BN Hot Topic: Fashionably Late or Tardy Barbie

When Valentine’s day lands on BN Hot Topic day, it kinda takes the shine off the seriousness of whatever topic we want to discuss. However, I shall try! I shall indeed.  First off, I’ve been dying to say this… Michelle Bello’s FLOWER GIRL was off the hook! I had such a fantastically amazing, superb, **insert many more adjectives here please** time. From the canapes to the bants in the cinema to the fact that I got to hug Tiwa Savage. Yeah, I did. (We’ve already established that I’m shameless when it comes to celebrities that I absolutely adore!) Anyway, the movie’s going to be in the cinemas from today so you guys should go and watch. Damilola Adegbite and the guy with the absolutely gorgeous lips did a great job. I don’t think I paid any attention to what the guy was saying because I was just fixated on those lips and that’s saying something. Even though my darling Chris Attoh was in the movie as well but for some reason my heart was just doing tudun tudun tudun for the guy with the gorgeous lips. So, anybody who has the hook up for  that dude would have made my Valentine’s day an absolute delight.

Another great thing about the Flower Girl premiere yesterday was the fact that I’d gone there with the mind set that like all other event, they were probably going to start at the earliest, 3 hours later than they were billed to. I was pleasantly surprised. They didn’t start bang on time but we didn’t have to wait and wait and wait and wait ***catches breath*** till we were able to see the movie.

Nigerians who live in Nigeria have been allowed to believe that when an event is billed to start at 7pm it actually means it will start at 9.15pm. It’s such a phenomenon that it has it’s own name “African Time”.  So you find someone saying “They wrote 3pm on the invite but you know they wont start till 6pm. There’s no need to rush” More often than not, this is the case. However, I asked a couple of event organizers why their events didn’t start at the times they were billed to and I got a varied range of responses:

“We don’t want to start when the hall isn’t full”
“The public address people didn’t set up on time so we couldn’t start”
“There was an event in this same venue and those people didn’t finish on time“

According to my friend, Halima, we’re just indisciplined and badly behaved “Imagine someone asking me to come for an interview at 9.30am and they’re not in their office at that time. Whatever happened to leadership by example” I laughed at her and told her that she’d better not take it as a cue to become tardy or her tushy would be out in the unemployment market forever! But it did give reason for a pause.

What is African time? Why do we go late for events? Is it an “in thing” to be “fashionably late”? Why don’t we have a proper concept of timing? Is it a “Nigerian Thing”? Something in our genetic frame work? If so, do we do the same thing abroad? Someone once said that we were generally tardy because we didn’t have UK-style efficient public transportation.

What do you guys think? Let’s discuss.

Photo credit: depositphotos.com