You can't just cherry pick traditions and civilization to suit your selfish interest and expect people like me to clap for you - Nkechi Bianze

I know a Nigerian couple living in the UK. They had three children. The man worked as an IT consultant, and the woman was a nurse. They both earned well.


I met them in a church I attended temporarily. They are the typical born again family where they were both church workers. However, from the outside, I noticed some things about this couple that raised my curiosity.


For starters, the car the man drove was a mere "locomotive engine" compared to what his wife cruised. The wife clearly looked and lived richer than her husband.
As a "busy body" that I can be sometimes, I was curious to know more, but I wasn't close enough to them or anyone close to them to have the chance of feeding my curiosity.

There was this day I was in a Church member's saloon at Peckham. For those of you who don't know, Peckham is that part of London that looks like Yaba market. Whenever I'm there, I feel like I'm in Lagos.... courtesy of the high concentration of blacks and black businesses, most of whom are Nigerians for Nigerians.


So, as typical of an average Nigerian saloon, you get to hear all the trending gists and gossips there. I ran into luck, and this couple happened to be one of the topics for the day.


So, #To_the_gist


Man and woman each earn pretty well, but as a Nigerian traditional family, man is the SOLE and I mean only breadwinner.
While woman took care of the domestic chores and all.


Woman happens to be a "Baby girl" who believes in making her life easy. So, she pays a caterer to cook three different soups every week, jellof rice, fried rice, and a few other things.


As a bread winner, the man had to provide money for these foods. She only payed the caterer for doing the cooking.


Madam also signed up with a cleaning agency that sends a cleaner to her house twice a week. So, she ends up doing very little herself.


Since madam only spends less than 10% of her salary paying caterers and cleaners to do her own bit of the duties, she always had enough money to drive the big cars. My amebo ears also heard that she's got two houses in Nigeria while her husband has one, and much smaller.


At the saloon, the women were practically slaughtering her with their mouths, calling her bad wife and all, while I was thinking about how much I love this woman.


She is a definition of "figure out how best to enjoy the rythm of the music".


*-*-*-*


Each time we talk about feminism and how women should contribute financially, even chauvinistic men support the motion. However, most of them have refused to understand that nothing goes for nothing.


Many women are willing to work and contribute to the family, but far less men are willing to drop their patriarchal privileges.


You can't have women drop their privileges while men hold on to theirs.


In the very unlikely event that I get married to a man who wants to be an "emperor" too big to do some chores in his own home, just like the woman above, I will become too much a woman to spend my dime, even though I earn more. We will go fully traditional.


I'm an advocate of CHOICE, but I'm certainly not an advocate of people wanting to have their cakes and still eat it.


If you want to be traditional, be traditional.
If you want to be civilized, be civilized.


But a twisted combination of both to the benefit of one and the expense of the other is what I do not subscribe to.


You can't just cherry pick traditions and civilization to suit your selfish interest and expect people like me to clap for you.