By Uzor Maxim Uzoatu
The Naira is so worthless these days 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 matter is that putting any money in the bank attracts interminable taxation from the ever-taxing Nigerian government.
Let’s not talk about the cyber-security tax for now since the government is already doing a yo-yo dance with the issue.
The fact is that I have never liked the characters called bankers from the beginning of time from Imo River.
As far as I am concerned, a banker with all the fine suits and ties and cuff-links is a glorified “maiguard”.
The great pity is that the banker is guarding not even human beings but ordinary paper named money, especially the good-for-nothing type called Naira!
I believe in the simple philosophy that money will be sent sooner or later – why not now?
It sure does not make sense for anyone to give money to a maiguard in a bank to keep when the cash ought to be spent just like that.
Trust the banker to raise his nose at this my assertion by expanding the ambit of banking beyond my meagre knowledge.
Who cares – when the point remains that the bank is at the mercy of money which happens to be “the root of all evil”, as has been written in the book.
I can afford to laugh at the banking industry because I have no use for banks.
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 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 missionary, sorry, Islamic journey?
Zuwo had rhetorically asked to know what was wrong in finding Kano government money in Kano Government House or Lodge!
Yes, like Barkin Zuwo I keep my own money in my own house and nothing is absolutely wrong in finding Maxim’s money in Maxim’s house.
This way, I can escape from the plentiful electronic charges of the banks and the cyber-security tax and more of the tax-mad government.
But 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 turn I am told that I must perforce come to open this account or that fixed deposit 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-naira 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, not being averse to temptation like the Irish wag, Oscar Wilde.
When the then Central Bank Governor Professor Charles Chukwuma Soludo – now Anambra State Governor – came up with his bank recapitalization exercise, the bankers perforce had to source for funds from all sorts of strange places such as the magic churches and juju covens.
In short, the churches somewhat became the extension of the banking halls with micro-mini-clad young ladies hugging the limelight.
Now that the current CBN Governor, Yemi Cardoso, is coming hard with a higher bank recapitalization regime, banks and bankers have gone haywire.
A friend of mine has just told me that the prayer point in the “sharp-sharp” churches is always to meet the target set by Cardoso.
When the ladies are screaming “Target” in the 450 or so dialects of Nigeria there could hardly ever be a better explanation of “speaking in tongues”!
There was even the celebrated case of a particular service where the shouting of “Target” reached the ears of a hawker who had stored Target cigarette since he came to Lagos after the Biafra war.
Believing that his prayers 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 their Cardoso 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!
Uzor Maxim Uzoatu is a renowned poet, journalist and author
