Risky is One Basket

Could you invest your resources in one commercial interest and feel truly relaxed, even after an ill-wind had blown across its station? If you could, what of a sincere belief by you that it is the immensely benefiting: that one could never end up a bitter victim of life’s bitter lessons in the realm of business?

It is my persuasion that one’s weak point should not be that of a ready refusal to break with a habit, until one has squarely suffered for it. There is a thing like Business Death which one’s commercial imitative should not taste through one’s transacting stubbornness. Unless one is a tragic figure with some sympathy for Suicide, one would gladly not taste the doctor’s stethoscope-assisted pronouncement of clinical death of a patient. Remember one’s bereaved relations could never veto against the pronouncement on one’s behalf, if it came; only painfully cry over it.

Happened it did that two youths, Agassi and Ufere had fortunate five million naira to start a business life with. Not in the least perturbed, Agassi completely ploughed his own Five into Building Materials Venture, his faultless reason for it that it was a flourishing trade of that period and district, if not its foremost money spinner! On his part, Ufere felt that he would be doing himself A World of Good, if he piloted at least three different trades with his own Five! Ufere had heard stories of many Commercial Deaths suffered by Commercial Greats, because they had sunk all their wealth in them and over-trusted the decision. Ufere Cain had made for a spread of Business Focus to Building Materials Venture allotting N2,000,000.00, to Motor Parts Dealership allotting another two million and to a strategically sited eatery the remaining one million naira. For the eatery, Ufere had fought to make sure it was a three-room space in a house overlooking the second gate of a big market in their city of residence with all the nice implication that a goodly number of the buyers and sellers it swallowed and regurgitated on daily basis except on Sundays and national days would not fail to knock on her door. Exulting in the satisfaction of having made a nice decision, Ufere sought an occasion to speak with Agassi Osinachi on the latter’s need to act likewise by extending his business interest to yet another concern. Regrettably, on the two separate occasions he had the chance to do so, he was rebuffed by Osinachi, who made sure he did not save him America’s “Fcuk off you! With your piece of advice shit!”

Agassi Osinachi had wanted to add that he would keep appreciating it like gesture, if Ufere Cain kept for himself his business lectures. While Ufere Cain did not take offence that much at Osinachi’s shocking response to his offered goodwill counseling, no setback nor any thing that resembled it struck Osinachi’s Building Materials’ business choice. Even as Ufere Cain’s three-dimensional commercial initiative was growing rosily, Osinachi’s was doing same rather amazingly from a high patronage of Building Materials by new unstoppable dreamers- to-be-landlord of a decent-looking house. The period in question fell within the one in which Ufere Motor Spare Parts Dealership had come close to giving up the ghost but was supplied with the resuscitating artificial oxygen which his Building Materials Business Arm and Eatery’s could deliver at short notice. It was conceivable: Agassi might have been emboldened by his knowledge of the challenges Ufere had had to grapple with from his Motor Spare Parts’ Venture to address him in the uncharitable manner he had… But was he Ufere Cain Eruom to receive even a half blame for the atrocious hiccups in his Motor Spare Parts’ venture? Surely not. There had been - heartbreaking enough – a sudden explosion of fresh interest in car snatching in their town of residence now by car robbers, next by life-risking car lovers.

This singularly had operated to make Ambitious Car Purchase for just Car Ownership Pride go down and with it a corresponding slump in the quest for the spares of the ones, whose tires still rolled over roads tarred or sandy.

All the same, on a broader level, both Agassi and Ufere, two full friends-now-half, were running a relatively undisturbed business and commanding a host of customers for records of pleasing profit. Between 2017 and 2019, Agassi was in reality the one having the upper hand between the two through his restrictive investment in the then lucrative Building Materials Venture – then with nothing but nice stories to keep telling its teeming givers of benefit of doubt. One would have thought that A New Ufere of Compromise would have dropped his original program to not bury all his funds in one seemingly lucrative business interest. But he did not. He remained unmoved; The Undaunted. Only, sometimes, swallowed the sad saliva its gland would secrete in his mouth and keep waiting for normalization of things in that department through police intervention in car snatching. By the end of the mid-year of following 2020, matters had begun to reshape itself for the better in the business.

Then, in less than a year, the long stable Building Materials Business began to experience its own crisis. Ufere was not taken aback by this, as it was not a new development to him. He made himself keep merely repeating the ritual he had come to know and practise, namely using the proceeds from his now revived Motor Spare Parts and the still blossoming Eatery’s to sustain his Building Materials’. Expectedly, the same was not the case with Agassi. Agassi had no other department to turn to; no other worth investment on which he might lean to arrest the situation. Try like a man he did to endure the downtrend for Tomorrow’s Brighter Clouds but The Overcast Ones persisted always stretching and spilling into a fresh week. Disillusioned, Agassi began to befriend alcohol and to seek the comfort of liberal sex. But these two served to further deplete his increasingly dwindling resources. Dramatically, it was during one of his womanizing sessions in a third rate bar room that a figure loomed behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. It was Ufere! Again! Rejected Mentor and now Half Friend. Ufere, who had continued to float again in the tidal cashes of a hostile commercial current.

Ufere declined Agassi’s surprising but also desperate offer of a glass of whisky, for being in a hurry to attend an important social engagement. Ufere rather paid for the drinks Agassi and his women had had and then dropped a sealed pack on Agassi’s lap with an appeal to him not to open it, until he had reached his house.

In one great demonstration of obedience, Agassi acted as bidden by Ufere, never looking twice at the seal of the pack until he had got home.

And when he did rip it open - lo! – a white polo shirt too attractive to turn down. Just that Agassi with the bleary eyes of an alcoholic could not see it then, the vest had a proverbial line crested on its front… Something about “Don’t put all your egg in one basket.”

It was the first passer-by he met after exiting his room, who near shouted its message in a supporting voice.

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