If all the buckets in Nigeria should get raptured into
Pail Heaven tonight, the country would be thrown into utter confusion. Life
without buckets in Nigeria
would mean no life at all. (The Rapture, to the uninitiated is when all Christians
will suddenly varnish from the face of the earth when the last trumpet sounds).
If such a fate befalls the ubiquitous buckets of Naija there will be cases of confused church ushers scratching their
heads when their Pastor shouts out ’pass the bucket round for offering time is
blessing time!’ Instances of naked men
running out of the bathroom with soap in their eyes will be common place.
Paranoid minds will be flung into panic when a sudden puddle of water caresses their
feet as buckets exit Nigeria’s territorial space to the after -life. It will be a sad night as mama bom-boi walks
into her kitchen to find three small hills of garri, rice and beans in the
place of her three virgin buckets. These were her vessels of honour complete
with tight lids that had never once seen the soapy face of a human in the
bathroom. Buckets destined for great
things on their day of purchase. Washed and dried and then comissioned to that
high office of being the custodians of food stuffs. Alas the buckets are gone
with the wind and the house wives cry.
Tales will be told of maidens walking back from the stream with buckets
of water balanced on their heads all experiencing a sudden baptism they had not
signed up for. Strong men pulling buckets out of wells will find themselves on
the floor as the resistance against which they pull varnishes. Drivers will
have to skip washing the cars as the weak tap pressures of Naija prevents
washing cars with a hose pipe. Woe to those burdened with gastroenteritis on
such a night. Having spent all night committing their vomitus and diarrhoea
into the bucket, they will be saddled with guilt when their carers tell of how
the bucket’s contents splashed onto the new carpets en-route to the toilet.
There will is cries of horror as buckets of paint splash around in the boots of
jeeps and ice-cream finds its freedom in freezers everywhere. Those with no
washing machines who had ‘soaked’ clothes in a bucket with soap as part of
their pre –wash ritual, would all awake to a soapy mess of water and wet
clothes all over the house. Surviving the thunderstorm and leaky roof would be
in vain in the wet parts of the country as the buckets of salvation get
translated leaving behind their contents on the carpet.
The good news is that the great icon that is the Naija
bucket is going nowhere. I just spoke about the rapture to pail heaven to flog
the dead horse of a point that buckets are more important to Nigerian life than
the Kola nut (No mind those jerry cans wey dey form levels). However even if
the buckets sprout wings and fly away only to send a post card pledging never
to return, overnight all the taps and showers in Nigeria will start to flow at
a good pressure for no country in the world can match Naija when it comes to
improvisation in a crisis. Our politicians and engineers can do things very
quickly when push comes to push me-push you. So where did all this talk about
buckets come from anyway?
Well, I needed a new bucket and asked my son where we should
go for a new blue model. We brain stormed a bit and various shops were
mentioned. He discounted a particular store as their clientele was
predominantly White and as he put it, ‘white people do not keep buckets in
their bathrooms’. It set me on a course of meditation that has brought me to
this point. I have examined myself and concluded that I have a Naija Bucket
Mentality. A unique mindset derived from a very simple necessity to avoid pain
and embarrassment. Getting stranded
during a shower when the water stops, you learn to know a pain that will never
be forgotten. Unable to open the eyes you call for help and when it arrives, opening
the locked bathroom door is a struggle. It only needs to happen once for you to
understand the importance of a bucket of water as insurance. When you grow up
not trusting the utilities, your paranoia means you have buckets inside the
house and an electric generator and bore hole outside. Must add that one man’s
paranoia is another man’s common sense.
My personal journey into bucketism started as a class
monitor in primary school. Part of the job description was to go and fetch the
break time snacks; puff- puff and squash in two buckets. The squash was then
served into plastic cups by dipping the master cup into the bucket and filling
the cups held out by fellow pupils. It was indeed a position of power. On the
school playground you heard stories of the famed Ojukwu bucket alias Ogbunigwe,
a kind of anti-armoured vehicle weapon made in Biafra. No this bucket did not
contain water to wash you clean. It exploded on impact. At home, the low pressure of the water
supplies meant you had no running water upstairs and had to fetch water from
the down stairs tap. When it was time to go into boarding school, you got a
list of essentials to bring in and the bucket was usually high up the list. The
same applied to going to university. Everyone packed his bucket, sometimes
before the books.
So having been fully bucketanized mentally, it is no wonder
that having moved to the UK, where the taps run at a reasonable pressure, I
still haven’t changed gears mentally as regards to my bathroom rituals. It is
just an irrational habit for I know that I only need a mop bucket at present.
On holidays or when ever I check into hotels, I do not expect to see a bucket
in bathrooms and never notice the absence of one. However once I am back into a
home I call my own, I look forward to having a bath out of a bucket and having
a small bowl with which to throw water on my body.
So why is this important?
I look at myself and I wonder. The ‘normal’ of yesterday has not given
way to the ‘new normal’ of today in some departments of my brain. The brain and
head are out of Suru-lere but parts of Suru-lere still exists in my frontal
lobe. As seasons change, being stuck in the past becomes a weight. Since
different countries exist in different ‘seasons of advancement’ one needs to
‘change gears’ when one travels to another country. Being used to something is
not a good enough excuse. Naija says, ‘shine your eyes’. A skill or daily chore
that has become obsolete must be forgotten. The great hand washer of clothes
with skills honed through washing senior students’ clothes in boarding school
must find new things to do with the hands once they move into a country with
washing machines, light and free flowing water; rather than insist that ‘dis
washing machine no dey wash cloth well’.
Of course the skills should return if he travels back to his
native country. There was this lady I stood next too while we awaited the
arrival of our luggage on the conveyor belt at Murtala Mohammed airport, Lagos.
This lady had no Naija Bucket mentality at all. She complained more that the
Europeans with an accent like beans wey never done well. She said over twenty times that, ‘dis Nigeria
is too hot’. I looked at her and wondered how being in Europe for 3 weeks had
taken away her acclimatisation to heat talents. She was fanning her face with
some brightly painted nail extensions studded with fake tiny diamonds. She
paused from fanning once in a while to scratch her weave. She was just acting
like an Ajebuta that she was not. I
advocate losing eighty to ninety per cent of our bucket mentality but not a
hundred per cent abeg. You must still know how to endure tropical climate and
slap-to-kill at mosquitoes without complaining, as the tropics will never
become Europe.
In summary (African style), I hope I have convinced you that
the Bucket is mightier than the Basket and it holds a significant place in
Nigeria. It also sits on the mantel piece of my heart as my early life was
spent lifting water holding onto the arched handles that so calloused my palms.
(Now everyone who shakes me says my hands are soft, how embarrassing). The
lessons to learn must be spelt out clearly. The old normal is gone. Just
because you had adapted to low water pressures in the past and were happy and
content with life does not mean that you must keep using these adaptation skills
till you kick the bucket. Seasons will change and so must we.
I foresee a poor ‘bucket mentality’ chap importing one
million electric generators into Nigeria in the near future because that was a
good business plan for his father, only to discover that there was no demand
for his products as a new era of Light 24/7 had been ushered in. Or perhaps in the near future someone without a visionary bone in his body
decides to open the biggest bucket factory in the Nigeria because research done
last year showed that there are more
buckets than children in each Nigerian household so he figured that the high
demand would gulp up his industrial output. Then the government suddenly does a
360 like Asha song and pipes portable water to every Nigerian home, Church,
Mosque, Prison, Babalawo joint and School. The magnate with the bucket plant
don enta gbese bi dat.
With light and water,
everyone will own a washing machine and the Omo anointed hand washing
ministries and all night soaking of clothes ministries will all be raptured
into antiquity. So in summary, friends, business men and country men, shine eye
and in all thy shining, shine retina.
Babawilly
Dr Wilson Orhiunu
26-3-2014
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