Building Materials and Ugly Prices
Usually, we hurt Truths by neglecting them. Also, we do as narrators by failing to feed our consuming readers with supportive stories about them.
Circulate it I would that repeated postponements of execution of a project end in its being dumped at last with a backing genuine or lame excuse. How I wish, right now, I can figure out reader’s reactions or catch their facial expressions. I imagine, quite a number of us had had this experience and it still bleeds our hearts. Possibly, quite as many had never risked abandonment of a set goal through ill-advised determent of attention to it. Candidly speaking, if you belong to The Second Group you are doubly lucky but, please, should be on guard against a future prompting to give it a try, as honestly, you do not need to absorb the crunching punch.
A Hyacinth Stan is still licking his wounds from sheer disregard for this counsel. Too careless of him! I could swear that the two or three plots he had cleared and surveyed for an erection of a mansion is still lying bare and as neglected like an African Widow the ten trips or so of sand and gravel, which he had heaped on one side of the plots. Who knows, The Pyramid-High Trips of Sand and Gravel may have shrunk in size and now looking anything but The Ten they had been!
Would it shock you? Hyacinth Stan was a man of comfortable resources, with enough cash to buy or build himself a decent house, if not an enviable one! In Lagos, he had seen one such as he admired, drew closer to it for a lingered inspection of its offered glamour, observed with satisfaction that its solidity would never cease to enrapture him and said to get a replica of it on his land in Kaduna. What he needed was all the relevant building materials for the edifice as well as the right skilled labour; of course, after hiring a contractor for the entire project.
On one sunny afternoon, for this purpose, Hyacinth Stan produced himself at the Building Materials Section of Kaduna’s Market for a survey of things and advance enquiry of prices.
“Sorry”, said Hyacinth’s first contact, “I can’t release my bags of cement at that ridiculous price!”
Hyacinth knew he had better not query the man’s bold tagging of his wished price offer as ‘Ridiculous, for indeed N2000.00 was for too little for either Eagle’s cement or Dangote’s.
“Then, at which price?” Hyacinth shot at The Cement Dealer, his voice very unfriendly.
“I thought I’d told you N3500.00,” responded the man, declaring it the current price of every bag.
Not convinced, Hyacinth Stan tried arguing that the said current price of cement solely applied to Eagle cement not Dangote’s, whereupon his co-debater first responded with a cajoling laughter and finally with a tart disclosure that no cement dealer of those he could still remember their names and location of their shops would dare give out his Eagle Cement at even N3499.00.
“N3500:00, then, for Eagle Cement! Hyacinth volunteered.
“Exactly,” said the dealer, ever ready to sound more factual than pleasing. And that was it! Like an Eagle, Hyacinth Stan, who had wings, too, flapped them and in less than ten minutes was more than a mile away from The Cement Dealer. His wings kept propelling him, until he was at home where he would not make the mistake of paying for the number of bags of Cement he wanted at the mentioned forbidden price.
But at home, Hyacinth learnt that there had been ugly increases as well in the prices of other building materials:
Zinc, asbestos, fixtures and fittings plumbing materials for tape; even nails! “Hopefully, in two weeks time their prices shall all bow down before me,” announced Hyacinth, all of a sudden, a forecaster in the Field of Commerce, or knowledgeable about the wisdom in a builder exercising a little patience for the Demons of High prices to pass over.
But two weeks later, Hyacinth was greeted with worse news! Dangote’s cement is now at N4000:00 and Eagle at N4500:00. A sheet of zinc has left its previous N1500:00 for N1900:00 while plumbing materials and wood work have equally jacked their prices up by Thirty Percent!
Once again Hyacinth remembered his Eagle’s Wings and flapped them homeward for an emergency nap, before making up his mind about what to do not next and how to proceed towards it.
But there was to be another ‘Next’ and another followed by more ‘Next’s, after every jolting discovery from a fresh appearance at the same venue that the prices of Building Materials had neither fallen nor stabilized.
Obviously time to have a rethink begun with an initial long or short sleep that should freshen one’s mind for the calculation challenges one had been grappling with…
At all times one should reckon the appropriateness of the time of an intended or wished action between The Serious and The Laughable. It was not clear whether or not thirty-three-year-old Hyacinth Stan was not after all trying to bring off Comedy by choosing to act the Small-Minded Millionaire, who had already taken up a construction work dying for prompt financing but would not at all want to ingratiate The Get–Rich–Quick- Dealers in the materials for it.
But a more realistic Hyacinth Stan would have been one, who had bothered to quickly address the space challenges his exploding family of already seven persons including his mother-in-law had begun to face in their two-bedroom apartment. A Hyacinth who candidly accepted that he had commenced but not executed a building project for which The Safest decision was The Fastest especially against the back drop of their country’s worsening ailing economy. New weeks kept elapsing and the prices of building materials soaring up towards the heavens but Hyacinth still courting a once-humorous-comedy-now-humorless!
Two bad! Six years now Hyacinth had heaped the trips of sands with gravel on a part of the plots for a building project and they are still there unutilized; rather at the mercy of Wind of Dispersal. On his part, Hyacinth Stan had sort of become a New-Won Apostle of the idea that Building a house for oneself is optional!
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