January – A season of sadness after madness

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday January 25, 2022 06:00

It is a season of detoxing and flushing out the toxins from the body. Don’t be fooled though if you hear this. It is not that people have suddenly become health conscious. It is a financial dictate. The bank balance has gone to Pitsville and the wallet now contains plastic cards and the COVID-19 vaccine card. January is a very tricky month for everyone. Almost every year after being jaded by the month, you swear by all your dead uncles in all cemeteries around the world that the subsequent January you will be ready. But as the next January ambles along, you find yourself in an even more dire financial situation than the previous year.

The irony of January is that it is ushered in amidst a welter of fireworks, festivities and a general gay atmosphere. Ululations too are a part of the whole setup and one would be forgiven for thinking they are part of a whole Miss World ensemble with Palesa right in the middle. The very next day though people will be pondering more serious issues like wondering what happened to their money and how they will get back to their workstations. The contrast is like a Facebook hookup where the prospect outside the glare of Facebook lights and filters looks like a character from Botswana’s Most Wanted List. Most of us are all having an out-of-the-money situation, which is another way of saying we are seriously broke. The former is how you say it to maintain your dignity which will now be teetering on the brink of fake.

Perhaps you feel I've been making some heavy-handed, unsubstantiated generalisations. Get used to it! At this point going to the ATM is as frightening as the toilet refusing to flush at someone’s house after a tricky number two job. The little trash can at the ATM is exclusively full of crumbled ATM receipts. There’s Newton’s First Law of ATM receipts. It goes thus - every receipt with a two-digit balance should be crumpled before throwing in the trash receptacle and every balance from four digits up should be respectfully dropped into the trash bin as fresh as it came out from the ATM. This is in case the next guy is a nosy busybody and wants a sneak peek at your balance.

The crumpled receipt makes it difficult to check that two-digit balance while the fresh one gives him/her a chance to see the four-digit balance and start to wonder why the hell they are struggling with their lives. And to save face the crumbled receipt brigade will mumble something like ‘just checking my balance’ to an interested queue also deeply worried about whether they are joining the crumpled receipt brigade or not.

The motivation mill will start whirring. Ideas like make a budget and stick to it, write your goals down, decide on five major goals and break them down in manageable pieces will start doing the rounds on the Internet will be bandied about. Basically that yawnfest stuff. We need more practical advice. For instance, how do you get back from Mohembo to Gabs on a budget of P100.

How do you stretch a P200 over a month to cover food, transport and entertainment? In January when we say food we are talking maize meal, cabbage and those little ingredients like salt, spice etc that make the two fuse together to achieve an edible state. We are in no way talking about fancy luxuries like tomato sauce, bacon, polony, rice etc.

Those will only happen along around March. That is when the first signs of recovery set in. That festive change is sure going to have to put in some extra-hard industrial shift to paper the craters. So authors of motivational books must look at publishing books like January for Dummies, An Idiot’s Guide to January, Handling January: An Idiot’s Manual and some such to help the suffering masses.

And it is just possible that if the figures don’t add up, you might just need a wife’s manual to help you deal with a wife who’s making a whining noise. Oh yes there’s going to be a lot of whining! You can count on it. (For comments, feedback and insults email inkspills1969@gmail.com)