Home Away from Home with Abi Adeboyejo
Email: abi.adeboyejo@yahoo.com Twitter: @abihafh
I never thought I would one day listen to as many news programmes as I do now. It is not as if there is anything cheering going on these days, is there? Reporters won’t let us forget the fact that there’s war in Syria, an earthquake in China and riots in Cyprus. At the end of the hour-long BBC news, a quick flash of the latest attack by Boko Haram in Nigeria covers the African side of disasters, if there are no rampant epidemics to report from the horn of Africa. Financial news is no better, at least here in the UK, as hardly a month goes by without some tax increase, decrease, re-organisation or creation which actually means the same thing: more taxes!
Listening to the news is almost as relaxing as a sizzling cup of herbal tea on a cold night (almost!). Not because I enjoy listening to disasters from around the world, but because I am constantly aware of the world around me and I know (or I think I know) about things that may affect my life. Take new changes to laws: they are always highlighted and explained on news and other current affairs programmes in the UK. No one can claim to be ignorant of these laws because they are constantly in the news, explained and discussed in plain English. This means it is not in the garbled tongue twisting fashion some Nigerian reporters are known to deliver news stories, spouting big words like they just swallowed the Webster’s dictionary (a fake version, though, because their pronunciation is also usually wrong).
Listening to news on current affairs and financial matters shouldn’t be a big deal to an average educated Nigerian. It is a culture we all have to develop, although if you are reading this article in QED then you are already on the right track. However, many people don’t develop this habit and go about life gleaning information from unreliable sources and end up getting themselves into avoidable trouble. This is particularly true of women, who tend to rely on their husbands or men generally to fill them in on financial and political events, as if they can’t read or listen to news themselves and form their opinion. I am not picking on women but so many older women in the UK are now in all sorts of financial trouble simply because they did not pay attention to the issues that were at hand a few years ago. They weren’t used to dealing with laws, banks, financial advisers and paperwork and ended up being duped.
In the last 15 years or so many Nigerian women got work permits to work as nurses in the UK. Being hardworking and money hungry (or why else would they leave the comfort of their sunny cities to freeze in nursing homes outside London), these women worked all the shifts available and could soon afford enough money to pay the deposit for properties. But most of these women were not used to following financial trends in the news. They didn’t pay attention to programmes that discussed the problems with buying properties in certain areas. In fact, many of them could not be bothered to read the financial details of the contracts for the purchase of the houses they bought. They didn’t do comparative house searches or watch informative property programmes on how to get reasonable mortgages.
Financial advisers were happy to lead these gullible women to invest huge proportions of their savings into mortgages that could not realistically be paid off before these women retired. Some were sold interest only mortgages, which basically meant they were renting the property and these poor women didn’t know. They had huge housewarming parties and sent pictures of their new houses to all their relatives around the world, showing that they had finally ‘made it’. Fast forward to the present day and many of these women are retiring and finding out that they made very bad investments when they bought their houses for all the reasons I mentioned above.
Many of these women had also been persuaded to re-mortgage the houses and so they had taken off whatever little profit they could have made from the sale of such houses even now. And of course the value of most of the houses has fallen even below the prices they bought them so many now owe banks money or will do so in the next few years when the full payments on the debts are due.
I am not sure I’ve explained the whole sorry mess properly, but the message here is that women need to learn to pay attention to financial matters, political issues, changes in laws and anything that men listen to as much as they do on home videos and music shows. I’d watch comedies and soaps all day if I could, but being ignorant is not an option so I make a conscious effort to keep myself informed of all that concerns me. There is a reason why there is so much information in the media. It is so that people can be made aware of things going on. Now that we are in the Internet age, it is even easier to access information when we need it. Facebook has its merits, but vital financial and political local and world news dissemination is not one of them.
Men pretend they enjoy reading newspapers and financial issues. They don’t. They only read them because they know that they need the information on those pages when they enter into business transactions. It is now more important than ever for women to pay attention to all these details because one never knows when one will have to make big financial decisions. Even decisions as to which countries are safe to go on holiday are only made wisely if one is aware of the state of affairs in other countries. Be informed.
