I saw this somewhere and decided to share it on the forum. Reflection on the good old days,
Sorry, the author is unknown!
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Have you, by any chance, noticed how transient everything appears to be in these perilous days of substandard living? Where are the good times when a bar of soap could last a family of three for a week; and ah, the days of Breeze, the gigantic family soap that could last a whole school term? Ha! These days, in best of conditions, a bar lathers away in just 2 days.

Air freshener gels sit in their containers, rather gawkily, emitting nothing but a faint smell of an apparently pleasant odour that dies away after a few hours, even though the gel is still starring blankly back at you; it used to be that their fragrance were sweet-scented and could go on forever.

Toilet rolls are ultra light, with thin layers that dissolve right in your hand at the slightest touch of moisture. Plastic buckets break too easily; when most of us can still remember plastic buckets that have survived thirty to forty-year use at our fathers' houses.

Combs loose their teeth just by journeying through an infant's thick lustrous hair. Exercise books are leaner, with inferior sheets that perforate at the gentle caress of an eraser.

Drugs are tedious to uncork and require rigorous fighting to open due to inferior packaging; and once uncorked impossible to close tightly again, their caps dance around the top like a nervous child.

And there's more: only a few weeks ago, as I was driving down Ikeja, a tiny speck of stone bounced off the tires of the vehicle ahead of me and hit my windscreen.

I heard the kpum sound and just thought, ‘ah well, nothing can happen, right? It's a brand new Honda City after all.' That was until I alighted a few minutes later and saw to my horror the scratch just at the middle of the screen; I shrugged it off, it was way too small to worry about.

How wrong I was, the next morning the scratch had grown into a crack with evil webs stretching to both ends of the shield, and in a week the screen just shattered on a hot afternoon where I packed it outdoors, I gasped! My people I was told it was shatter-proof, but I guess it wasn't, only in Nigeria! How can we drive brand news cars in this age that don't come with standard shatter-proof screens? Would it have been a Temitope Saloon (which I am still looking forward to by the way) or a Chiamaka Jeep, I wouldn't be too bothered; my anger would be disguised in patriotism too strong to let minor things weigh it down; but this is Honda, brand name with vast experience in technology, abi? So they create an inferior technology for their Nigerian market; don't they sell here at the same rate, if not higher than they sell in other markets? Why do these companies bring lower versions to us? Sad!

Do you remember the aggressive marketing LG had when they came to town? I bought into the frenzy and made the blunder of my life.

I got my hubby to buy all our electronics from an authorized LG distributor - from TV, to disc player, DVD player, name it. In a short time, all of these electronics have had to spend a night or two at the repairers' shop.

The TV, one night, just refused to blink, so I practiced good ol' tapping to resurrect it to life, and how embarrassing those tapping can be when you have a friend visiting. Heavens, the set was only two years old! The DVD and disc player lasted for all of one year, and just gave up on me.

So the repairer tells me, ‘shop for Sharp.' At the shops you see things like, ‘Shrap', ‘Shape', ‘Sharap', and then ‘Sharp' but with a logo I'm not familiar with. You see Sony, Soni, Sonni, Sonny, and the names keep coming. In the good days, our parents got rid of appliances because it was outdated as most lasted well above 20 to 30 years.

In the midst of all the plastic bowls, buckets, coolers, clocks, and flasks designed in various ridiculous colours (some looking like adire), one of the best gifts I received on my wedding day was, well, a gas cooker.

So the next day, like a new bride trying to impress, I made my way to the kitchen to heat left-over meal from the day before; I heard the scariest sound from within the cooker.

Crok crom crook, alas, the fire was cracking the white coat off the brand new cooker. I had never, not in the years I'd lived with my mother, seen anything so alarming.

Last week the cooker decided it was going to rest, since I failed to listen to all its rebellion over the years. It was one cooker that was unwilling to serve. It lasted just five years. I grew up knowing only one cooker in my mother's house, all my years with her; and she had a PhD in cooking affairs.

Nothing is apparently made to last these days in Nigeria; like a kiss from a lover boy, everything is fleeting, inferior without regard for the consumer.


We have children's text books with the most unattractive pictures, pale colours; schools are approving the poorest quality of books with wrong spelling; yes you heard me right: ‘gilr' ‘appel' ‘taecher'. I once saw a nursery book with the sentence: ‘clean the yamayama from your hands before you eat.' I swear!


We can't find durable sharpeners, erasers, crayons, and school bags at local shops; things we used to take for granted. One out of two products are substandard; there are antiseptic liquid that are just coloured water; Izal used to have an aroma that could wake the dead, now its just one bland weak odour that you can easily mix with your tea and wont even know its not milk.

Did I forget door knobs? It yanks off the joint after a few months; and phone chargers last only a few weeks. Toothpaste with no minty flavour. S.O.N where art thou? Consumer rights protection arise from your slumber; somebody come to the aid of Nigerians lest I relocate to Ghana. I'm dead serious!



What do you think?


, author unknown.

Nothing going on in Naija

Economic slowdown, Energy rundown, leadership letdown, Security failure

That's what

@Poster

You've left out clothing.It's pretty hard to find authentic clothes these days.Even some "respected" boutiques are overflowing with fake goods (most of which are produced here).The ones that they claim to be "original" are from either China or Dubai.

Talking more about LG, i also caught frenzy those days and bought everything from TV,home theatre,fridge,split unit down to speakers and car stereo for my car.The home theatre stopped playing movies after 8 months.

God help us.