When Did They Stop Giving Away Toasters?

Don’t you just hate it when you go down to the bank to make a withdrawal, get accused of stealing the bank manager’s “manhood”, and have to flee an angry lynch mob?

I know I do, and I tend to avoid those situations like the plague, because they can put a serious crimp in your day. This is why I am so worried about Nigerian journalist Saminu Ibrahim, and based on the day he’s had I would voluntarily send him my bank routing number, if it would help him out.

I’m sorry. That was a cheap joke at Mr. Ibrahim’s expense. He’s had a bad day, if we can believe his story, and yet it is so incredible I just have to share. In order to keep my PG rating, however, I will be using what we in the humor industry call a “euphemism”, which is our way of protecting our readers’ delicate sensibilities and not getting fired from our day jobs. In this case, I shall be referring to the bank manager’s “manhood”, as it says in the article, as Herman.

According to Mr. Ibrahim and local witnesses, a trip to his bank to withdraw his paycheck turned ugly when the manager, an educated man who would presumably know about these things, discovered that his Herman had gone missing. That’s certainly a troubling turn of events in anyone’s work day, so the manager did what any financial service professional would do when confronted with a problem of this sort: he immediately contacted the bank’s insurance company, which completely covered his expenses and even managed not to lose his paperwork.

Ha ha! No, I’m just kidding. What actually happened was that the bank manager accused Mr. Ibrahim of stealing his Herman, whereupon the other customers at the bank formed a lynch mob, and Mr. Ibrahim survived his morning only because the police were able to pry him and the Herman-less manager away from the bloodthirsty mob.

That’s a pretty good story, but like most of the newspaper articles that people send me, it raises a couple of questions in my mind:

What kind of a bank is this? Are Hermans a normal part of the swag at Nigerian banks? Mine only gives away keychains. I almost feel like I’m missing out.

Are African journalists misinterpreting the phrase “getting to the meat of the story”? According to Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ), pronounced “Noodge”, this is the SECOND TIME a journalist has been accused of misappropriating a Herman that did not belong to him.

The chairman of NUJ, of course, was on hand to say that at no time were any journalists in possession of a Herman that was not his own, and what’s more, newsmen have been suffering from a decline in reputation lately, plus the accusers are devils.

You’ll have to excuse me now. I need to look into opening a Nigerian bank account.

 

 

 

 

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