Sorry, It's now e-payment.

Aliyu, a middle-age man with separatist beliefs showed up on a hot sunny afternoon at a local grocery store, after years of ostracizing himself from everything called modern, with a large dark-colored pouch about the size of a soccer ball.

Some years back, the store was only a small area with a few shelves of food items on display but now to Aliyu's surprise, it's about fifteen times his farm and now filled with eye-catching items of all sorts, that even the most local person cannot resist. 

Several years back, Aliyu woke up from a deep sleep and felt everything around him was changing too quickly from what they used to be. He felt modernity was causing so much insanity and he would rather remain sane. He therefore made a personal decision to stop interacting with everyone and everything that showed any semblance of this change he resented. He became self-indulgent and adjusted a lot about his life to suit his new-found belief. He stopped interacting with neighbors, stopped going to the market, stopped spending his money, and started planting all he ate at his backyard farm until the yields became disappointing and insufficient to meet his growing demand for food.

In his fully-fledged haughty and unapologetically superior demeanor, Aliyu threw the dark pouch on the wicket where one of the sales representatives was and said 'open it, count it and let me know how much i have in there; afterwards divide the amount into four, use one part to get as much yam as it can buy, one part for everything vegetables, one part for condiments and palm oil and of course the last part for garri - the last food handed down by our ancestors when they were leaving for heaven.'

Trained to be respectful and handlers of all unpleasant situations, the sales representative, Ruto, pulled the raffia rope off the pouch carefully and peeped slowly into the content of the bag. Much to her surprise and with a mixture of amazement and disappointment, Ruto muted 'sir, what are these whitish shell-like piece of art that you have in this bag? It appears to me that you may have come to the wrong store. We are not an artifact collection store or an antique preservation outlet, we sell groceries here'.

Aliyu laughed sheepishly and shouted with a look wrapped with anger 'where is Busari, the owner of this store', rats like you go into hiding when my cat gallantly walk around. Get me Busari now', he shouted further with a higher-pitched voice. A few shoppers glanced at his direction when he raised his voice the second time at Ruto.

Ruto, unsure of what was going on and still trying to recover her breath from the verbal tornado erupted on her, zigzagged towards the manager's office and said 'Oga, there is a situation at my wicket, a certain man is acting funny and he mentioned your name during our conversation'.

Busari - the manager, coming from his office to fully understand what could be the issue, spotted Aliyu from a distance. It's being a while I saw him last and he really looked more and more unkempt, the manager thought in his mind as he approached the wicket where Aliyu stood.

'Busari, you mean you have taken this modernity stupidity to a higher stage. You have gone to the level of adding insult to injury by importing ignorant little rats into this community who cannot even identify the means of business transaction that our forefathers bequeathed unto us - I mean the cowries. So, this is the best you can bring out of your years of living in the big city and constantly claiming times are changing and we should change with time'.

Busari, trying to ensure the conversation does not create a scene in the store, moved closer to the loose pouch on the wicket and shoveling through the whitish objects with his hands exclaimed 'Baba Aliyu, you can't be serious, cowries as a means of business transaction in this age and time. Where have you been? Everything in this store is now paid for by electronic means - I mean e-payment'.

Aliyu could not believe his ear. His mind immediately flashed back to the fifty other pouches of cowries, twice the size of what he brought to the store, that he kept secretly in his roof. His eyes gazed swiftly at the calendar on the wall close to this wicket where he stood. It's August 1, 2014. Could Busari be saying that cowries are no longer accepted as at this date? Something in his mind suggested to him that he might have been living behind the times.

There is nothing like being cut off from reality, whether it is as a result of arrogance or ignorance or due to the impact of e-revolution that societies across the world are going through. 

Indeed, it leaves much to be desired when one tries to acquire today's needs with yesterday's means - showing up in the Metro, Lidl or Walmart of our time with a pouch of cowries as a means of exchange.

The pace at which technological changes are impacting our lives now is unprecedented and phenomenal to say the least. From religion to business to relationship to parenting, there is practically no aspect of our lives that is left untouched by this wind of innovation and newness blowing across the world. For examples online market places are increasingly wiping out traditional face-to-face market locations and e-books are obsoleting hard cover books. In an aspect of my professional space, the long-hour, arduous task of manually milking cows is now handled by robots - yes robots, and with the revolution we are seeing in recent years in robotic science and engineering, some of today's high-paying jobs will be next in line for robots to take over.

Globally, we are in the middle of change and we cannot ignore it. We are at a time when we either innovate or relocate at personal, organizational or societal levels. We are in the middle of history and we can either add to it or rewrite it, we cannot remove from it or destroy it. 

As a student of strategic management, I learnt about destructive innovation and how big corporations and organizations are redefining tomorrow's products through today's processes and are establishing themselves in their blue ocean spaces, which guarantee sustained profitability.

One thing is clear in this wave of advancement and never-before experienced scientific and technological evolution, we cannot show up in today's store with yesterday's means of exchange. 

We can save ourselves the pain and shame of being told 'sorry it's now e-payment' by responding to the wind of change blowing around us. The world is not waiting for us to be ready, it's rotating anyways.