Friends are a dime a dozen nowadays. Oh, well, I may be wrong if you jump to conclusions that I have assumed wrongly. You may be right and I may be wrong or we are both right. Huh?

The level of selfishness in one’s so-called friends of today is so thick that you don’t need to read your friend’s body language or gauge his mindset as evidenced by what tumbles out of his mouth. It bothers on unbelievable amount of disgust when you eventually discover to your rude shock that this so-called friend is the smelly rat ‘within’ that ‘rats’ on your weaknesses to the assumed enemies on the outside who now turn out to act as worthy friends when your presumed friend has been busy lying to you behind his teeth and watching you closely while you make mistakes that leaf your pages to the world that exposes you as a nothing contrary to your make-belief efforts to make the world believe you are some big deal with no faults of your own. You know this thing about dual personalities, don’t you? The real us that hugs our fears and exposes our weaknesses which we do our utmost humanly best to hide from our enemies and make the mistakes of revealing to these lecherous friends who are hell-bent on pulling you down even when you have not given them any reasons to give you such a ‘back-hand’ treatment. It grieves one’s heart when he observes to his dismay that this life is fast becoming a crude awakening on daily basis when one gets to read about all kinds of crimes being committed by friends against friends. From the beginning of the world, it has been brothers waging war against one another and wasting their lives even on a stage that then was way bigger than any of them could inhabit as master of the universe, how much more today that we live on patches of lands that could hardly provide inheritance for our children when tomorrow comes. Wickedness is now raised beyond our grasp by some mathematical power yet to be properly agreed upon as it keeps increasing on daily basis. People have been on each other’s neck over trivial things like money. Oops! 

Money is the root of all evil, but of course the grace to walk through life with much ease. Coming back to the antics of unworthy friends, one will need all of his strengths to enable him see them for who they are and on time before their wrecking-balls leaking envy is loosed all over one’s life with the attendant damaging  effects.

Share with this so-called friend anything that has to do with your humble background, his earlier confessed love for you will wax cold and evaporate before your very eyes that it leaves you exasperated. Well, of course, that is the best way to figure out these unworthy pretenders to the game of friendship.

I observed a scenario that staggered my mind during the last festive season. No one pays a visit to another these days. These days are pregnant with sordid tales and happenings of breach of brotherly love. You pay a visit to a beer parlour to unwind and celebrate the season with friends; these friends from the belly of earth have already gone ahead of you to contract-out your death to the beer-parlour owner. Heaven help you should God’s grace suddenly depart from you. It becomes your funeral. Who else can you trust? You now trust members of your kindred? Same fears abound. They treat you like you are ostracized and wouldn’t spare you a healthy welcome like it used to be simply because you have achieved a little success in the year sailing pass by.

This teaches you how much envy can ruin great friendships and threatens the peace of the immediate and extended families. Then some of these friends and blood relations will adorn the trait and jackets of a chameleon and confess to the world of their honest friendship for you. Such an avowed and undying love for you is the disguise of their eagerness to hurt you till you lose your last breath. It shadows their stark hatred for you that when they descend with dolorous stroke, no one will have them as suspects for their hand in one’s death. Tufiakwa!

You can detect such crop of friends whom I call unfriendly friends here by praying to God Almighty to help you by exposing such unworthy friends. He does that always. Remember that the Bible urges us to be wiser than the Serpent and gentle as the Dove. Seek and you shall find. Seek wisdom to figure out unfriendly friends that are in operation in your life and the good Lord will give you the grace to ease them out of your life without much drama.

May Heavens deny such friends our backs to plant cudgels in this life and in the life to come! Amen!