By Bamidele Johnson
Two days before last Christmas, I went somewhere with a friend and it took till very deep into the night to get through what we went to do. We rode in his car, while mine was parked where I couldn’t access at that time of the day. Even if I could, my night vision discouraged me from driving.
I chose to stay at a hotel. We shopped for one Opebi and later at Ikeja GRA where, despite non-stop bleating about “money nor dey town”, hotels were chock-full. My friend drove me to one, where I found a room. That was at 12.01am. I hadn’t cash. I had my ATM card. Suspecting that my bank, notorious for worse than poor services, could mess up, he gave me his own card and PIN. Payment with my card, not surprisingly, failed. My friend’s bank also choked.
I was in the grip of panic and, almost as importantly, of hunger. Ravenous is too tame a word to describe the hunger. But I needed to find a place to sleep and the receptionist, thankfully, asked if I could make a transfer. I had some money in my Palmpay account and it went through. One time!
I got shown the room. Nice place. But hunger was searing my tummy. I still had some money left in the Palmpay and if the kitchen had something, I was minded to go for it. Despite being famished, I didn’t find any of those things the kitchen offered sufficiently interesting, especially with the explanation that it’d take 40-45 minutes to get it done. I asked if there was “assorted” pepper soup and they said there was-at N7,500. It wasn’t something I should eat, but there wasn’t a more appealing option.
I got an assurance it would be ready in 15 minutes. It was clearly mass-produced, perhaps in readiness for a yahoo boy surge that didn’t happen. It arrived steaming, as assured. The first scoop of the soup left me horrified. It was “a-salted”, as it was close to bitter. Whoever cooked obviously thought using industrial quantities of salt was the way to go. I called the kitchen. A guy showed up and I told him, scowling, that the meat and the soup in the bowl could not cost more than N1,500, while the salt was N6,000. His mouth hung open. I told him to take the bowl away. That was not something for a man with hypertension. My head was woozy with anger and hunger, which conspired to ruin things. Finding sleep was not possible till, I think, at about 3am.
I was up by 6am because of hunger. Had my bath and took a cab to where my car was. On my way, I kept wondering how often people with hypertension and those yet without it indulge in such level of sodium intake in the name of yotomising. We need to watch it, especially if you eat suya.
Photo credit: Corporate Accountability for Public Participation Africa (CAPPA)
… Johnson wrote in from Lagos
