FOR BACKWARD GLANCES AND FORWARD GLARES

Edited by Moore Numental


Dear Uncle Sege,

I hope you got the gift I sent you through Santa Claus. Did you like it? I know it’s not much. Just keep it with you all the time especially when you go to bed. It will help you sleep soundly and not have any nightmares like you used to have before when you hear of EFCC.

Have I told you about my new friend? I should tell you about him because he makes me very proud. If he was a woman, and I was big like my big brother, I would have made him my wife. Months ago. But he is not a woman, and I cannot marry a man. Because I do not want to go to hell fire yet. Not in this particular life. Maybe in one of the other nine lives I will have when I become a cat like your cat “Oliver”. Maybe by then, I will not be attending catechism classes anymore.

I love spending time with this my friend; I love listening to all the wise things he says and all the stories he tells me, especially the one of one old woman called “Michelle”. I have always wondered how it is that my friend is so wise. My mummy says it is because of his gray hairs. Do you think I will look fine with gray hairs? So that I can be wise like him too. 

Sometimes, spending time with my friend means going for a ride in his car. He usually drives. He has a green car with a white stripe running down the whole middle from the back to the front. It is a very nice car. He once told me the name of the company that made the car. It sounded like “Loogaad” but I can’t remember. It is not like your own in that picture you sent me in your last letter. It is not as fine as that. My friend says it is because his car is a third generation model. It took me a long time to say that correctly but I did and my friend says I am very brilliant. 

I like our outings in my friend's car because it has a radio, an air conditioner that works (not like Uncle Tami’s own that does not work), and it always smells good inside. I wish it is what I enter to school every day instead of those noisy danfo buses that have smelly drivers, rude conductors, and sweaty passengers. I will tell my mummy to buy this type of car for me next Christmas. I think she should be able to. The other day, she said she would buy anything I wanted if I was good and took my injection. I was good and took the injection. I did not cry too much (only for one hour afterward); I did not bite the nurse’s hand and I did not pinch her bombom when she gave me the injection. No. I was good. So I will tell Mummy to buy this type of car for me. Then I will ask my friend to teach me to drive it. And next Christmas, she will buy for you too.

But first, let me tell you about how my friend drives.

My friend is a good driver. He is always careful. He drives slowly and obeys all the road signs. He obeys the traffic lights and obeys the traffic wardens. He also obeys that traffic warden on our street. You remember that one who is not really a traffic warden and who does not have any legs but controls traffic with his big hands and wheels himself around the road junction on a small wooden panel on which sits his rather small legless waist? But my friend doesn’t give him money. Everybody gives that man money. Except my friend. He just thanks him with a wave of his slender hands and a bright, wide, sincere, gap-toothed smile. What I like best is that my friend doesn’t drink and drive o. He doesn’t even drink alcohol at all. Just sips of water and fruit wine. As a good driver should.

Yes, so you see? My friend is a good driver. But he is not the perfect driver. No one is, I guess. But I don't just like how my friend spends too long looking at the mirrors that show him what is going on at his back. My mummy says they are called “rear-view mirrors”. I have noticed my friend not only looks but even spends too much time talking about what he sees there each time he looks. He looks in the mirror before he overtakes beautiful jeeps and ugly trucks and then he talks about it; after he avoids portholes on the road, he looks in the mirror so long I begin to wonder whether he is quietly measuring the size of the porthole in his mind and congratulating himself for a job well done. 

He looks in the mirror when we drive past beautiful girls and he smiles and nods his head (not that that bit is particularly worrisome); he looks in the mirror when we drive past beautiful houses and talks about his love for architecture. He looks in the rear-view mirror when he hears any car honk. And here, they honk a heck of a lot. Especially those danfo drivers. Those ones honk with their van horns as if it was a musical instrument for “Santa Claus is coming to town”. I don’t like danfo drivers. Thank God my friend is not a danfo driver. He is just a good driver who looks at the rear-view mirror a little too much for my liking. Sometimes, I even think he also looks at the rear-view mirror to see whether his eyes are too misty or his mustache too dusty.

Like I said, my friend is a good driver. But he spends so much time looking at that rear-view mirror and I sometimes have this fear that we may fall into a porthole or miss a bend as our beautiful car bounces forward along these unsafe roads. I wish he would look forward more. Don’t you think so? Am I wrong? My aunty in the school said the rear-view mirror helps one drive safely, but I think the mirrors are better for glances; not stares and glares. The stares and glares should be for the road in front, the glances for the roads and trees and houses we have past. Yea, the glances should be for them and for other things past - fine girls and ugly women, Sambo Dasuki and Goodluck Jonathan, your own house and everything else that appears in that past.

My friend Muhammadu Buhari is a good driver. I want him to stare at the road dead ahead, and save only glances for the rear-view mirror.

Starting now.

One day, you will get to meet him and I can bet with all the money I have saved for Cold Stone Ice Cream that you will like him as much as I do. Maybe not as much.

Take care my uncle,

Hugo Naijaman.



***
Author's Notes: Very sincere thanks to Moore Numental for editing this piece and making it all the more readworthy. 

IN MEMORIAM: A FEW WORDS ABOUT A DEADLY DISEASE

As I looked at the now still form of what used to be a 7-month old baby, I tried not to hear the hair-splitting wails of the woman who had just ceased to be a mother. I tried to mentally lock out the drama that was playing out around me as she thrashed about on the floor, asking God why He would be so wicked as to take from her 28-year old self her 7-month old only child; I tried not to notice how determinedly her husband was standing by the corner trying to “be a man”, to show full composure; perhaps even to show no emotion, his pain suggested only by the furious twitching of his lower lip and the mist that clouded the tiny slits that occupied the place on his face where people would normally have eyes. I tried not to notice all this because, as I looked down at the little innocent who had so needlessly died, all I felt was rage. Rage at the parents, rage at her grandmother, rage that acknowledgement of their grief would only worsen – not temper. Rage because the child that had just died, the 7-month old child that had just walked away from a 28-year old mother and a 33-year old father, had been taken on that walk by no less a phenomenon than malaria.

Strange as it sounds, malaria still kills thousands of people the world over, and hundreds of children in your own locality in the time it takes a woman to have two menstrual cycles. In the time it takes the English Premier League to complete one season, about 300,000 people in Nigeria die from malaria. And this, not because the disease itself is untreatable, but because of the continued supremacy of the ignorance of the people, by the people, against the people.

Ignorance of the disease and how to go about its treatment is no excuse. That is why this 28-year old woman will never get her daughter back. That she did not know that she should not have kept in her house a 7-month old child with fever who was vomiting and passing watery stools is not enough; that she did not know that her generous aliquots of pastor’s prayers and grandma’s concoctions may be more potent in exorcising evil spirits than in curing malaria does not matter.

But I already resolved to be kind. So instead of giving the couple the verbal bashing I think they deserve for killing their own child, I resolved there and then to try to save another couple from killing theirs. Hence this piece, which has been written in as informal and as simple a manner as I can handle.

Malaria has long been blamed on the mosquitoes that thoroughly infest our environment, and with good reason. It is mosquitoes, the females among them no less, that transfer the malaria parasite from one infected person to another uninfected person. The malaria parasite itself can cause malaria in human beings but does not cause malaria in mosquitoes. Like I hinted at earlier, a patient who is down with malaria has excellent chances of full recovery if appropriate treatment is commenced on time and fully carried out. But for appropriate treatment to be initiated, one must recognize that malaria is afoot, and for one to recognize the presence of malaria, one must be familiar with its – common – symptoms.

Now, while I will not presume to tell you what your own malaria symptoms could be (perhaps because I am sure you know them already), I will make bold to tell you what you may notice in a child around you, or what a child around you may complain of when he or she has malaria. Someone with malaria infection may have all (or some of) these symptoms listed. In some cases, the malaria sufferer may not even have any of these symptoms, or may have just one of the symptoms listed. The paucity of the symptoms exhibited by the person doesn’t make the sickness any less dangerous.

• The child may refuse foods or be uninterested in food and drink.

• Fever with chills – the person may be noted to have very hot body temperatures, while at the same time shivering from cold. Caring for the person may be challenging because, one minute, the person may complain of being cold and needing a blanket. The next minute, once the blanket is applied, the person throws it off, complaining of heat. And all the while, their body temperature remains burning hot. The episodes of fever are sometimes followed by excessive sweating, following which the body temperature may drop to normal.

• Cough

• Nausea

• Vomiting

• Diarrhea

• There may be yellowing of the eyes

• Fatigue – the person may notice that they become too easily or too frequently tired after little or no physical activity.

• Malaise – the person maybe uneasy, without being able to say precisely what it is that is responsible for their unease.

• Joint pains 

• Muscle pains

• That telltale bitterness that fills the mouth

OK. So when your usually active child who always fights with you for your mobile phone or for the remote controller of the television suddenly begins to prefer the company of his pillow, when the child who previously could not get enough of breast milk (to the scarce-expressed chagrin of his father who has had to wait in a never-moving queue for his turn at the breast) suddenly loses interest in all things round and beautiful, that is not the time to quote the scriptures with the local pastor; that is not the time for “trying” the herbal remedies Mama brought with her from the village when she came for the customary omugwo. Mbanu. It is time to dress the child up and take him to a hospital so he can be properly diagnosed. His fever may not be spiritual. It may be malarial.

In fact, in recognition of how big the problem posed by malaria is, Community health experts now advise us to commence antimalarial treatment within 72 hours of onset of the aforementioned symptoms if we cannot get the patient to hospital and symptoms fail to abate within that timeframe. The consequences of treating for malaria when it is not present are far more tolerable than are the consequences of NOT treating for malaria when it is present.

So, how do you treat for malaria?

Before I talk about antimalarial medications, let me say a few things about handling the fever that is due to malaria. That fever usually responds well to paracetamol, although you may prefer to use ibuprofen. Your doctor will tell you how to administer the drug. But it is the tepid sponging that those busty nurses at teaching hospitals yap about that I want to highlight here. Tepid sponging refers to the use of tepid water – made from a mix of warm and cold water – to try to reduce the body temperature. This is done by dipping and wetting a towel in the tepid water and then dabbing different body parts of the feverish person with it. Dabbing, not scrubbing, not washing, not anointing. Dabbing. When next the child has a fever, take their clothes off them and do a tepid sponge. It works. 

I would like to say that antimalarial combination therapy is the preferred mode of treatment. This means that you make simultaneous use of two different antimalarial medications in treating the condition. Happily, many of the antimalarials on pharmacists’ shelves today are pre-combined in just the right doses. This is to ensure that instead of taking two or more different antimalarial tablets each time, you take one tablet that contains the two different drugs. An example of these pre-combined medications is Lonart. Another is Amatem. Then there is Coartem. And Artecam, Artequin, and many others.

You or your child can take your antimalarials whether or not you have had your meal. Don’t prevent your child from taking their antimalarial because they have not had a meal or because they have refused to eat. The truth is that loss of appetite is one of the first symptoms that appears when you have malaria, and one of the last symptoms to completely disappear after you have successfully treated the condition.

If you are treating your child, maybe it is preferable you use tablets. I know there are these equally effective antimalarial powders that come in bottles to which you can add water to form suspensions which you can give the children to drink. But some people add too much water – to make the drug last longer –This excess water that they add to the powder just lessens the effective dose of drug that the child gets to drink at each administration. For this reason and for no other, I think tablets are better. 

Do not give more than the recommended dose at any one time because you are in a hurry to make your child get well. An overdose does not make your child get well faster. It may actually make your child get sicker. With malaria and with at least one more thing else. Recommended doses are printed on the medication packs and on the leaflets that accompany them. Try to read those leaflets before you discard them. Reading does not kill. 

Try not to skip any dose. Try not to forget. But if you do forget to take a dose, please take the next dose when you remember. Don’t come and go and be forming drug amebo, taking double dose, one for yesterday night and one for this morning, all at once. Haba! You want to go from malaria survivor to suicide survivor?

Let me hasten to say that if you live in Nigeria, and you use chloroquine or any of the variants of that “three-at-once” drug they call Fansidar (or Amalar, etc) to treat malaria, just know that every day is for the thief, and one day is for the owner of the house. And in this case, you are the thief, not the house owner. Those drugs are not effective in treating someone who already has malaria. They may have been effective when granny was a twelve-year old Girl Guide but that was many years ago, and I don’t even know whether the Girls’ Guide exists anymore. Many things have changed since then, and more particularly, the malaria parasites have become more stubborn. A la Donald Trump, chloroquine and “three-at-once” medicines are now ways of ensuring that your child who is suffering from malaria dies faster. 

Speaking of dying, that is something malaria can bring about too. Something that it brought about in the patient whose death inspired this post. People with untreated malaria are liable to die young. And before they die, they may have convulsions. They may behave irrationally. They may experience kidney failure. They may see blood in their urine. Yes, malaria can be wicked like that, and in many other ways. 

When you have treated your child and recovered him from the valley of the shadow of the darkness of malaria, you can take the following steps to keep him/her in the light of health, and out of easy reach of the next hungry, infected mosquito:

• Try to ensure that there are no stagnant water deposits around your house, whether clean or dirty. Although they can do dirty, the mosquitoes that spread malaria actually prefer to breed in clean water where they can find it. Their only requirement is that the water be stagnant.

• There is also that piece of advice about spreading a film of oil over surrounding stagnant water deposits in order to deprive whatever eggs are there of oxygen. 

• When children are going out in the evenings, let them be fully clothed in long sleeved shirts, trousers, socks, and gloves. Let there be a minimum of skin which mosquitoes can bite.

• Let us all sleep under those insecticide treated bed nets. Doors and windows can also be protected with nets. Sometimes, we can use insecticides to fumigate our homes; although the producers of these insecticides nowadays claim that it is essentially harmless to humans in low doses, I think this fumigation is better done when there will be no one indoors, no one forced to stay and inhale the substance, no one to share the final moments of the mosquitoes with them as they embark on their one-way trip to insect-hellven.

May her soul rest in peace, and may God comfort her grieving parents. Amen.

THIS CORN IS NOT OF MAIZE

I want to say a word about how uncatholic I find some Catholic positions (and some positions that are passed off in these parts as Catholic positions) - one of which I had been aware of, but whose import I had blissfully failed to realize until it played itself out at Mass earlier today.

At Mass this morning, the altar was resplendent in its Advent purple. The choir did justice to the solemn tunes that herald the coming of the long-expected Saviour. The mass servers looked innocent and dutifully holy, always punctuating their altar crisscrossings with low bows and deep genuflections. The woman who read the first lesson from the lectern on the right side of the altar seemed like she was drowning under the weight of her own gele - the elaborate headscarf that she had mounted on her head in a manner that strongly reminded one of a poorly mounted secondhand corn mill. The voice of the little girl who sang the responsorial psalm was outdone in its beauty only by her own visage. The second reader’s beard reminded me of, of all people, Saddam Hussein. The gospel was short. The sermon was long. Very long. The preacher pranced around Pentecostal-style, intermittently asking the bulletin- and Missal-wielding congregation to turn to this and that passages of their Bibles - Bibles which were most likely nestling cosily in their various homes while the Sunday bulletins and missals stood proxy on their behalf. He sounded intelligent. Many Catholic priests are. If the Church lacks anything, it is not brains. Ask Gregor Mendel. Look up Fulton Sheen. Read George Ehusani. Or spend a few moments with Okoye Anthony.

So all was going well, and I was going through the motions of the Mass, kneeling, sitting, standing, feeling contrite when I was expected to, and being joyful when the liturgy permitted it. I admit I was also thoroughly enjoying the smell of the incense that wafted upward from the thurible wielded by one of the mass servers, the very tall, very black one with a scar running down from just behind his left ear to his jawline, a scar that didn't look like it was acquired during a holy excursion. I was also, perhaps not so righteously, enjoying watching the young girls who were giggling, the young men who were looking at the preacher with a faraway look in their eyes, a look that seemed to see the English Premier League football match coming up later in the day rather than the steps to take on the march to heaven  as being pointed out by the preacher. I remembered not to forget to notice the elderly men who were nodding off at intervals and their elderly wives who were fanning themselves with their multipurpose Sunday bulletins, their beautiful handkerchiefs...the leisurely fanning probably more for show than for sweat, since the chill of the air conditioning was taking care of the latter.

Then the new converts to my Catholic brand of Christianity were called upon to approach the altar, their robes whiter than their hearts, their soon-to-be-baptized hearts soon to be whiter than their starched, white robes. They approached the altar, their hands clasped together and heads bowed in the universally accepted pose of Catholic sanctity. The priest then invited them to announce their names to us all. And then came the flurry of Ritas, Angelas, Stephens, Anthonys....

And then there was Okechukwu.

And silence.

Silence as the priest retrieved the microphone from the boy who introduced himself as Okechukwu, and, in no uncertain terms, chided him for introducing himself to God's people in God's house using an unchristian name. And then gave him back the microphone after instructing him to reintroduce himself to the community of the Lord’s faithful, as the catechist had taught him to.

In the single, low-pitched penitent word that followed, what was Okechukwu became Henry.

The priest apparently found Henry to be acceptable, to be Christian enough. On behalf of the people of God therefore, he congratulated the new convert who had been Okechukwu and who was now Henry, and he then went on to the next person. Welcoming her, and then the next girl, and the next young man, and the one after him - all of them Mary, Prisca, Raphael, Nicholas - into the fold of the one, holy, Catholic Church, world without end. Amen.

But while all that was going on, I began to reflect on how Okechukwu had just been robbed of his right to his identity, how he had just been made to become less African, at least in name, in order to be considered worthy of Catholicism, of redemption; how a young African’s soul was redeemable only so far as its owner first shed his African name.

I have been told several times since childhood that the Church “encourages” her faithful to adopt for themselves at baptism and confirmation names of canonized saints. I don't know to what extent this “encouragement” is persuasion, but today at Mass, it looked to me like compulsion.

If we all have to be Henry, John, Benedict, Lucy, Agnes, Perpetua….in order to become Christians, how will there ever be a time when the Church will have saints like Saint Somto, Saint Okechukwu, Saint Tinuke, Saint Hauwa? So that some American girl can also be someday encouraged at baptism to take on the name Folake because there is such a saint as Saint Folake? Perhaps being a saint is incompatible with being a black man - or having a name native to the black man. But how would I know? These things are beyond the reach even of extraordinary men...and I am but the most ordinary of the ordinariest men. I am just a man who hopes that when Blessed Tansi is canonized, he will be addressed as Saint Tansi, or Saint Iwene...and not be forced - even in posthumous sainthood - to go only by the baptismal Saint Cyprian.

But if the Church will be universal in reach, as well as universal in name, I think one place to start is to allow adherents universal reach in choice of their own personal names. I think it is instructive to remember that the only person whose name the Lord Jesus was recorded as having ever changed was Simon, the man he called Peter. And that was the one who became Pope, after first denying three times that he knew him. The rest of his disciples, from the one who betrayed him to the one who was portrayed as the one Jesus loved, all kept their names. Their original names. I think two brothers even kept their Zebedee surname and there was another whose surname was Alphaeus.

Okechukwu should not have become Henry. Okechukwu was robbed of his Okechukwuness and dressed in a Henryness that was not his in order to qualify to be Catholic. If we must accept Catholicism and Christianity as they are, I think Catholicism and Christianity should accept us as we are, and then make saints out of us sinners - whilst we keep our names.

Names like Okechukwu.

Image sourced from http://www.thecatholiccatalogue.com/

SOMETHING NO GIRL CAN LIE ABOUT

The next time some random woman screams "rape", let the crucifying crowd give pause before they pelt the alleged rapist with stones and epithets. 

That a woman says she was raped by a man doesn't mean she was indeed raped by that man (Nor is the man's denial proof that she wasn't,  yea).

The man who is accused of rape is entitled to fair hearing. Before he is denounced as a pig, a boar, let his denouncers take heed lest his accuser be herself a proven sow.

Owning a penis is an anatomical asset, not a biological liability. I believe the same can be said about owning ovaries. Therefore, believing a man is a rapist just because a girl says so is analogous to believing a girl is an adulterer just because her husband says so.

There Is No Such Thing As Something No Girl (or guy) Can Lie About. We may all want to remember that when deciding in favor of the one who says she was raped or in favor of the one who denies that any of their encounters together even remotely approached rape.

BABA, GIVE US PETROL. BIKO.

Dear Mr President,

I write to you in your capacity as the President of Nigeria, as well as in your capacity as the Nigerian oil minister. In case you missed it, we have no petrol. We nor geh fuel.

I am hoping that you know - perhaps, that you remember - that petrol is our life in Nigeria. Petrol is how we move our cars, just like many others around the world. Petrol is also how we light our homes, unlike many others around the world. Petrol is how we get our haircuts and hairdos; how we heat our bathwater and chill our drinking water; how we recharge the batteries of our phones so we can get on Facebook and chant Sai Buhari; how we power our computers so that we can do this BVN thing and that TSA thang...

Petrol and diesel are how we get things done. Probably the only thing we don't do with petrol ...yet... is move cattle from the plains of Kebbi to the forests of Delta, with all the farmfights between and betwixt. But even the fish we get from Argungu need petrol - and diesel - to stay preserved; they require kerosene - or diesel - to become the protein-rich meals that we cherish.  

Granted that these days, we need less petrol to do some of the things I have just mentioned because PHCN somehow decided that holding power in trust for us is not the same thing as holding power from us, and so, perhaps reading your famed body language, they have elected to give power to the people (pun intended o, very, very much intended). Yea, granted that that may be the case, we still do need petrol - and diesel....and kerosene - to get by. We need it so that when the Oga-at-the-phcn-top decides to remind us who is in charge, we can still watch our Chelsea match as they continue their one-win-per-month promo.

So please sir, give us petrol. Do whatever you need to do to give us petrol. 

Even if you are Baba Go Slow, you may agree with me that there can be no going - slow or fast - if there is no petrol, if there is no fuel. There can be no going - fast or slow - if the petrol stations are empty of petrol and the streets are replete with NGN5,000-eligible young men brandishing plastic tubes with which they advertise their own mobile petrol stations to anyone who cares.

We nor geh fuel Baba. Give us fuel. Not excuses.

Daalu.

Yours sincerely, (yesso, because this was very sincerely written, from me to you)

Hugo Naijaman

HOW MARKET?

Category:Uncategorized


I am just wondering...whatever the hell happened to Nnamdi Kanu? He must have been freed on bail from the clutches of the Nigerian government by his teeming horde of Biafran supporters who have promised to die for him and for Biafra. No? He hasn’t? He hasn't been freed by his foot-soldiers? He is still under arrest? In the Zoo? He, the human, kept captive by the Animals? But how is that even possible? And how do his supporters sleep at night, knowing that he, their fellow Biafran Human (the Director, no less) continues to be held by his Animal captors in the Zoo? Where is their conscience? Is it buried under rubbish heaps at Ochanja market? Isn’t is easier to lay down your cash to secure freedom for your leader than to lay down your life to secure freedom for your dreamland?


I am also wondering...why can’t those who supply smokers with weed give them quality weed for their money, ehn? Isn’t it heart-breaking to pay heavily for a product and then get supplied something that is so manifestly substandard that it begins to produce untoward effects in the smoker? Effects like increasing the number of years medical students have to spend in Nigerian universities from six years to seven years. I would like to tell whoever is in charge that it isn’t because our medical students spend ONLY six years in university that they cannot get housemanship positions after their induction as doctors. It isn’t because our medical students spend ONLY six years in school that the current system of rote learning is not working. It is the rote learning that is the problem, not the number of years spent in the university. But I don’t expect anyone in charge to understand that, unless their weed suppliers stop supplying them Osogbo-made weed that they did not pay for, and instead start supplying them with the premium Aba-made weed that they did pay for.

"DON'T BE SILLY"

Category:Uncategorized

I came across this story on SaharaReporters and thereafter said a prayer of thanks to God that nothing untoward happened to my dear former president. For, were Matthew Aremu Okikiola Olusegun Obasanjo to so suddenly go missing from among the living, this ridiculous back and forth between Wole Soyinka and him would come to an untimely end, and so would my thorough entertainment by the big words that adorn the many pages of their bickering.

So I said a prayer of thanksgiving to God for protecting the former president as he made his way to Lagos en route Abidjan, where he was going to monitor the presidential elections there on behalf of ECOWAS and to ensure that those elections were free and fair.

After my prayer of thanksgiving to God for the life of Okikiola, I allowed myself to begin to think that having President Obasanjo monitor any elections and/or listening to his opinion on free and fair elections is like having, as the lead judge in a musical competition, a man born deaf and dumb, and requesting such a man to verbalize his keynote address.

Then I slapped my hungry self and, in my father’s voice said to myself: “Don’t be silly!”

DIVINE DECEIT? OR DIVINELY INSPIRED CON MEN?

Category:Uncategorized

Finally, the good pastor Chris Okotie and I agree on something.

Perhaps.

In 2003, God asked President Obasanjo to try for a second shot at the Nigerian presidency after Obasanjo performed a month's fast. Interestingly, God also asked Okotie to the same task at the same time. Obasanjo eventually clinched the presidency and Okotie clinched a certification for a failed attempt. In 2015, God again asked Okotie to run for the Nigerian presidential elections, the same year he asked incumbent President Jonathan to run for the same position in the same elections.

Rev Chris Okotie (source: http://revchrisokotie.com/)

Pastor Ayo Oritsejafor (source: Wikipedia)

And all the while that God was pushing an Okotie to run for the presidency and a Jonathan - via Oritsejafor - to win the same presidency, he was persuading a certain Buhari to "show me your satificate, oya pullova", no?

Just why does the good pastor think that God's prophecy to Jonathan according to Oritsejafor was false? In listening to God, wasn't Oritsejafor employing the same radio frequency that he, Okotie, was making use of? It appears to me that, though Okotie accuses Oritsejafor of deceiving Jonathan, Oritsejafor actually heard the very same message Okotie heard. Only, when Oritsejafor heard God say Jonathan, Okotie heard God say Okotie. One cannot be justly vilified for hearing something different than the other, surely?

Methinks the good pastor should cut Oritsejafor some slack. This was either one helluva first rate divine deceit, or both pastors - honourable men of God that they are - suffered from a form of auditory hallucination so interestingly profound that they may require psychiatric evaluation rather more urgently than they do divine intervention.

If that is not the case, then it would appear that God, judging from claims attributed to these holy and very, very honourable men, derives great pleasure from divinely instigating lots of people to stand for Nigerian presidential elections...just for the fun of watching them tear at each other’s throats.

Mbaka?

This post is about men of God, not about God's men.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

Category:Uncategorized

In one of his comments on one of my Facebook posts in which I basically hailed the news of the arrest of the warmonger Nnamdi Kanu as good riddance to bad rubbish, a contributor said:

“I am not praising or criticising him...I won't haul derogatory names at him either...but I don't feel strongly as a Nigerian....will I have a chance to decide....maybe a vote among others who feel like me to decide if Nigeria is what we want?”

Nigeria was indeed a British contraption, made to, among other things, spite the French who were the other big player in the West African colonial space. The Germans were never really big, and their WWII defeat put paid altogether to their colonial ventures. Our consent to the amalgamation of the Lagos Colony and the Northern and Southern Protectorates was neither required nor sought, nor was our approval obtained before the king’s mistress called us Nigerians (not the King of England, mind, but the man who by leave of the English Crown, was essentially the king in these parts). What mattered to the British overlords was the administrative and strategic military sense it made for the British Empire to have a single, giant colony in the heart of West Africa in addition to the far smaller ones that existed farther west along the west African coast.

At independence, and especially after Nigeria became a republic, our “founding fathers” (if indeed Nigeria can be accurately said to have a founding father other than Lord Lugard) missed important opportunities to put the question to the Nigerian people: “Do you want Nigeria?” It was taken for granted that we did, and that the Nigerian concept was not negotiable. In fact, it was understood that any kind of independence from the white man was a more desperate need and therefore a most thoroughly desirable outcome than was a clear understanding of where we were headed once that much sought-after independence was achieved. Several times since 1963, since the Biafran surrender in 1970 and the promised reconstruction of Eastern Nigeria that never happened, and through all the coups d’état that perforated our half-hearted democratic experiments, we have missed important opportunities to do all of the following:

• convene a truly representative and truly sovereign national conference to which every ethnic group (not local governments) will send representatives chosen by a deliberately organized series of elections.
• systematically address at that conference the following among other questions:
• whether we choose to remain a united Nigeria or otherwise.
• why we want to remain a united Nigeria if we so chose, and why we would not like to remain a united Nigeria, if we chose otherwise.
• how the united Nigeria was to operate if we chose to stay united, and how the so far united Nigeria was to disintegrate if we chose to go our separate ways.
• the number of years that would intervene between one conference and the next conference, at which subsequent session the same questions with respect to our continued nationhood would be posed and answered.
• what role religion and ethnicity were to play in national life, should we have elected to remain together.
• how resources and proceeds from resources were to be exploited in the case of the former, and shared in the case of the latter.
• what form of government the nation would run, were we to have chosen to stay together, and what form our Constitution would take.
• the resolutions reached at that conference would then be subjected to a plebiscite, the result of which would be instantaneously binding and maximally effective.

A lot of Nigerians, like the one whose comment in part inspired this post, do not feel Nigerian. It is unfair not to let them have their say regarding their misgivings. But a lot of other Nigerians do not feel anything other than Nigerian. They know their country is very imperfect on many fronts, but they feel a connection to that green-white-and-green flag, and to those two unfortunate horses forever condemned to their arduous task of unsteadily holding up the banner on which the eagle on our coat of arms rests its conceivably impressive weight. It is unfair to try to force these ones out of their Nigerianness, just because one ragtag riffraff called Nnamdi Kanu can get on the internet and, like his islamist terrorist mentors, dish out hate speeches and refer to the political boundaries of the labours of our heroes past as a zoo.

So it is desirable that there be an opportunity for Nigerians to decide and to determine whether they want to be together, and if they decide that they do, on what terms such a union should be built. This is what the Americans had the opportunity to do when their Founding Fathers met on behalf of the Colonies and decided to become the United States of America. This is the opportunity that Lord Lugard denied Nigerians by his amalgamation to create the behemoth, and that General Yakubu Gowon denied Nigerians by his balkanization of that behemoth into states that had neither ethnic nor religious justification for their allotted boundary lines. This is the opportunity that should be afforded Nigerians, by the simple instrumentality of the ballot box.

A lot of my friends desire Biafra for its own sake really, and not for any clear ideological differences that separate such a Biafra from the already existent Nigeria. The current southeastern states are not noticeably ideologically separate from the rest of the country. So, for many Nnamdi Kanu-enthusiasts at least, and for many others whose lungs have been generously suffused with the incense of his rabble-rousing, Biafra represents an opportunity for personal economic gain, rather than the touted opportunity for the emancipation of a hitherto shortchanged people. 

But not all that is desirable is always immediately achievable. Sometimes, Wisdom is knowing what you really want, how best to get it, and, having got it, knowing how to manage it, how to ensure that it stays useful to you, and how to properly rank it on the scale of preference. This is the definition that assures me that although Nnamdi Kanu is someone that we all are better off without, he is also a cancerous mass than cannot be ignored without dire consequences, and so must carefully be excised in good time, and with clinical precision. He is like a fly perched on the testicles. You do not want to injure your balls while taking a swipe at the insect, but then, as you most definitely do not want the arthropod anywhere near those prized nuggets, you are sure that inaction is not an option.

IRRESPONSIBLE FREEDOM (DIRTY LANGUAGE ALERT)

Category:Uncategorized

I read this Punch story about the dismissal from his duties of a senior Polish priest who, flanked by his Spanish boyfriend, publicly came out of the closet, while criticizing the Church for its as yet unchanged position with respect to "sexual minorities".

Now, I believe that men (and women) should be allowed to fuck who they please, so long as the act is mutually consensual (and of course that the consenting parties are legally capable of giving consent), and that the act does not interfere with their work and with the day-to-day running of societal life. I believe too that who a person is fucking should not define how I relate with that person. And I think that, on a personal level, it doesn't.

But, I am aware that the Roman Catholic Church prescribes celibacy for its priests. So, with Catholic priests, it is not really a question of who you can or cannot fuck; it is a statement that you cannot fuck anyone. You are a eunuch for God's sake and for the sake of God's people. That is the way it is, and that is something you get to know before you become a priest. It is not a surprise that someone springs on you after you have donned the chasuble.

So when some priest drunk on his own testosterone addresses a news conference, hanging on his Spanish lover's arm, dressed among other things, in a Roman collar, saying stuff to the effect that he should be allowed to be both Catholic priest and boyfriend, beyond the crass absurdity of it all, I believe he is dressing irresponsibility up in garbs stolen from Freedom's wardrobe.

So here's my message to Krzysztof Charamsa:

Hey priest. You can quit being the patron saint of ingratitude to the Church. As of this moment, the Church recommends that you choose between your priesthood and your prickhood. You may not like it much, but being a priest is not compulsory, and staying a priest is not obligatory. You may have been born gay, but you were not born a priest. What you seek to defend is not your right to freedom; what you seek to defend is your right to irresponsibility. While you may have a right to be irresponsible, the rest of us have a right - and a duty - to be protected from your irresponsibility. Next time you come across a TERMS AND CONDITIONS section, don't just check the box. Read the text.

And by the way, what the heck is "sexual minorities"?

DOOMSDAY

Category:Uncategorized

One preacher is just doing his thing in this bus where I am sandwiched between this fat woman and this other not-so-fat woman, both reeking of fish in different stages of decomposition.

This preacher has just told us, his unwilling audience, that God has decided that Man has 6,000 years to live on Earth and that that allotted time expired on September 14, 2015...and that the "blood moon" of two days back was God's way of notifying us of that expiry and of the imminence of Doomsday.

I dunno if the two fat women between whose armpits I am sandwiched believe him. But the smell oozing from them seems to make a compelling case for the Doomsday argument.

OUTDOOR PISS AND OFFSHORE TALES

Category:A Set Of Random Thoughts

Here in Africa, forget Africa, here in Lagos, we guys have the license to pee anywhere. Into toilet bowls at home or in a friend's house, into gutters facing the roads or backing them, into bushes  while standing with legs spread wide apart and hips thrust forward, by the front tires of little buses and back tires of huge trucks, standing behind open passenger doors of saloon cars, legs together, feet apart, and in some really interesting cases, we pee right out in the open, standing side by side with other non-peeing guys who are drinking, smoking, gisting, and getting ready to pee.

It appears to me that we feel more comfortable with our outdoor pee-pisodes. I have had friends who have come visiting and who, as they left my house or office, turned to the nearest bush or gutter and unzipped their fly. Mind you, I have clean toilets in my house and office. I have had times also where I had just left a house where I could have asked to use the urinal and instead sought out the comfort of the privacy of the back tire of a parked bus to do my wee business.

So why do we like doing our wee business outdoors? It would be interesting to know. Definitely something a psychologist may have an opinion about.

As I am no psychologist, let me take this opportunity to wonder - why does this president prefer making important announcements from outside Nigeria? For instance, why did we have to learn from articles in foreign media that Nigerian government ministers would be appointed in September? 

Speaking of, today is September 29. And as they say, 30 days hath September. 

[Edit:ADD Sept 30, 2015, 1100HRS]
And why is it that I now hear that the president communicated his decision to be his own petroleum minister to another foreign media house, ehn? This president should learn to pee inside the house na. If the toilet bowls are dirty, let us clean them and use them. 

Why litter everything outside with our pee just because there are maggots in the loo which we built inside the house with our hard-earned naira and its not-so-visible kobo!!!

AS NUMBER FOUR TAKES HER ROYAL TURN...

Category:Uncategorized 

Why does Nigeria issue driver's licenses to 18-year olds? Why does Nigeria register 18-year olds to vote? Could it be because 18-year olds are adjudged as having reached the legal age of consent? Could it be because at 18 years old, a boy, no, a man is expected to be able to decide for himself what is right, what is wrong, and what is right or wrong depending on prevailing circumstances? Could it be because at 18 years old, a girl is expected to say no when she means no, and to say yes when she is sure she can handle the consequences of her fiat?

Could that be the reason our former chief banker and now good emir (Sai Turanchi) is now said to have married an 18-year old Adamawa princess?

Maybe.

But let the emir beware.

The princess may be able to accept his nuptial hand; her vagina may be able to sate what remnants of his passion still trickle down the legs of his first three wives. But her young pelvis may not be able to withstand the live consequence of that residual passion.

Let the good emir beware vesicovaginal fistula. It does not necessarily recognize the 18-year benchmark for independence. 

But what do I know sef? Abeg lemme park well. 

THE BEAUTY OF ATHEISM

Category: A Set Of Random Thoughts

The aloofness of religious leaders to the real circumstances of their followers has gradually lent to atheism a beauty it neither truly possesses nor truly merits. It has led some people to a reactionary rejection of all things that are not readily explained by Science.

Yet Science is not at cross-purposes with God's plans. God created logic and expanded the human brain enough to develop a mind capable of abstract reasoning, from which resource all things scientific have been made, and all technology has come forth. Science is ultimately God's weapon placed in Man's hands, or, more correctly, in Man's skull, with which Man is to conquer the universe and, hopefully, create a fate for mankind different from that which has befallen the dinosaurs.

Atheism is a shadowy mist resting on borrowed canvas. Bereft of substance, its beauty is like that of the moon - lent to it by rays stolen from the sun. It is an irrelevant ball of darkness in the absence of that blazing star.

Do not be fooled by atheism, or by atheists.

A THANK YOU NOTE TO AN UNLIKELY LOT

Category: As I Was Saying...

I have on occasion been guilty of one sin: the sin of dismissing every single Nigerian policeman (and policewoman, mind you) as just another member of a thieving, inefficient, ineffective, corrupt lot, whose specialty is harassing motorists as the latter try to negotiate their way through the motley of death-traps on Nigerian roads. I have often held that the only crimes that our police officers have taught themselves to fight are hawking on some streets in Asokoro, riding okada in some parts of Lagos, parking a vehicle "wrongly" in parts of Onitsha.

But today, I woke up to the news that the police had rescued the patriarch of my family friend's home, less than 24 hours after he had been kidnapped from his residence. The kidnappers roughed him up some, but the men and women of the Nigerian Police Force got him out. Alive.

Kudos olopa.

Change is here. 

PAPA FRANCESCO: MORE LOVE, LESS LECTURES

Category: On The Wall

Pope Francis Inside A Philadelphia Prison, Sept 2015

Notice how this pope has, with his choice of tour sites during his 2015 visit to the US, called attention to the world's homeless and to the world's imprisoned.

He has been making a difference in our world, not with pompous words of canonical self-righteousness, but with deliberate action that calls on us all to return to the fundamental principle on which Christianity was built: LOVE

THUS SAYS THE LORD...TO 'THE LORD'S CHOSEN...'

Category: On The Wall

I have just received a message from the Most High. Someone please take this message to the leaders of The Lord's Chosen:

Thus says the Lord:

In the beginning, I created Time. And that was the beginning of the Beginning. I created everything out of nothing. I have created things you have seen and things you cannot fathom. I have given you capabilities so that you can use them to fend for yourself.

You sin grievously when you give murderous instructions to those who choose to come to me through you. You belong with the Father of Lies when you tell my children that I said they should not take medications, when you stop them from getting medical help when they are sick, and instead lock them up and needlessly pollute the atmosphere I created with the noisy ruckus that you like to call prayer.

I created man. I created all men. There is a reason I created Newton. And Fleming. And Shakespeare. And Florence Nightingale. And Ben Carson. And Lionel Messi. I have given each man his own gift, each man his own talent. I have even given you - some of you - the gift of oratory. Do not misuse it by employing it to lead other people to needless deaths.

I will hold each of you responsible for every single death you cause. Every single one. This caveat applies also to your colleagues at Faith Tabernacle.

If I were anything like some of you, this is where I would use what you people like to call an expletive. But, you see, I am not.

One more thing. I have chosen everyone, and appointed to different people different roles. Do not keep telling my children that they are the ones I have specially chosen. That is pathetic. None of them - and none of you - is even a non-Gentile!!!