A happy couple on their wedding day. In most African societies, weddings are a family affair and banks have very little to do with them. Fotosearch
Q. Three years ago, my nephew held a church wedding. He took a bank loan to finance some of the expenses. I had asked him not to take that route, but he was madly in love and adamant.
He later lost his job as a banker and started drinking heavily, perhaps in the hope that alcohol would cool his stress.
A few weeks ago, his wife, who was repaying the loan, walked out on him. My distraught nephew is now issuing threats and is not speaking to any family member. We want him to sober up first, but we don’t know how.
Your question has three important threads which are worth considering before we can help your nephew. Let me explain. Getting married is not an emergency even if one is madly in love. For this reason, it is difficult to understand why your nephew took a loan to get hitched up. Why didn’t you help him make the right decision at that point?
Your duty as an uncle or aunt would have been better discharged at that time, with you prevailing upon him to wait until he was more stable in his job and could afford a wedding.
Alternatively, you should have done what most close relatives do; which is helping organise the wedding. Raising funds would have been part of your duty in this regard.
By the way, where are his parents in this crisis? What role did they play then and now? In most African societies, weddings are a family affair and banks have very little to do with them.
This then brings me to the next issue. How does one go to a bank and seek funding for a wedding? I know things have changed in this digital age, but I still find it difficult to relate to the idea of a loan application that states that the purpose is to get married because the applicant is madly in love and parents, uncles, cousins and aunts are not available to help.
As a bank manager, I would see red written all over the application and would consider it a likely case of poor management of personal affairs. I would decline the application.
This then leads me to the next thread in your question, which is the fact that he has now lost his job. You do not tell us why he lost his job, so all we can do is speculate.
Is it possible that his poor management of personal affairs led to dismal performance at work? For a man who needs a bank loan to get married, and whose relationship with the extended family is so poor that they are unavailable to help, I am left to wonder what else is wrong.
You imply that he started drinking heavily after he got married. Are you sure? Is it possible that you became more aware of his drinking after the big and lavish wedding?
You tell us that his wife, who has since left him, was responsible for paying the loan. Shame and scandal on your family! How can an African girl finance her own wedding in a self-respecting family?
All this leads me to wonder what might have led a hard working, decent girl to fall “madly in love” with your nephew. What could have happened to the poor girl? Was it his good looks or was it the promise so many women accept from men with psychopathic tendencies?
“Marry me and I will stop drinking,” he might have promised her. Many such men tell sob stories about how they did not receive enough love from their parents and how it has led to their heavy drinking and how only true love can fill the void left by childhood trauma of rejection.
Taken on a guilt trip
A decent, hard working, well-educated girl from a good home is then taken on a guilt trip about how she is lucky to have him and how God must have planned their meeting and wedding.
Did your nephew marry such a girl? Did the poor girl fall for the charm of your deceitful nephew whose parents are no longer available to arrange his wedding?
Three years is usually long enough for such a girl to discover the truth, i.e. that she married a lazy, selfish, wife-beating, insecure shadow of a real man – totally lacking in ambition and happy to let her pay his loan.
Her mother must have warned her that she could not get him to stop drinking. The day of reckoning has come, the chips are down and she has now to go back to her mother.
Your nephew, the proverbial cry baby, is threatening to kill himself, beat her up, take away their child, and most importantly for him – never to stop drinking!
This third thread in your question is also important because in a sense, it is your real question: “where did things go so wrong for your nephew, and why is he such a mess today?”
Now that he has neither wife nor job, and now that you have offered to help, you might do well to have him evaluated by a psychiatrist who might tell you whether your nephew has a treatable disorder or not.
Often, alcohol abuse is a symptom of an underlying mental illness.
PAYE Tax Calculator
Note: The results are not exact but very close to the actual.
