Useless Column with Mawuli Zogbenu: ‘Is potbelly a criminal offence?’

I was shocked the day Ablavi introduced me to a guy as her godfather. Me? Godfather for where? Hahaaaa! Some side chicks don’t know how to lie o, hmmm! Doctor says ‘Mr Zogbenu, please take two slices of bread in the morning, two slices of yam in the afternoon and just two cups of rice with light soup before 6pm every day’ –Dr says o. Me: Thank you, Dr. Please should this be taken before or after meals? Doctor fainted! This is where I lost control over my belly.

Anyway we are here again with this ‘garbage’ of a thing called ‘Useless Column’, a very unorganized chaos to your mind in an unnecessary satire mode. We are here to ‘dirty ourselves’ in public small. Taking life easy – no stress over GDTP, Aphro balometer, whine whine, etc.

For the team here at USELESS COLUMN, we don’t have a problem. The everyday things that we do in secret are going to come out crearrrr and trust me, you won’t learn anything from here. Sha!

You see why I always say Nigerians don’t know how to insult? Often one adjective in an attempt to emphasise the insult, ends up cancelling or neutalising the noun. For example, ‘st*p*d id**t’. Trust my people, they have finished you regardless of how you choose to interpret it. ‘f**lish f**l’. That’s how my Naija friends call me anyway. They have a lot of interesting proverbs too – ‘ a sheep escorting a lion to the farm should know that whether they catch a game or not, the lion already has food’.

I don’t know what happened but now my stomach is some way la! My mother was full of praise for my wife for being the best wife ever though my daughter thinks that I should be jailed for carrying a potbelly and that she thinks it should be made a criminal offence. Guess what: the praises were in respect of my Madam taking good care of me because of my potbelly and that at the time we got married I was very thin and looked sick.

That is what has given me the feeling that if you have been married for at least 2 years and you don’t have a potbelly, two things: it is either your wife is overfeeding you, stressing you or you are stressing her to stress you because you don’t take her advice not to be eating late. Heed to her advice and treat her well and you would see the magic in developing a potbelly. A reasonably large potbelly also gives you access to loans with ease because the banks see you as a well-to-do man and therefore loan repayment risk factor is low. That is the only advantage I have over those with flat stomachs.

Yaovi Eklu, come on, develop some potbelly and let’s fall sick small, together. Should that happen, we would spend more money to treat ourselves and that money would be used to develop the pills and syrups sector at the expense of our families and our children’s education. Let’s keep eating late at night and we should not exercise at all; it is ‘very good’ for us but as to whether it is good for our families or not, I don’t know oo. Let’s go on la, no problem. Eat anything, meat with a lot of fat and 4 eggs put together and fry them and eat nyafunyafu and not having enough sleep. The reason I think that if it becomes a law, we would comply to all the advice to healthy living. Many of us men are too stubborn.

Many people lack discipline when it comes to the amount of food we eat. As for meat, don’t go there. We chew meat as if it is the last time we are eating. Now that we are done with October pink breast noise, our women should also help us check if there are no lumps down there with the view to preventing hernia in men. If you are a man and you’ve not gotten hernia before, you are not serious. No girl ever tried to suffocate those useless twins in between your thighs er?  We supported the women paaa during this occasion – I took advantage to do things that I never did with her in the bush.

Serwah, my ward is constantly on my neck over me not to eat late. And that eating late is the cause of my potbelly. Because I don’t want to eat in the night as I stand the risk of developing many dangerous illnesses, when I close from work, I go to the nearest chopbar to eat before it gets late, usually before 7pm. I have observed on many occasions that anytime I find myself at the chopbar after work, I see a lot of men with wedding rings who are also there eating. Don’t we have wives at home?

What should I do again about my weight han? I am beginning to be tempted to free my mind and eat anything though there are some things we don’t eat with our mouths. For those ones, I will use ‘rubber’. The risk level is super high, coupled with the challenges with the availability of anti-retroviral medications; the numbers are increasing and I have become more careful but if it has to do with what I will eat with my mouth, anything goes, I am tired. Even the cow eats mainly grass but has fat and potbelly just like Brigadier-General James Tee of the salvation army. I have never seen a ‘soldier’ with such potbelly.

The only thing that can make men with such conditions to behave themselves, eat less, exercise more etc is to declare potbelly as a criminal offence. That applies to only men o. Have you ever seen a woman with potbelly before?

If you ever saw one, I am sure she is pregnant. Obesity in men is the only ‘city’ that gives dangerous diseases with some of the nicest names such as osteoporosis, sclerosis st. roses, parkinsons, hypertension, huntington disease (nice name), gastrointestinal meningitis, multiple sclerosis, angina (this one sounds like something men pursue), amibic dysentery, etc.

Very nice names! You remember that my uncle, Ganyaglo. He was lucky I was at the naming ceremony of his last born. He would have named that boy ‘Osteoporosis Zogbenu’. The name just sweet my uncle k3k3 and he would not ask to find out the meaning too o, but just because he saw the word somewhere inside grafic! Illiteracy is another disease o, hmmm!

Meanwhile, we mostly want the thing without recourse to the fact that we are weakening ourselves. Ei sorry o, I mean I am weakening myself. Sometimes even though some of our wives do the ‘opening ceremony’ religiously, some of us would still go out to ‘eat’ anyway, often without our mouths. Please help us to reduce the ‘outside eating’ especially the ones without using our mouths. You equally stand the risk of infections, some wives.

Remember the fact that ‘Sin fascinates and assassinates’! And over-eating is a sin against your body – God’s temple. It is also a sin against the State’s economy so therefore, a criminal offence! Hey hey hey…please drop the meat pie you are about to eat after that heavy meal of waakye this morning – you are inflating something you cannot deflate – a life time regret may just be staring you in the face!

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