STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT
Pa Chima did not stop telling people, who cared to listen to him, about the need to make good use of any favourable occasion without losing valuable time. People living around him wondered why he remained in abject poverty without any breakthrough. In most cases, he would go on memo lane to remember his past of wasted opportunities and tell his neighbours, especially the youths, mainly out of self pity, to make good use of favourable occasions as soon as they come.
Pa Chima, as he was fondly referred to, was a man of seventy-two years of age. He was lonely as nobody knew his wife and children. He was born in the palace of a king who was his father. Though he was brought up in the palace of a king, his old age was spent in penury and abject poverty. Though Pa Chima could be said to have been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, his parents were not the doting type; they were strict and ready to send him to school.
He attended primary and secondary schools in the country and he was later sent abroad, on his insistence, to study. When he got there, he felt that he had escaped from the strict control of his parents and he could do anything he wanted. He started to live a wayward life involving himself in gambling, immorality and other social vices. Most times, he would be arrested by the London police for night crawling but he would be let off the hook because his father was known to be influential. Meanwhile, he had dropped out of school and concealed this fact from his parents. It got to a time his father contemplated bringing him back home but his mother prevailed on him not to do so.
After living in London for ten years, Pa Chima was deported home after he had been arrested for raping, charged to a court and found guilty of the offence. He was deported without achieving anything and he could not account for his stay abroad. When he arrived the country, his parents pardoned him and encouraged him to settle down by giving him to start a business of his own. He told them that he would go into the business of selling American photocopying machines and his parents gave him two million Naira to start the business. However, Pa Chima didn't learn from his past mistakes as he continued his wayward and wanton ways of life. He wasted the money and after some months he could not account for the money.
Meanwhile, his brothers and sisters were doing well and his parents thought that they should not give up on him so that he would not become a liability on his brothers and sisters. They got him a wife and so after he had his own family, they thought that being a family man would help him out of his wanton living. They set him up in a business again with a large sum of money which he wasted. It was at this point in his life that his father died and soon after he lost his mother in a fatal motor accident. His brothers and sisters neglected him and when things were rough with him, his wife abandoned him and took away his children.
He had since then become a lonely man, a failure who found solace only in telling people who cared to listen the story of his life and urged them not live a life of wasted opportunities as he had lived but strike while the iron is hot.