Ladies, Beware the Suitor Con - Guest Post by Chinwe Obi

This is indeed a tough one for me to comprehend as I still cannot fathom the extent to which a full grown healthy man can go to extract some good money out of an innocent, unsuspecting and most times desperate single lady. This is my story as it happened to me, hence the need to warn my fellow single ladies.

I attend one of the very popular and fast growing churches in the city of Lagos, been there for a very long time and have given up the hope of marrying from there as my thinking was that most of these guys have actually confirmed their insecurity because most of the single ladies in the same age brackets as these guys are better off financially, so they are afraid to even start up a conversation in most cases due to the fear of rejection. As a result of this, I decided to start visiting other churches and one of these churches won my heart by the way and manner they conduct things and I decided to stick with it for a while.

Sometime in February I decided to go for the second service instead of the usual first service that I attend (of this new church I discovered), I came in early and decided to sit in the car for a while just to while away time, I was there for sometime before a metallic color Toyota Rav 4 came and parked beside me, I stepped out of the car and started walking towards the church building; as I walked I heard someone call out excuse me, I turned and it was the guy that had just parked beside me.

He walked up to me and introduced himself as Kingsley Anyanwu (this was the names he gave me so I’m not sure if its real), works with Schlumberger as a rig engineer, was transferred to Lagos from Port Harcourt last December and is looking for a church to identify with, so it was his first time visiting the church.  I smiled and put out my hand for a hand shake, introduced myself, welcomed him to church and told him that he’s at the right place.

After service he asked me to have lunch with him, I suggested we go to the food court at “The Palms” (just for us to be in the open crowd incase if he’s a serial killer). After lunch, we talked freely like old friends that was just catching up on lost times to the extent that we knew almost everything about each other in that one hour, afterwards we exchanged numbers and went our separate ways and I didn’t hear from him again until a week to my birthday he called to ask if we could have dinner on my birthday, I said it was ok since I had broken up with the guy I was dating earlier in the year so I was single at that time and had nothing planned for my birthday. We decided to meet and have dinner in one of the restaurants in Ikoyi by 7pm.

I arrived the venue at exactly 7pm and called him from the car, he said he was running late as he was coming from the mainland (that was when my suspicion began, if you are coming from the mainland at that time you will obviously be driving against traffic so why will he say he was stuck in traffic?), while I waited we exchanged a few text messages and the final one was for me to come to his house instead as he doesn’t know when he will be out of the traffic, needless to say how angry and furious I was at this time, I told him I was sorry that I cannot go to his house as I do not know him well enough so I went home angry, irritated and disappointed on my birthday.

He did not respond to my text neither did he call me back, this went on for a few weeks. I decided he wasn’t worth the space on my phone contact list and deleted his number as I do not want to be tempted to ever call him. 3 days after I deleted him from my phone, he called to say that he has been away on rig assignment and is back in Lagos and wants to have lunch, (fast forward 3 lunch dates and a movie date) we were back to been best of friends and he has asked me out and I was still checking him out to be sure he was real as I met him randomly.

One faithful Friday night he called to say he was attacked by armed robbers on the third mainland bridge and they made away with his laptop, cash, ATM cards and other valuable items, and since it was a weekend that he needed some cash to do stuff. At first a bell went off in my head and I asked him why his phone wasn’t stolen as well, he stuttered a bit and said he hid the phone from then, I decided to take his response with a pinch of salt.

Fast forward 3 weeks from that day he called to say he was on the verge of closing a deal with an agent, he wanted to buy a land where he will build a house for us to live in and asked me if I would like to live in Gbagada as that was where he’s negotiating the purchase of the land. He said he needed me to pay =N=50,000.00 naira into his GTBank account as he has issued the agent a cheque of 9million naira and his bank manager told him he needs to leave at least =N=50,000.00 in his account. That was when the second alarm bell went off in my head, I told him to structure the payment with the agent that by the end of the month he should have enough in his account to settle the bills.

After this, he didn’t call me for another 2 weeks, when he finally did, he said he had an accident and needed some money to sort out the hospital bills as GTBank is having network challenges at that particular time, I called my friend that works for the same bank and she confirmed otherwise, so I called him back to say I use GTBank as well and do not have access to my cash as we were both experiencing network failure (nice one huh??). I think he figured I was too wise to be conned so he stopped calling me and his phone has been off till this day.

Don’t get me wrong, I did not just become wise in one day, I have fallen victim a few times so now my radar is up and active, each time I meet a guy and he says hello, I read a million and one meanings into the hello to see if it’s sincere or has an agenda attached to it. The truth is that it is a very funny and uncomfortable way of living but it’s not what I do by choice, it’s as a result of what I have experienced in my race as a devoted Christian and in my journey of finding true and real love.

My very close friend decided that it was time I made a movie out of my life story as regards to relationships and I said why limit it to just a movie why not write a book also and we started sampling titles, now we have settled for the title “The Journey” and have started working on it so watch out for this space.

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The writer of this guest post, Chinwe Obi, has started a blog. Please feel free to visit and leave a comment - www.houseofemeralds.blogspot.com