In every house there is a throne. It is not made of gold or wood. It is small, rectangular and powered by two batteries. It is called the remote control, and whoever holds it rules the sitting room.

This is the story of the Bello family, five people, one television and a very long Sunday evening.

The Schedule That Wasn’t

At 6 p.m., the family gathered in the sitting room. Everyone had a plan. Papa Bello wanted to watch football. Mama Bello wanted her favourite reality show, in which ten people argue about a house. Ten-year-old Seyi wanted cartoons. Fifteen-year-old Lola wanted a film that she described as “very deep” and her brother described as “very slow”. And little Femi, aged four, wanted to press all the buttons.

The television, a modest old model with a slightly crooked stand, glowed in the corner like an altar. Everyone looked at it. Then everyone looked at the remote, which lay on the table like a small black treasure.

Nobody moved. It was the kind of quiet that comes just before an argument or a war.

Papa Makes His Move

Papa Bello, calm and strategic, reached out first. “Today is a special day,” he announced. “A very important match. I will just take the remote for a moment.”

“For a moment?” said Mama Bello. “You said that last week, and we watched football until midnight.”

“It was a long match.”

“It was a very long argument about one referee.”

Papa Bello tucked the remote under his arm and turned on the match. The screen exploded in green. The commentator shouted something about a corner. Papa Bello leaned forward with the happiness of a man whose spirit had returned home.

Mama Strikes Back

Mama Bello was patient. She went to the kitchen and returned with a plate of fried plantain. She placed it on the table and smiled sweetly. “My dear, would you like some?”

“Yes, thank you,” said Papa, reaching for it with his free hand.

It was a trap. In a flash, Mama’s hand moved. The remote was gone. When Papa looked down, his arm was empty, and the channel had changed to the reality show. A woman in a large hat was crying about a missing handbag.

“What happened?” said Papa.

“It is the final episode,” said Mama.

“It is the final episode of everything,” said Papa, sadly.

The Children Join the War

Seyi saw his opportunity. He waited until Mama was fully absorbed in the drama, then crept across the carpet like a cat. His hand closed around the remote. The channel changed again, this time to a bright cartoon about a talking sponge.

“Seyi!” shouted both parents.

“It is educational,” said Seyi.

“It is a sponge,” said Papa.

Lola, who had been watching the chaos with great contempt, calmly picked up her phone and typed something. Seconds later, the television switched itself to a quiet black-and-white film. She had connected her phone to the television. Nobody had known that was possible.

“It is called technology,” she said, in the tone of a monarch. The family stared. Even Femi stopped pressing buttons.

The Great Disappearance

At 8 p.m., the sitting room descended into total war. The remote was passed, snatched, hidden, found and hidden again. Papa put it behind a cushion. Mama moved it to a flowerpot. Seyi slid it into his shirt. Lola confiscated it and placed it in her pocket, where it was promptly stolen by Femi, who ran down the corridor singing.

The family chased him through the house. They found him under a bed, holding the remote with both hands and pressing every button with deep satisfaction. The television, in the sitting room, was doing something strange. It was changing languages, brightness and volume all at once, and at one moment it displayed a menu that nobody had ever seen.

When Femi finally surrendered the remote, its battery cover was missing and its back was held on with a hairpin. It looked like a tiny wounded soldier.

The Hiding Place

That night, after everyone had gone to bed, Papa Bello crept into the sitting room. He held the remote in his hands and looked at it thoughtfully. Then he opened the cupboard behind the television, placed it inside a large pot and closed the door. “For the next Sunday,” he whispered, “I will be ready.”

What he did not know was that Mama Bello was watching from the doorway. She waited until he left. Then she crept in, took the remote from the pot and placed it in her own secret place, which was inside a bag of rice.

A few minutes later, Lola came, found it and moved it to her room. Seyi followed, took it and placed it under the stairs. Femi, half asleep, picked it up and put it in a shoe.

By morning, the remote was in a shoe, which was in a cupboard, which was behind a door that nobody could remember opening. The family spent three days searching. They found it on Wednesday, in the garden, where it had been taken by the cat.

The Peace Treaty

On Thursday evening, the Bellos held a family meeting. Papa spoke first. “We cannot go on like this. We need a rule.” Mama nodded. “A fair system.” Lola suggested a schedule. Seyi suggested a vote. Femi suggested snacks.

In the end, they agreed on a simple plan. Each person would have one hour of control, in turn, and then pass the remote with a handshake. Papa had football on Sundays, Mama had her show on Tuesdays, the children had Saturdays, and Lola, with great generosity, would choose a film every other Friday.

It worked beautifully for exactly two weeks. Then Papa discovered there was a second important match, and the war began again. But this time, there was a handshake, a plate of plantain and a promise. And in that house, a promise was almost as good as a remote control.

There are many scary sentences in the world. “The exam is open book” is one of them, because it never is. “The network is down” is another. But none of them compares to four short words, said in a calm voice at an ordinary time: “We need to talk.”

This is the story of the Eze family, and the evening their mother turned an ordinary Tuesday into a full-scale investigation.

The Four Words

It was a quiet evening. Chuka was scrolling on his phone. His sister Ada was folding laundry. The youngest, Obi, was pretending to do his homework while actually watching a video of a dancing goat. Their father was asleep in the sitting room with a newspaper on his face.

The kitchen door opened. Mama Eze walked in, wiped her hands on her wrapper and said softly, “We need to talk.”

Everything stopped. The phone went dark. The laundry fell silent. The goat video, which had been playing in the background, suddenly seemed very loud. Obi pressed pause with the speed of a man defusing a bomb.

The Seating Arrangement

Mama Eze did not explain. She simply pulled out a chair at the dining table, sat down and folded her arms. The children understood the rules. They sat facing her, one by one, like people appearing before a very polite court.

“Who wants to start?” she asked.

Nobody did. Chuka stared at the table. Ada studied her fingernails. Obi counted the dots on the tablecloth. Each of them was mentally scrolling through the past week, searching for a crime.

Chuka thought: Is it the broken cup? I replaced it. Ada thought: Is it the phone call last night? I whispered. Obi thought: Is it the goat? She can’t know about the goat.

The Investigation Begins

Mama Eze let the silence work for a full minute. She was a master of silence. It was her favourite tool, and she used it the way a chef uses salt: carefully, and at exactly the right moment.

“I noticed something,” she said at last.

The children leaned in.

“Somebody has been eating the chin-chin.”

A deep sigh passed around the table. It was a sigh of relief mixed with fear. The chin-chin was a sacred matter. A large jar of it stood on the kitchen shelf, prepared for the weekend visit of Aunty Ify. Mama Eze counted it every morning, like a bank manager.

“Somebody,” she repeated, “has been eating it.”

The Suspects

She questioned them one by one. “Chuka, where were you on Sunday afternoon?”

“I was at football.”

“And on Monday?”

“I was at work.”

“Ada?”

“I was studying, Mummy.”

“Studying in the kitchen?”

“It is where the light is.”

“And Obi?”

Obi opened his mouth to speak, but nothing came out. His hand moved to his pocket, from which a small crumb fell and rolled across the table. Everyone watched it travel. It stopped in front of Mama Eze, who looked at it with the gravity of a detective examining a footprint.

The Lecture

What followed was one of the great performances of Nigerian family life. Mama Eze rose and began to speak. She did not shout. She did not need to. She simply listed, in a calm and beautiful voice, every household sacrifice she had ever made.

She spoke of the school fees. She spoke of the jollof she had cooked at 4 a.m. She spoke of the day Chuka caught a cold and she walked three streets to buy ginger. She spoke of the time Ada needed a costume, and she stayed up sewing it. She even mentioned a pair of shoes from 2009.

“And now,” she concluded, “someone cannot even leave the chin-chin alone for Aunty Ify.”

The lecture lasted thirty-five minutes. By the end, even Chuka was close to tears, though he had not touched the chin-chin since Christmas.

The Real Conversation

At last, Mama Eze sat down again. “Now,” she said, “there is something else.” The children tensed. The first matter had been a warm-up. The real subject was coming.

She took a deep breath. “I need one of you to help me with this phone.”

She placed her phone on the table. The screen was filled with notifications. “I have received a message from a lady who says she is a prince,” she said. “She wants to send me money. Is it real?”

The silence returned, but this time it was the silence of three people trying not to laugh. Ada put a hand over her mouth. Chuka stared at the ceiling. Obi began to hum quietly.

“It is a scam, Mummy,” said Chuka gently.

“I thought so,” she said, with great dignity. “But I wanted to be sure. You can never be too careful.”

The Aftermath

She stood up, patted each of them on the shoulder and walked back to the kitchen. At the door, she paused. “And somebody,” she said, without turning, “owes me a new jar of chin-chin.”

Everyone nodded. Obi quietly slid forty naira across the table, which was exactly what remained of his allowance and nowhere near enough.

That night, the three children sat together in the corridor, laughing softly. They had survived the four words. They would survive them again. And somewhere in the kitchen, a mother smiled to herself, closed the chin-chin jar and wrote a small note on the calendar: “Next talk: Friday.”

Some people buy a smartphone and become better organised. Others buy a smartphone and begin a long, emotional relationship with a device that seems to know more than they do.

This is the story of Baba Chuka, a proud man in his fifties, his brand-new phone and the family who had to live through the first month.

The Unboxing

The phone arrived on a Saturday, in a white box with a picture of a happy person on the front. Baba Chuka held it up like a trophy. “This,” he announced, “is the future.”

His daughter Adaeze offered to help set it up. “No, no,” he said. “I know how to do it. I am a man of the world.” He threw the instruction booklet over his shoulder with the gesture of a man who disliked paper. It landed in the plantain bowl and remained there for three weeks.

Within five minutes, the phone asked him to create a password. He typed “password”. It said, “Too weak.” He typed “password123”. It said, “Too common.” He typed his own name. It said nothing, but he felt judged.

The PIN Problem

At last, he created a PIN. He chose a number he would never forget, and then promptly forgot it. The next morning, the phone locked itself and asked for the code. He typed his birthday. Wrong. His wedding date. Wrong. The year of the national football victory. Wrong, though he felt it should have been right.

After five attempts, the phone said, “Please wait one minute.” He waited. Then it said, “Please wait five minutes.” Then fifteen. At one point it said, “Try again in one hour,” and Baba Chuka stared at it like a man who had just been told his own house did not recognise him.

His wife, Mama Chuka, who had been calmly knitting in the corner, said, “Did you write it somewhere?”

“Of course not. That would defeat the purpose of a secret.”

“Then how will you remember it?”

He opened his mouth, closed it, and picked up the plantain bowl, which also contained the instruction booklet.

The Accidental Video Call

The next problem arrived on Tuesday. Baba Chuka wanted to call his old friend Mr. Eze. He pressed a button that looked like a telephone. It was, in fact, a video call button.

Mr. Eze answered, but the screen showed only the ceiling of Baba Chuka’s sitting room, a small part of his ear and, briefly, a close-up of his nose. “Hello? Hello?” said Mr. Eze. “I can only see your nostril.”

“It is the phone,” said Baba Chuka. “It is shy.”

The call lasted twenty minutes. During that time, the camera showed the ceiling, a lamp, the family cat and one accidental view of Baba Chuka’s slippers. Mr. Eze did not mind. He said it was the best conversation they had had in years, because he could not see his friend’s face and therefore did not have to pretend to listen.

The Online Shopping Surprise

By week two, Baba Chuka had discovered online shopping. It was, to him, like a market that came to your house and politely asked what you wanted. He browsed with delight. He pressed buttons with confidence. He added things to a cart, removed them, added them again and, one evening, pressed “Buy Now” on something while looking away.

Three days later, a delivery rider arrived with a large box. Inside was a set of twelve wooden spoons, a pair of pink slippers in the wrong size and a small machine for making ice cream.

“I did not order this,” said Baba Chuka.

Adaeze examined the receipt. “You did. It is your account.”

“Then the phone ordered it itself.”

It was a defence that did not hold, but the ice cream machine was kept anyway, and the family ate surprisingly good ice cream for a week.

The Phone Takes Over

By week three, the phone had begun to talk back. It suggested songs. It reminded him about appointments. It offered to “optimise” his battery, which he agreed to, though he had no idea what that meant. Once, late at night, it spoke aloud to him: “I did not quite catch that.” He nearly fell off the sofa.

“It is spying on me,” he whispered to his wife.

“It is the voice assistant,” she said. “You pressed the wrong button.”

“Then it is a very nosy assistant.”

Mama Chuka sighed and finally took the instruction booklet from the plantain bowl. She wiped it, opened it and began to read. Ten minutes later, she knew more about the phone than he did. Twenty minutes later, she had changed the PIN, recovered his contacts and silenced the voice assistant. Thirty minutes later, she had found the missing ice cream recipe.

The Smart Decision

That evening, Baba Chuka sat beside his wife, watching her thumb glide over the screen like a pianist. He cleared his throat. “My dear,” he said, “I have decided to appoint you as the official manager of the phone.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes. It will free me to focus on bigger matters.”

“Such as?”

He paused. “Such as making ice cream.”

She laughed. He laughed. The phone, sitting on the table, glowed softly, and the screen displayed a notification. “Congratulations. You have become smarter.”

He chose not to ask who it was talking to.

There are many sacred moments in a Nigerian home. The first spoonful of party jollof. The last piece of meat in the pot. The final five minutes of a big football match. And, somehow, every single time, that is exactly when NEPA decides to take light.

Yes, I know the company changed its name years ago. But when the power goes at the worst possible second, nobody shouts a modern name. We shout the old one, with feeling. This is the story of the Adeyemi family and one very long Sunday evening.

The Setup

Papa Ade had been preparing for this match since Wednesday. He had cleared his schedule, reminded everyone twice that nobody should “disturb the television”, and personally supervised the arrival of pepper soup. His wife, Mama Tolu, had cooked enough rice to feed the entire street, because in her experience a big match attracts neighbours the way an open pot attracts flies.

By the 80th minute the sitting room was full. Papa Ade had the best chair. Uncle Segun sat on a stool pretending he did not want the second-best chair. Little Tolu was on the floor with a bowl, and the neighbours from the next flat stood at the door, politely “just passing”.

The score was level. A free kick was awarded. Papa Ade stood up. Then the television blinked once, twice, and the whole house went dark.

The Sound of Collective Pain

I cannot describe the noise that followed. It was not a scream and it was not a prayer. It was a thing in the middle, like a choir of forty people who had all stepped on the same nail.

“Ah! Ah! NEPA!” Papa Ade said, to nobody and everybody. “Is it today? Is it today that you will do this thing?”

Uncle Segun, ever the voice of reason, said calmly, “Switch on the generator.”

There was a short silence, the kind that follows a very bad idea. Everyone looked at Papa Ade. Papa Ade looked at the floor.

The Petrol Question

The generator, affectionately called “Small Thunder”, had been sitting in the corner since the previous Tuesday, when it had swallowed the last of its petrol powering a ceiling fan and a single blender. Nobody had bought more. Everyone had assumed somebody else would.

Papa Ade shook the jerrycan. It made a sad little sound, like a spoon in an empty cup. “There is a small small one inside,” he declared with great confidence.

There was not a small small one inside. There was about one mouthful. Still, a man in his own house must try, so he pulled the cord. Small Thunder coughed. He pulled again. Small Thunder sneezed. By the fifth pull the whole sitting room was giving advice in stereo.

“Pull it harder!”
“Don’t pull it like that, you will spoil it!”
“Open the thing on top!”
“Which thing on top?”

At last the generator roared to life, ran for exactly forty seconds, and died with a dignity that suggested it had done its very best.

The Expert Arrives

This was when Mr. Kelechi from the next flat stepped forward. Every compound has one man like him. He owns no tools and holds no certificate, but he speaks about electricity with the calm of a surgeon.

“It is the transformer,” he said, looking at the ceiling as if it had personally insulted him. “I know these things. They will bring it back by nine o’clock.”

It was a quarter past eight. The match had maybe ten minutes left. Papa Ade stared at him. “Nine o’clock? Mr. Kelechi, how do you know?”

“Experience,” said Mr. Kelechi, and nobody argued, because nobody could prove otherwise. In fairness, his record was not terrible. He had once predicted light would return “soon”, and it did, three days later.

Plan B, C and D

Little Tolu suggested using a phone to watch. Good idea, except the family’s three phones were at eleven, nine and four percent, and the data bundle had expired on Friday. Aunty Ngozi, visiting from Enugu, offered her power bank. It was charged to exactly two percent, which she announced with pride, as if she had saved the day.

Uncle Segun tried the radio, which turned out to have no batteries. Then the family discovered that the only batteries in the house were inside the television remote, so they took them out and put them in the radio. The radio crackled and a commentator said, in the voice of a man who had just seen a miracle, “And that is the winning goal!”

Then the batteries died. Nobody knew which team had scored.

The Great Return

For the next twenty minutes the sitting room became a courtroom. Papa Ade claimed his team had won. Uncle Segun claimed the other team had won. Mama Tolu said nobody was getting dessert until they stopped. Mr. Kelechi, still standing by the door, repeated that light would return at nine.

At exactly 8:58 p.m., with no warning, the bulbs flickered and the whole house burst into light. The fridge hummed. The television came back mid-advert for a detergent. Every phone in the building started charging at once, and somewhere down the street a man shouted, “Up NEPA!” with the passion of a football fan.

Papa Ade turned slowly to Mr. Kelechi. Mr. Kelechi adjusted his shirt with great dignity. “Two minutes early,” he said. “I told you. Experience.”

The match had ended long ago. The result? Papa Ade found out from the next-door neighbour’s six-year-old, who walked past the window and cheerfully announced the score, plus who had cried, plus who had been sent off.

What We Learned

Buy petrol before the match, not during it. Charge your power bank before you brag about it. And never trust a man who says he knows when light will return, unless he is wrong in your favour. As for Papa Ade, he now keeps two full jerrycans next to Small Thunder, and a sign in the sitting room that says: “Match day. No light is an emergency.”

Next time NEPA takes light at the worst moment, remember you are not alone. Somewhere, another family is pulling a generator cord and asking the same question: “Is it today?”