Uselessness with Mawuli Zogbenu: ‘Where is my koose?’

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Mawuli Zogbenu

Can you please silence your phones before reading this or rather stop reading it if your phone will not ring? This non-fa would make you feel like stop reading immediately but you cannot o, Mr Soglo.

But once you are convinced that you cannot and wish to continue, your desire to discontinue heightens because this abstract is not written in any particular order. Everything here is basaaaaa, chakaaaa! Unorganised to the extent that you can hardly tell the head or tail of the whole write-up.

Don’t you know that if a holiday falls on a Tuesday, chances are that the Monday before it is seen as a ‘Friday’ and we are kind of eyi, I dey lie?

May Day holiday is May 1st er but it looks like it will be moved to Monday May 2nd, 2022. Incidentally Eid-Al-Fitr may also fall on that day or the day after, which is 3rd. I pray for the latter so I can sleep well but ‘eat well’? Doctors will have to clearly define what ‘eating well’ is o.

May Day just reminds of NAM Conference in 1990 when Accra was expected to be very clean, clean of every other thing apart from bad mind. U know it is hard to change that one; even the clergy tried but still, we are still throwing garbage anywhere we choose to. Hmmm. God forgive us.

Yeeeeei! NAM Conference 1990, was it? In their bid to clean the streets before foreign delegates came to Ghana for the conference, the city authorities picked up anybody who was not clean and shoved them into a waiting van for a secured location. This was simply not to make them come out so the visitors would not have any bad impression about Ghana.

Guess what I saw at Kaneshie towards kokompe. A van was waiting; officers picked up one man they had concluded had a little wiring challenge up there and not up to 100%! This was by virtue of his dressing. The man fiercely resisted. His excuse was that he was mental okay and that he was an auto mechanic.

The officers applied some minimal acceptable force and told him that all the people already packed in the van were people who also claimed they were auto mechanics and so his story was not different and his excuse unacceptable. Torn between being convinced and not, they tried a strategy to establish the truth or otherwise of this man’s claim.

One of the ways they used to validate this man’s claim was to ask him of the time, showing him a wrist watch. By my watch, it was 9am in the morning oo, and the man’s answer was: ‘the time is 10,000!’ The speed with which they shoved him into the waiting van er, hmmm!

 ‘To God be the glory great things He has done….’ Sing along, man! I love this song but last week Tuesday someone sang this song at my expense. Every morning I buy koko and koose and while expecting the traffic to catch me so I can be sipping and gulping it down small small at the blind side of the Polis. I normally complement the efforts of the koko with, as one may expect, koose. This my church colleague, Agorsu was standing in front of the Westhills mall waiting to join trotro. Typical of me, I packed and offered him lift. My koko and koose were resting on the dash board to get cool to make it easy for me to gulp down with relative ease. I was stopped by the Tetegu traffic lights and decided to make use of the first koose and ‘weakly’ invited this guy to join me. Ohhh is it that you don’t know how to weakly invite somebody to a meal? It is that kind of invitation that you do with such a voice that suggests it is only a formality not really one that should be ‘honoured’ by the invitee. It often goes like, : Charlie, I get some koose bi o’. Is this one too an invitation?

But Agorsu honoured my invitation oo. He picked one of my koose and started chewing and annoyingly praised the woman who prepared it ‘Charlie, the koose dey bii waaa…the woman wey prepare am dey form tu’. I giggled. The giggle was like that of a medieval time Caucasian. I was not really amused by this unnecessary comment. The next thing was another koose…gone. Should I confront or stop him or? I soliloquized. The traffic gave way and he had a ‘competitive advantage’. I was driving, he kept eating. Ei! Wey kan matter be this? Was I wrong to have offered him lift in the first place? My only hope was the fact that he would not touch the koko as it was in a ‘take-away rubber’.

He was to alight at Mallam junction but because of my koose, he continued with the journey as I journeyed on towards Kaneshie. I hatched a plan to tell him I was no longer heading towards Kaneshie but would stop over at Sakaman junction. I branched off. He was ready to wait for me. Ah! What kind of temptation is this? It was already the 16th of the month where we pull the brakes on our expenses and my koose was an expenditure reduction mechanism.

I managed to force him out as I mentioned to him it was going to take a little while before I continued. He took his own ‘send off’ koose before getting down. Wherever you are, Agorsu, bring back my koose oo, yoo! Do you know the financial planning that goes into koose purchase? The bidding process and all the necessary documentations?

The negative effects of doing good oo. I offered you lift and now my koose reserve was depleted by you. Next time wai! While I had planned to demand from Agorsu to give me back my koose, oh yes, indeed, I saw him in church last Sunday and he asked me ‘Chief, what time would you leave for work tomorrow’. You can guess my answer… ‘I am on leave’!

 

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