the drawing board’ expression business men use after a plan falls flat. This is the gist: you keep giving birth to kids and adopting new nurturing techniques for each of them until you get it right. The moment you get it right, you can begin to adopt the technique to raise other kids. However, try as much as possible not to exceed twelve kids. Anything above a dozen will make people say that you have turned your wife into a baby-making machine.

Since you are not going to be the kind of father who will wake up in the morning with the mind of rushing to office with some Jehovah’s Witness’ bag and poise, there are things you dedicate your mornings to. The most important of them all is teaching your children the word of God. Your children ought to be vast in scriptures or else, the future of your profession isn’t good. Some children are born to be impervious to instructions. Hence, you must beat the scriptures into their heads from childhood. The best instrument for that is a rod. The scripture asks us to employ this instrument regularly. You should also note that it is Western madness - yes, I call it madness – not to beat your children for their wrong deeds. The other day, a friend of mine told me he would like to be the kind of father Luther Vandross sang about in his ‘Dance with my Father’. Rubbish! Mumu! *I hope he isn't reading* What African dad father does that? I can’t imagine myself swinging my hips to some club banger all in the name of being a father. God forbid! A black father is like Okonkwo, Achebe’s Okonkwo. He should be ready to yank skirt or short – whichever - off any ass for serious spanking. Your children should be in perpetual fear of your fatherly anger.

I’ll also advise that you don’t give your children sex education. Don’t even mention sex! I’ve heard so many parents say sex education starts from making one’s children call private parts their real names. Don’t do it. Our fathers didn’t. Stick to calling them thing or kokoro. You know how much sex sells these days. So, be wary of selling sex to them. No romance novels. No magazines. No TV for them too, except it is to watch Super Story and Pastor Chris. Only Pastor Chris o, because he will help them develop good English fone (pronounced /fone/) and enough holy swag.


I can’t teach you all you need to know about fatherhood, but I am sure these should be enough in helping you start out as a father. Good luck.

When we were boys, boys living in hostels, we woke to chimes for devotion. Nobody wanted to arouse the sentimental anger of the seniors, so we all obeyed except for the few ones who were down with recalcitrance. Those who were denied the boarding experience, either by ‘condition’ or parents’ reservations also had their fair share of boyish experiences. For instance, we all experienced the thrill of early morning erections, just as boys still do. Boarding school boys found it more commonplace since they had many hard-ons to see. And compare. It seemed like heaven! When we became men, we knew it cost days and nights of good labour to satisfy erections. A lazy man ought not to have one, and when he does, he should spank some sense into his thing. As men, we know if you must bed, not like a rapist, you must work. The men we are today laugh at boys who gift trivial commodities to fellow boys, and girls, to be voted into political offices. They look for shortcuts. All boys want is to eat, dream, and follow the nudges of their small blokos. Men work.

When we were boys, we sang in the choir and attended all prayer and Bible Study meetings. In fact, we prayed that God would wipe mucus from noses; that he would make us pass, even when we had not done our arithmetic well. We mastered scriptures and devoted little time to study. God must have been a fool to answer such prayers. Yes, I did say that. That was what we took God for. A fool. On becoming men, we knew we are the architects of our destinies.

As boys, we all thought Nigeria was wack. We knew it, we were right. We were wrong too. We felt we were all born to be her president, each boy o. We were silly, like boys of course. Thank fate, we grew into men and not the presidents we desired. We turned out better. We’ve had presidents. Yes, president upon president, we’ve had, and our national shit has clung to our bums. Un-shat, and with flies hymning around. We’ve had boy-presidents.

I know a president. He used to be a boy like we were. But poorer. The church rat’s wealth would have dwarfed all he had and ever thought he could. Of course, he had no shoes. No liver. No head. No mind, prick…nothing. He lacked so many things. But he became a Dr so and so. He became a president too, no thanks to fate and umbrellas that manipulate polls. Now, he has tonnes of shoes. With them, he shoos us, men, and our sons, and daughters away like houseflies. He had no fez as a boy. Now, he is a rich boy, with hats he flaps over his ears like a hijab. He is deaf. So deaf to cries and pleas! I don’t blame him. He’s just a boy.

They are just boys too, the Boko people. They should be men, but they still play like boys, and with toys of mass destruction. A pack of boys, unlike us, they would not taunt girls. They would rather seize them, girls in their teens. Their erections are directed at these babies. It is babies that fuck mothers in the making. Men wait to prove their manliness, in yam tubers and wads of hard-earned dough. These boys would rather steal into spaces where men work and worship. They would blow them up thereafter. Once in a while, they blew one of their own alongside. What more can one expect? They are boys, clueless and veiled by fanaticism. Clueless as they may be, they are nothing like the boy-president. His ineptitude and his Patience are both too nauseating. ‘Keep doing it!’ Some sycophants egg him on. Boys teasing boys! Keep doing what? What does he do? What does he do but watch like dodo? Keep doing it! Keep watching while people get roasted in the millions, daily. Keep watching while boys your age abduct and exploit your own. Keep watching while he is emasculated, he and his nation together… ‘Keep doing it’ is what men like me should not say. When we do, like I will, we prophesy doom, but in the language boy-presidents like him would understand.

When we were boys, we recited Humpty Dumpty. We never saw beyond the rhyme:

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall;
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again.


Now that we are men, we see there is more to Humpty than its rhyme. We see Humpty in our boy-president. Above all, we see an impending fall, one beyond repair. 

Very early one morning, not too long ago, I was roused by the thought of how some time ago, a year or so, some bloggers took to the internet to talk about the next big things in their lives and careers.  I didn’t know why such memory would stomp into my mind, and at such time. I was actually dreaming of an eternity in the bosom of a crush. We were about kissing when this thought landed in my head. I hissed and jumped out of bed. Such are the travails of a writer! I’m glad the thought came actually. I had been sleeping (and dreaming) too much. A walk to the loo and back was all that followed and got me sane enough to think as well as come up with this.

The idea of the next big thing, I observe, presupposes that there have been things before. Big things! Life is a complex phenomenon to me and by the way, I doubt if it is really simple to other people. Despite its many complexities, I like it and would like to continue being part of its intricate drama. Hence, I hate death…! To some people, this is unbelief and unchristian. I can imagine someone making a ‘Make dis guy park well’ face. Warefa! I have parked and I did it so well it won’t prevent me from making my point. Thank you.

A year ago, after regaining her health, a friend came visiting.  Happy as we both were, I was expecting her, as always, to initiate the normal sweetrat, tom tom expressions with which we greet ourselves. She didn’t. We hugged and what followed was ‘You are scared of death. I saw it on your face!’ ‘AY, I’m not scared of death,’ she ended. Those words, I won’t forget in a long time. I didn’t deny her observation though. As I write this, I cannot but imagine that she was drunk on something that had totally formatted from her head what she experienced on the sick bed some days before. She had asked a friend to inform me that she was at the hospital. I rushed down and found her a different person. She was there lying on the hospital bed with some friends around her. She was pale, and could hardly talk. I could measure her pain by the cakes of dried tears that lined her face. 

I can’t imagine what she saw on my face that made her come up with that inference. However, I must say, as I held one of her hands on the said day, all I could think about was how young we were (and still are) and how we had/have not really made our marks in the world. I thought about the dreams we had shared. I imagined the impending impossibility of attaining her much cherished big thing: winning the Booker Prize.

Again, I am scared of death…. And for one reason. Death, to me is like a board cleaner. It wipes everything about one off the board that is life. Just like that! ‘Shit!’ you said? Death is shit and when it happens, it does all it can to make a mess of people. I see that happen to a whole lot of people and the fact that I don’t want same happening to me is the reason I fear death... Was life a white board, I would like to be scribbled on it with a permanent board marker such that my impacts, my big things, would be forever etched on the memories of the people after me. But where are the big things to be written about me?

Life’s complex, it’s a mirage of some sort; it’s a labyrinth. It’s doing one thing before the other. It’s achieving big things one after the other. It could signify the converse of all these too. So, I woke up that morning thinking about what the current big thing is for me and most importantly, what the next big thing(s) would be. Life’s so unpredictable I couldn’t (and still can’t) say assertively what the next big thing is. But I have visions of it. Yes, I do! Perhaps, it could be that one thing I fear: DEATH, AFTER A PALTRY, WORTHLESS LIFE. 

This is what I mean: I fear death only when it is subsequent to a paltry, worthless existence. However, the next thing for me can’t be death! It is that big, doro thing. And I would entertain no fear in my pursuit. My friend’s doing same. You should too.

Do have a lovely day ahead.

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