Photo credit: the.Guardian
People do suffer!
OK, I’ve been hearing a phrase: Gb’omu le lantern. The literal meaning is placing some breast on a lantern.
Can you imagine how it will feel? Putting a woman’s succulent breasts on a lit lantern. Even a man will certainly not enjoy it.
I don’t know the phrase’s roots, but it will be sufficient for people to know that I live amongst people who have a deep sense of imagery.
They use the term to describe a particular system for getting financial help for businesses. Commercial banks are unapproachable because of their outrageous interest rates.
Even when people decide to make do with the interest rates, what about their asking for collateral? And the tedious documentation?
It is no surprise that some wise businesspeople are finding their way into the hearts of desperate people who need financial help.
We are not talking about organized businesses or people who need money to launch their businesses.
We are talking of people who need less than a hundred thousand naira for their businesses. It’s even in the range of fifty thousand naira.
At the current exchange rate, fifty thousand naira is not up to two hundred dollars!
The idea is very popular with the informal sector, which includes the people who retail goods.
Let’s look at one of them. They are operating a spaza. A neutral person looking at the business will see a lot of profits.
However, the discerning will see many liabilities. Any business that is qualified to be described as such must be based on the profits derived from the actual sales.
One has to remove the various losses incurred by the business before determining whether it is actually making a profit.
The business owner is responsible for fending the family from the business’s proceeds. A child may be seeking admission into a higher institution of learning. One or two of the children might have developed a system of feathering their own nests from the business.
Lastly, since the business is a buy-and-sell affair, many goods are sold on credit. When people obtain some credit facilities from a particular store, what they do is that they move on to another store for their subsequent transactions. When they don’t do that, they refuse to pay their debts on time.
Against that background, one should examine a loan of, say, fifty thousand naira. The person is supposed to be making a payment of three thousand naira weekly. Of course, the debtor will pay some interest on the loan.
The first repayment may not be a problem—our trader pays from the loan. However, problems might start to arise from the second expected repayment.
That’s when the borrower will see the other side of their creditors.
The borrower might be locked in a stinking toilet, their shop may be locked, their guarantors may be harassed, or they might even illegally use some law enforcement agents.
Every means will be employed to make the debtor pay their debts.
I just have a feeling that if our banks had some human face, the masses would not be going into a vicious circle of debt. And governments could do much more!
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