My husband and I had been together many, many years. We met when I finished school and was already working. We got married and things were fine but my husband couldn’t hold down a job.
If he got one job today (and he was very good at his job); he would lose it a few months down the line; he was into Computer Engineering, you know, IT.
Many companies were looking for him to come and work for them; he would start the job but maybe, one year or a few months down the line, something would happen, maybe it would be that they didn’t pay on time or that he got another job offer or that he didn’t like the way the company was run, my husband would leave and start at another place, all over again.
At the initial stage, this was ok by me but you know, as we started raising our boys, we needed stability; you know, financial security for me and our children. Though I too was working but one salary alone wasn’t helping us, we needed the two of us to be earning good money, so I was always anxious.
You see, my husband could be out of a job for a few months but in those few months, there would always be a strain on our budget and let me tell you, if a man can’t hold down a job for long, if he is jumping from job to job, then there would be other problems with everything he does.
He wasn’t able to promise me that he would stay and at least build a career on his job; it was even getting to the point that many people began to refer to him as the guy who didn’t stay long on his job and because of that one or two companies didn’t hire him.
For me, it was a spiritual problem. I didn’t see it as ordinary. It meat he may never truly succeed at anything if he didn’t stay long enough. Our children were all boys, I needed their father to be a good example to them, not one that was jumping from job to job and couldn’t even give them financial security.
I then shared my concerns with a senior colleague of mine, about how my husband’s inability to stay on a job was becoming a bother to me. The woman introduced me to a man of God who would pray for us and help my husband become stable; because like I said, his other colleagues who stayed at their jobs were rising fast, you know.
I went to see the man of God o. After I told him what the issue was, he agreed with me that it was a spiritual problem and that he would help us find a solution.
He told me he would prepare something for me to give to my husband to eat that that would tie his soul to the best job on offer and he would excel from there.
My sister, all I wanted to do was help my husband. I also knew the man I was married to would not eat anything any pastor or man of God asked him to eat, he wouldn’t. He would scoff and tell me to go and rest but I was the one who saw him wasting his potentials, his opportunities, his life in general. His mates were doing big things, building houses, driving big cars and I knew my husband was better than all of them by far! By far, far!
And so I still collected the thing, it was actually and egg, boiled egg but I guess it was no ordinary boiled egg so I cooked rice and added the boiled egg to the food I gave to my husband that period.
He ate it, of course but nothing happened, o.
A few months after he got a new job, he began to tell me he didn’t like working late and that his new place required him to work late every day. I was becoming apprehensive that the egg didn’t work, so I called the man of God.
He then told me to wake up in the midnight and stand naked before my husband and pray over him. that was when wahala started o.
I was just praying, I was praying and chanting the Psalms that the man of God gave me to chant when my husband woke up. He said, “Blessing, what are you doing?”
I said, “I am praying for you. They said I should pray for you…”
He got up, he said, “Naked? They said you should pray for me naked?” I told him, yes, because the one I did before did not work!
Haaaa! He gave me gbosa! On my face! I fell down gbam!
He said I was planning to kill him. so I was angry, I said, “What will I do with your dead body?”
We quarreled that night, he called my family that midnight, he called them and called his mother to come and see me, o!
You know, in my heart if I was doing him wicked, I would have been afraid but I told him to go ahead and call his entire village, he should go and call those abroad as well, I meant him no harm, I wanted what was best for him, that was why I did what I did.
Of course they all came, they came to our house; his mother accused me of doing her son juju, she said I took his destiny and I was using it to shine, that I was the one who had been doing him juju for years…
Hummn, they went searching around the house and came up with some juju stuff, I swear…it wasn’t me who planted those things there. you know, they saw old naira notes in the ceiling.
My sister, I have never had any reason to go to the ceiling, the old naira notes there were new to me; maybe the previous tenants put it there, I don’t know!
They said it was proof I was using his head to achieve my own destiny…what won’t people say?
I told them calmly, “I am not using his head, I want him to be better in life, that is why I did what I did.”
We are separated I maintain my innocence and till today he is still jumping from job to job with no future ambition and has not settled. Oya tell me, am I the one still doing him?
(Series written and edited by Peju Akande and based on true stories)