Bizwoman gets death as reward for good deeds

Bizwoman gets death as reward for good deeds

People do good in this life for various reasons. There are those whose motivation is the payback they expect from their beneficiaries, like when politicians distribute food, cash and other provisions to the masses because they want their votes in return. Another category of good doers want God to bless them. To some others, however, helping others is a calling or a natural burden. Such people are always happy to do good or put a smile on someone’s face. One thing that is certain, though, is the belief that doing good or helping others attracts blessings both here on earth and in the hereafter. The two main religions preach the virtue of goodness or helping others in need, and the rewards that should follow those who do good. It is, therefore, an irony that doing good sometimes brings misfortunes to people instead of blessings.

An international businesswoman based in Kano recently paid the supreme price for her kind nature. The Kogi state-born woman was richly blessed, traveling to Canada and Dubai frequently to buy goods for sale in her boutique. She was married to a high ranking government official from Ondo state, and they had five kids. One would have expected that her five children would be a handful of responsibilities for her, but her kind nature did not allow such seeming selfishness. There was this aunt of hers, her mother’s sibling, who had two sons. Those guys only had formal education up to secondary level. And the older son was stuck in the village behaving like a mentally deranged person. So, this kind-hearted wealthy woman decided to help the younger son of her aunt to advance in education since his parents could not afford further studies for him. She decided to send him to Canada to acquire university education.

But that turned out to be the biggest mistake of her life. For unknown to the woman, her auntie was a witch and she had sacrificed the prosperity of her two sons to her fellow witches, which was why the older son was useless in the village. She had made a covenant with her fellow witches that her two sons would be nobodies in life. So, when the woman saw that her niece was trying to make somebody out of her younger son, she took offence but not in the physical. She decided to ruin her financially in the spiritual realm because, as she later confessed, it was because her niece was rich that she was able to stick her nose into something that did not concern her.

Suddenly, the woman and her husband began to suffer hardship. First, her husband lost his job in mysterious circumstances. Then, armed robbers emptied her big one-stop boutique. And the armed robbers did not stop there. They visited their home and carted away every valuable thing including some of their cars. And the only car remaining began to have problems until they were unable to finance the repairs and sold it off. Then they relocated to the woman’s house in the village. After some time, the husband returned to Kano to ask his friends to help him secure another job but to no avail. Eventually, he got a woman to assist him but had to marry her as a precondition, and she was not willing to share him with his wife. Unable to continue with the suffering, the man abandoned his wife in the village and married his benefactor. The hitherto robust businesswoman now became emaciated, living at the mercy of the villagers who offered her handouts. Everyone pitied her because she was good to them when the going was good for her, and they would give her some tubers of yam or other farm produce on their return from their farms. Some would ask her to follow them to the farm to collect one food item or another. That was how she sustained herself, her children and mother, being an only child.

While all this was going on, she visited some prayer houses and everywhere she went, she was told that it was her aunt that was behind her travails, and her sin was daring to send her nephew abroad. She was told that her aunt afflicted her with poverty so she would not be able to feed, talk less of sending someone overseas.

Eventually, the first son of the previously wealthy woman sent for her to come and stay with him in Lagos. Excited, she left the village and arrived Lagos but never got to her son’s house. She fell from the okada that was ferrying her to Ikorodu and because she had become hypertensive due to her financial predicament, she went into shock and died on the spot. Mission accomplished, the witch later confessed the evil she did to her niece and kicked the bucket too.