Many years ago, I had a friend and neighbour, Gloria, who was brutally frank. Once, she threatened to cut up a dress I had worn too much. But this story isn’t about my relationship with her ’cause I wasn’t the only one she confronted with her well-intentioned meddlesomeness. Seemed that every teenager in the neighborhood was afraid of her and for a rather hilarious reason. Hilarious to other people, though, not to the teenagers at the time.
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You see, Gloria was a mother. She pushed her kids to do well and she did the same to every young person she knew believing, perhaps as Africans do, that bringing up a child is not the responsibility of the parents alone but of the whole community. Another way of putting it is the African proverb: It takes a village to raise a child.
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You cannot help to train someone you know nothing about. So Gloria took a keen interest in the progress of the youths around. But she wasn’t the most tactful person, if you know what I mean. If she met a young person on the way, she would not just respond to their greeting and keep moving. She would stop and start questioning them like this:
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“Remind me again, whose child are you?”
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“Ok. You were born at the same time as So-and-So, were you not?”
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“That means you’re 17 or 18. So what are you doing now?”
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You’ve taken WAEC,* that’s good. How many credits did you get?”
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“Three credits. That’s too poor. You need at least five credits to get into the university. What about NECO?”*

On and on she would go, asking about JAMB, what you intend to study, whether you are attending extra lessons to improve your grades and so on. And she would insist on getting clear answers to her inquiries. She would top off the conversation with some words of commendation, rebuke, encouragement, a quick prayer, or blessing as the occasion demanded.
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A lovely and caring soul my friend Gloria was, but many of the youths hated that sort of thing: putting them on the spot – scrutinizing their affairs and taking them to task over their mistakes and inadequacies. So if they spotted Gloria from a distance, they quickly made a detour or hid somewhere to escape her interrogation. The unspoken code was, “Mummy Gloria is coming. Run, run, run!”
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But Gloria’s approach, heavy-handed though it seemed to them, helped to keep a lot of young people in the neighbourhood focussed and diligent so that in the event they had to face her, they would have the right responses to her questions, the responses that would make her praise, rather than berate them.
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-The end-
Ⓒ Edith Ugochi Ohaja 2016
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Perhaps you had a Mummy Gloria in your extended family or neighbourhood while growing up, kindly share how your encounters with him or her affected you. Or maybe you have been a Mummy Gloria yourself. How have young people and others responded to your “well-intentioned meddlesomeness”?
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*WAEC in this context refers to O’level exams conducted by the West African Examinations Council.
*NECO in this context refers to O’level exams conducted by the National Examinations Council in Nigeria.
*JAMB here refers to the university admission exams conducted by the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board in Nigeria.
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