Day 8: Wildcard wildness - BBNaija

For the past week, the question on everybody’s lips has been , "who are they?" The announcement that there were two Wildcard Housemates got everyone – Housemates and the Big Brother audience – wondering who they may be. If they were discovered, they would go home.  If not – they’d get to stay on just like any other ordinary Housemate, and – of course – there was no shortage to the speculation.

Unfortunately for everyone concerned, there was never much to base the speculation on. The Wildcards weren’t given any secret mission to complete – they were, in effect, indistinguishable from ordinary Housemates, but with the extra risk of going home early. 

Audience members were similarly in the dark – until Thursday, at least, when the identities were revealed in Diary Sessions to which the rest of the Housemates were not privy.  It turns out that Maria and Pere were the dodgy duo, although neither of them knew the identity of the other.

Maria expressed regret at having to lead her fellow Housemates on, because she felt that they could be friends outside of the House and hated the thought of their relationship starting out with her being dishonest.  Pere, for his part, wanted to ask Big Brother how he’d been doing in the deception game – it should come as no surprise, Biggie is not in the habit of satisfying the Housemates’ curiosity.  Pere, it seems, would have to wait until Sunday to find out how well his deception had been going.

Or perhaps not – after the Saturday night party, Saga, Nini and Arin came to the conclusion that Beatrice was one of the Housemates, and then proceeded to make their case to two other Housemates.  Unfortunately – and somewhat ironically – the two Housemates they were trying to convince were – you guessed it – Maria and Pere, who were probably feeling pretty safe, at that point.

When the time came for the Housemates to drop their votes – this is how things went down:

 

To save you the effort of counting, this is how many times each of the Housemates were thought to be one of the Wildcards by the time voting ended:

Liquorose: 10

Jaypaul: 10

Beatrice: 7

Yerins: 6

Emmanuel: 2

Princess: 1

Yousef: 1

Saskay: 1

Niyi: 1

Arin: 1

Everybody else: 0

As is pretty obvious from these numbers, there was a general consensus that Liquorose and Jaypaul were the two wildcards, with ten votes each. This kind of consensus would be impressive if it also had the benefit of being accurate.  Beatrice and Yerins also came up as a pair that was considered to be Wildcards, with seven and six votesd respectively, and – like Liquorose and Jaypaul – were typically nominated as a pair, which would suggest either some really suspicious behaviour on their part, or collusion between the other Housemates.

Both the Wildcards picked Whitemoney as one of the Housemates most likely to correctly pick them as the secret Wildcards – one of them was actually right. While he missed Maria, Whitemoney correctly named Pere as one of the Wildcards – quite an insight from the Housemate who’s been stuck in the kitchen for most of the week.

For some reason, Cross and Tega seemed to struggle putting up two names, with the latter seeming to come close to tears. How she's going to handle it when it comes to actually nominating people to be voted off is anybody's guess.  After all, it's only going to get harder – and more emotional – from here.

What was mathematically obvious from the very one-sided – and very wrong – guesses of so many of the Housemates is that Peace, in her role as Head of House, would not be casting the deciding vote during the evening's live show even if she did mange to guess them correctly (which she didn't), meaning that Maria and Pere were safe.  As of that moment, they became dyed-in-the-wool, fair dinkum Housemates.  What is not all that clear is how they are going to fit in now that the rest of the Housemates know they are accomplished sneaks.  Perhaps being good at lying is not the best way to endear yourself to your fellow Housemates.  Nevertheless, they are now in it to win it, and all the other Housemates' odds just got a little longer.

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