SIGNS YOU DO NOT HAVE A GOVERNMENT

IF IN THIS MILLENNIUM THESE THINGS ARE STILL NORMAL WHERE YOU LIVE, THEN YOU DON´T HAVE A GOVERNMENT, YOU HAVE A GROUP OF CRIMINALS AT THE HELM OF AFFAIRS IN YOUR COUNTRY. YOU CANNOT BE LIVING IN THE 17^TH CENTURY IN 2014. THERE IS NO SANE JUSTIFICATION TO WHY ANYBODY SHOULD LIVE UNDER THESE INHUMAN CONDITIONS;

GRINDING PEPPER ON STONE

PRIMITIVE FARMING TECHNIQUE

FETCHING WATER FROM THE WELL

COOKING WITH FIREWOOD

WITHOUT ELECTRICITY

WITHOUT AN AFFORDABLE QUALITY HEALTH SYSTEM

CHILD LABOUR

WAR

STOP THE ICE BUCKET THING, NOW!

  I love and appreciate the fact that many people are responding massively to this social awareness call to ALS, especially world superstars. I must be honest that prior to the ice bucket thing I did not know anything about the ALS myself, I believe it is among the sicknesses that are unjustly classified as unknown or strange because only a little percentage of the world population suffer from it which is why a lot of world governments and even world rich organizations do not allocate any or enough money into its scientific investigation for the purpose of finding a cure for it.

  But after this massive publicity stunt, I am sure I will never forget what the ALS stands for, my heart will always be with those who suffer from it, and most importantly too, I shall try to donate my little widows might, especially financially to the cause, notwithstanding, I must admit that I am waiting eagerly to see the person that will put an end to the ice bucket challenge thing that has suddenly turned into a trend, where some people are grossly bastardizing the good intention of whoever it was that started the honorable feat in the first place. We cannot do this forever, there are other issues affecting the world that needs part of our attention too, with all due respect to ALS victims. ALS is a sickness which cure is yet to be discovered but the cure to the millions of persons dying in the world today as a result of hunger is known, FOOD, and in some part of the world we still continue to throw edible foods into the dustbins, in fact, one school of thought says that more food are wasted in the western world than what is actually consumed in some part of the world.

  People are dying everyday in one unjust war in some part of the world, what are we doing about it? in what way are we pressurizing our government to cease selling or handing weapons to those who are using it to terrorize innocent world citizens?

  I know it is cool to have the world see your name mentioned and then see you take up the ice bucket challenge, but after the ice bucket challenge what next? Some people are even eager to do the ice bucket thing even if they were not nominated in the challenge chain just to hype their status, how much have you given to the cause? Why do we like to be seen giving to the needy? Or presuming to assist others while only arrogantly satisfying our ego? People need assistance every day, some stars have their families and community members going through worst situations, but they won´t assist them because the world won´t see them on social media and because a camera won´t be there to showcase it.

  The positive side of the whole hype about the ice bucket challenge is that it has proved that the world is a small community and that if we really desire, we can all be interconnected somehow. I hope to see us use the opportunity that the social network has given to us to bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots, to continue to genuinely feel a part of this same world, to rise every day and at every moment to defend the cause of the powerless against their oppressors, to stand constantly and not occasionally against injustice, to step forward every now and again in the favor of those who cannot stand for themselves.

  Please, enough of this ice bucket thing and let us attend to other world problems too.

 

WHEN LATE CHIEF OBAFEMI AWOLOWO MADE A SIGN OF VICTORY IN THE MOON IN LAGOS

  I was around 9 years old then in Lagos, when I realized that if you gave men the chance; they can control your mind. It was sometime in 1979 - a little before the general elections that ushered in the 2^nd republic in Nigeria. I had never actually known what it was like before this period to be ruled by men who would be wearing the native Nigerian attires instead of military uniforms, I never believed that it was possible for men in civil attires to rule Nigeria even though my parents and my elder ones had shared an experience that confirmed that Nigeria had once been ruled by civilians, during the first republic. In fact, as our social studies book puts it, these civilian men and women were actually the ones who obtained our independence from Great Britain in 1960. So like many other Nigerians, I was very optimistic and enthusiastic to live the experience.

  My first real experience about the military rule in Nigeria and the manner in which they ascend to government had been very terrible; it traumatized me and many children of my generation at the time. As a child, our only yardstick for measuring good government was that when you asked your parents for money you wouldn´t get an excuse in return and that when they gave you the money which at that time was usually coin(s), it was always sufficient for you to buy yourself a pack full of candies and sometimes buy yourself a bottle of soft drink and still get back some change. And the Head of state we had at the time, at least the moment I began to understand my environment was General Murtala Mohammed, and at that period, the coin(s) my parents gave to me, were still very powerful, so I did not understand why a group of undesirable persons in the army led by one notorious Colonel Buka suka Dimka would kill a man who ensured that my father´s salary was constant, and by so doing that my demand for coin(s) was also constant. So, I have always hated military coups, because the moment General Murtala muhammed died in that botched coup of 13^th of February 1976 and General Olusegun Obasanjo, now retired, stepped into his shoes as Head of State I began to notice some changes in the economy of my house, the coin(s) became insufficient to satisfy my needs as a child.

  As a child then, like most children of my generation I was really ignorant and uninterested about the many technical economic innuendos that the so called economic experts talked about then and now. Our evaluation of the economy  like I said before was purely based on our direct personal experience with the economic situation in our homes; if papa´s salary was constant and sufficient to handle the many economic challenges we had at home and if mama made sufficient gains in her petty trade, then the economy was buoyant.  With the coming into power of retired Gen Olusegun Obasanjo, I began to observe that my father started complaining about constant cuts in his salaries, my mother too about how she no longer makes any gains in her petty trade and worst of all my own demand for coin(s) were no longer satisfied and even when they managed to come, they no longer had the buying powers they had under General Murtala Muhammed.

  So when General Olusegun Obasanjo subsequently announced that he would hand over power to a democratically elected government in 1979, our hopes brightened up again, moreover, when I realized that most of the men contesting in the election were the same whose photographs were all over my social studies textbook; the living legends, the heroes of our time and times gone by, among them Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe and a host of others.

    

  People had complained bitterly that the first coup d´etat in Nigeria and the fact that it quashed civilian rule in the country and gave room for the military to come to power with the consequencial 3 years civil war that came with it was really what dealt a devastating blow to the socio-economic and political growth of a nation which many saw at the time with a real potential and a credible possibility to rule the world or at least be among the greatest world economic powers.

  At that time and even now I did not know much about politics, my experience would mark my ideology concerning the game of politics even till date. Politics to me is a system of government characterized by lies and mostly empty promises which are never fulfilled. Those who play this game are called politicians; men and women who are often selfish but love to sell the false idea that they are concerned about the common good of all, then again comes the worst group; their supporters, a massive group of bamboozled disciples, who constantly and eternally appear to be under the influence of a spell or a hypnotization.

  I soon began to notice strange things in my community; some of the suspicious street urchins in my neighborhood returned sometimes with blood stained clothes from political rallies and sometimes with broken heads and badly bruised faces, suddenly, I began to observe with great awe how some known hoodlums in the community began to make huge sums of money from dubious relationships with some of the very notable politicians in the society. But I was still too small to directly link this to the political atmosphere that was brewing.

  I remember that before this period, when I was a little younger and always stared into the full moon in the dark nights of Lagos, I always appear to see the image of a man, breaking firewood with an axe and always believed that every other person saw the same thing until the supporters of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo came up one night and started shouting that even the heavens have endorsed the presidency of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, popularly called Awo by his teeming supporters, and that to show its support, the heavens have put the image of the Late Chief Obafemi Awolowo in the moon raising up his two fingers in a sign of victory. I remember staring so hard and so much that slowly, my firewood splitter that I had always seen inside the moon appeared to begin to transform into every other thing except Chief Obafemi Awolowo raising up two fingers in the sign of victory, but the clamor of Up Awo! all around me continued, I even received some knocks on the head from some grownups until I was forced to say that I had seen what they claimed they saw, they pointed at his peculiar pair of small-hole round glasses, his cap and even his agbada and to avoid another hard knock I nodded that I could see everything so clearly.

  Eventually the election came and went and rtd. Gen Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Michael Ani, the then chairman of the Federal electoral commissions FEDECO, as it was known then, who were at the time the two key persons that wielded the power to decide on who was really the endorsed person to rule the nation appear not to have seen or accepted the heavens endorsement through a live moon coverage of the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo, and instead endorsed an unknown former school teacher Alhaji Shehu Shagari as the President of the 2^nd republic of Nigeria.

  Even today, when I revisit my childhood days, particularly that electoral period and all that hype and great fallacy of the appearance in the moon of Chief Obafemi Awolowo with a victory sign, it becomes even more preposterous to see the length that men can go to always try to control the minds of others to satisfy their lust for power.         

FAREWELL, ANGELIC AMAZON

Night stole its way home to us

and you jolted awake to light up its darkness

And make it turn to day

But underneath its cloak mortal pangs

that ´s come with loads of pains  

waiting to heap them on all of us

while we snore away in the deep of the night

you cared so much and opted to cure

an unfortunate victim of a deadly disease;

the very messenger that death had chosen arbitrarily,

you touched with your tender hands

the same that´s restored life to others

when hopes had long been obliterated.

caring for the sick

And uncaring about the danger

that hides behind the Ebola

but unknown to you Ebola loathes love and care

And like hate,

kills only those who care and share.

The messenger falls flat

And soon the doctor falls sick,

no cure, no care…. 

just a strange concern

as days came and went by

and suddenly your caring hands became frozen,

your eyes went to a heroine sleep;

where great names are engraved on ageless rocks

that will stand the test of time

Farewell, Dr Ameyo Adadevoh for intercepting the death meant for all of us.

Farewell, our angelic amazon.  

KUDOS TO THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT FOR ITS EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF THE EBOLA OUTBREAK

  Failure has become a constance in the Nigerian socio-political panorama that a lot of us have likened our great nation to a sure malfunctioning society where nothing positive ever works, but some individuals and a group of persons sometimes continue to prove that if there is a genuine will excellence can be achieved even with very limited means.

  I think that the Nigerian government and especially the Nigerian health ministry deserve an encomium for the functional way it is managing the Ebola outbreak in our country; information-wise and even in the management of confirmed Ebola victims. The reaction to the emergency has really been positive and very effective.

  I want to commend their good efforts so far and implore them to continue to work assiduously towards the prevention and the management of the disease pending the time that a vaccine or a cure would be discovered. So far, five diagnosed Ebola patients have been treated successfully by the Nigeria health workers following the W.H.O protocol of action in cases like this and have since been confirmed Ebola free, According to the health minister Prof. Onyebuchi Chukwu, none of the newly discovered antidote was used in the treatment of the patients, the Nigerian medical experts only used the primary W.H.O index treatment procedure.

  As we commend our government for a good job, we want to continue to advice our people to respect all the warnings and preventive measures put in place by the Nigerian health ministry especially that of washing our hands thoroughly, remember, prevention is always better than cure.                     

DAY 2 AT THE NIGERIAN POLICE REPORT EXERCISE IN MADRID

  As I was driving back home from the venue today, I kept thinking of an appropriate adjective to qualify what actually took place there. So many curse words came to my mind. Everything that transpired there today points to the very reason why a great potential like Nigeria has gradually retrogressed into becoming a failed state.

  It started initially well, at least I saw that two of the suggestions I made yesterday to one of the organizers were put in place today and it enhanced the smooth commencement  of the exercise until the very organizers themselves began to destroy the peace and orderliness with which the activity started; I had told one of the organizers yesterday that the first thing they should have done was use a rope to cordon the area from where they would be operating to make people not intrude into their work space, I told him too that to correct and excise people from thronging towards them rather than be seated, they should make use of the available microphones because I discovered that some of the persons who kept pushing forward and constituting a disorderliness were people who were not hearing the organizers each time they made their several announcements.

  Today, these two common but handy ideas were put in place and they made a tremendous difference compared to yesterday.  It would be recalled that yesterday when I left after being informed that the officers were only going to attend to a 100 persons; I had number 185 with me, hoping today that if they came early they would be able to attend to at least a 100 persons or more.

  Surprisingly at my arrival this morning, I learnt that the officers worked until around 22:30 yesterday, so when I came this morning I was given another number as a continuation from where they stopped yesterday on the list. The new number was number 30 although I was also made to know that there were about 25 persons carried over from yesterday´s exercise that logically would be attended to before me, so roughly I imagined that I would be within the first 60 persons that would be attended to.

  All through, I sat patiently as names and more names were announced to take their turns, until the names became endless and still it had not reached my turn. I stood up to go to the table to demand from the host organizers the point they were on the list, it was then that I saw that some of the organizers were smuggling in the forms of people whose turns it had not reached after possibly receiving bribes from them, at that point I lost it completely, I realized that only illegal persons are respected by Nigerians, those of us who had tried to act civilized and stick to the rules were treated as fools, I threatened to overturn their table and some people intervened before the matter got out of hand. The host organizers denied the accusation and even made me look a liar and a fool.

  But as time went by, they continued in their corrupt activity, smuggling in people from the back door and so on, until the whole of us gathered, caught them red handed. They had called on a girl who some people had seen arrive today not more than two hours before then and were about smuggling her in when someone raised the alarm that she had just arrived, so caught in their own net they had no option than to quash their decision. But as the girl returned to her seat she turned around to all of us, particularly to a lady who was the one who had complained bitterly and asked her to shut up! And before I knew it, chairs were flying and the two ladies and some of their friends were already engaged in a serious uproar.

  At 17:30, we learnt that the process would be terminated for the day because the church which is serving as the venue would be having a Church service. So, after over 8 hours, I had still not been attended to, I asked the officers how many forms they had treated already and they said they had done a little over 200, yet on the official list we were still around 147 persons which means that over 60 persons have been smuggled in by this corrupt Nigerians, who were supposed to be defending the good name of Nigeria and upholding her integrity.

My heart bleeds seriously           

ORGANIZATION: THE MISSING WORD IN THE NIGERIAN DICTIONARY

  My experience today at the police report preparation exercise in Madrid Spain was disgusting as it is disappointing. I had unofficially gotten the report that the police officers sent from Nigeria for the exercise were around and that the exercise would not be held at the Nigerian embassy as was expected but a lackluster warehouse converted into a church with no proper ventilation and lacking  the stipulated exit route in case of emergency.

  The exercise was slated to commence at 9:00 under the watchful eyes of the organizers and the providers of the space, The Nigerian national association in Madrid. I got there at about 9:25 due to the difficulty in locating the address. As at the time I got there, there were already about 184 persons on the list before me, amongst them mothers and their kids, some of whom I gathered came from other states in Spain for the exercise.

  The impression I got as I entered the venue was that of chaos and lack of adequate organization, which was made manifest as the hour stipulated for the commencement of the exercise went past with more than two hours during which the members of the Nigerian Nationals present did not have any cogent explanation on why the exercise had not commenced, according to their spokespersons, they had made several calls to the embassy to know why the police officers who were to conduct the exercise were yet to turn up at the venue.  
  More and more people started trooping in and putting their names down in the list made available by the host association, the Nigerian Nationals. Close to 300 names were written and corresponding numbers given to up to 129 persons on the list because the same group of persons responsible for the list allegedly discovered that some people were writing down their names as well as that of their friends and family members who were still at home sleeping on their bed while some people had already arrived at the venue as early as 6:00. It was also alleged that a prior list had already been drawn a day earlier by the church as well as persons close to the church and even members of the Nigerian nationals themselves, which was why at my arrival I already had 184 persons before me on the list even though there were physically half or a little more than half of that number of persons at the time of my arrival.

  My special concern as I persistently made it known to some of the host organizers was the issue of the Ebola virus, I could not understand why a multitude like that could be jam-packed in that inappropriate and chaotic space for so long, everybody shaking hands and embracing old friends despite the threat of the Ebola virus. I wondered why there was not even a sanitizer available despite the huge sum of money, 145 Euros for each person in the case of fresh police report and 115 Euros in the case of a renewal.

  It was not until 11:40 that the Nigerian police and the Nigerian embassy staff accompanying them arrived at the venue with their usual Nigeria superiority aura, walking majestically past a multitude of persons they had kept waiting for almost 3 hours. They marched pompously to a room upstairs prepared to serve as the operating office without even a formal apology to all the Nigerian men and women present.

  Precisely one hour after their arrival at about 13.00, the Nigerian nationals’ spokesperson came forward to declare the exercise open in the midst of the already generated chaos, without a clear-cut demarcation point or cordoned area from where they will be operating. I stepped forward to demand that before the event could start, at least an official of the Nigerian embassy needed to come down and tender a deserved apology to all of us for waiting for them for almost 3 hours but was surprised that the same Nigerians I was interceding on their behalf said it was unnecessary, I looked at them and shook my head. I understood at once why our leaders and those elected to serve us treat us as herds of cows and goats. When is the official time in Nigeria for the commencement of the day´s work in the civil service? Why have these government officials chosen to arrive at their place of work at 11:40 when they had earlier announced that the exercise was going to begin by 9:00.

  And again when they eventually kick-started the exercise, they said they would only attend to 100 persons on the list so the rest of us had to leave to return the next day (tomorrow) hoping and expecting that the list today will still be valid for tomorrow´s exercise.

  With what I saw today, I think that most Nigerians think that the head is only meant for wearing a cap, people get paid and demand money for doing nothing or for rendering a mediocre service to Nigerians, in their minds they believe that every Nigerian is a goat and deserve no better treatment than that reserved for a goat . The same document that the Spanish government give to their citizens for a tax payment of less than 10 Euros and you wouldn´t need to be on the queue for more than 20 minutes, is what the Nigerian authorities, and a referent Nigerian association in Spain cannot even organize laudably after charging as much as a 145 Euros.

Honestly, my heart bleeds.