The Son of my maternal cousin(my Mum is Efik) got married to a lovely Igbo lady yesterday in VI and it was a very classy wedding with abundance of everything to eat and drink.
Somewhere during the wedding I went to use the restroom and saw three guys arguing. Two of the guys were seriously abusing the third guy for making them waste their time and transport fare to come for the wedding.
Now what was the problem? They were all sellers of new notes.In otherwords the sell new notes at parties for a living.From what I gathered,the 3rd guy was the one that informed the other two about the wedding but the 1st guy had reservations about coming because neither the bride nor the groom family was a yoruba family and when he was told the bride family was Igbo,he asked if they were traders or businessmen and was told the bride’s father is a Lawyer, he had serious doubts if their business would recieve the kind of patronage they are used to getting.
From what I gathered,the 2nd guy expressed the same opinion but the 3rd guy convinced both of them that it was going to be a high society wedding,the couple schooled abroad and are based there and only came in to the country just for the wedding and so obviously the families are well to do.
So they arrived the venue and according to the 1st guy, ‘lo and behold’the business was not moving just like they predicted and they took it out on the 3rd guy.Now instead of me to simply piss my piss that I came to piss and go, I could not help chooking my mouth into their argument.
The first thing I asked them was how much they were selling the new notes.They said the old notes were 10k for a wrap of N50k while the new notes were N25k.That is 50% cost!!!To say I was stunned was an understatement! I asked them why anybody would incur such unreasonable cost just to spray money at a party.
The 1st guy just laughed and asked me whether ‘I be JJC for Lagos’ or whether I ‘no dey go Yoruba party or correct party wey Igbo traders they hold for Lagos’.He said it was obvious the parents of the bride and groom and their guests ‘na civil servants and old school people wey no know wetin dey’
I asked him why he felt so and he said because they even prevented them(money sellers) from entering the reception hall and so he was wondering if they were not planning to recoup some of the money they spent on the wedding through the spraying of the couple by the guests.
When I asked if someone would actually pay an additional 25k just to get 50k to spray,the guys laughed heartily at me and told me that there are people that spend millions of naira to spray at parties.The 2nd guy reminded them of a burial reception party they attended in December where one person alone bought all the new notes from all the sellers that attended the party that they had to start calling for back up from other note sellers in other locations that day.
Yesterday,I saw bundles upon bundles of the New naira notes with them.So for those wondering where the new notes are,there is your answer!They are all at party venues!
