Funmi Tofowomo Okelola,
There's the tendency that we share/ distribute criticisms gladly;
like some of the loot stashed in some bank accounts,
keep some knowledge etc, selfishly, do not share it.
Here is a cautionary note to the people like me who would like to relinquish responsibility/ responsibilities to those who are better disposed and more capable of taking on such responsibilities : "It is easier to criticise than to take responsibility"
True too, the armchair critics are also valuable and as we all know we can only grow if we are also permitted to give and take criticism.
" A stitch in time saves nine."
Tomorrow, I'm going to phone Baba K and tell him how much Oga Falola loves him,when it comes to the gritty grit criticising Baba so mildly, a mild slap on Baba's wrist - as if the strongest and the worst thingy thing that Baba has ever said to anyone in this forum was, " lazy intellectual"...
Kenya :
There have been the terrorist attacks by al Shabab among others, and in one of those attacks, four years ago, we lost Kofi Awoonor
Four years ago, after Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner of the Kenyan presidential elections I was not surprised but I knew that there was no way that I was going to console the electorally defeated.
Four years ago, I watched all the presidential debates that were conducted in Kenya before the presidential election in which Uhuru Kenyatta was declared the winner and I was much more impressed by Mr. Kentýatta's performance in those debates, than with any of the other candidates.
I suppose that I was more than a little biased, culturally, because In my humble opinion he was the most eloquent, the most down to earth, the more savvy, the more practical and at the same time the most genuinely visionary of all the candidates as they represented themselves . All said and done, culturally biased, perhaps because he was the better talker and appearances can be deceptive, as in
" all he believes are his eyes - and his eyes they just tell him lies "
but Uhuru Kenyatta appeared to be more polished than the rest of the field. On the eve of the election I told Brother Okoth Osewe that I thought Uhuru was going to win and he assured me that on the contrary the next democratically elected President was going to be his man Raila Odinga and that I could take that to the bank.
I'm sorry to say that that's even more reason why I'm exceedingly angry with the man who I thought knew better and ought to know better and there's precious little you can do about it or are doing about it, over there in America. So I take it out on my Alhambra : I play best when I'm angry. I don't know how it happens: it's like magic.
I'm exceeding angry and frustrated about the situation in Kenya this evening, and you probably know all about it - a low turnout even in Nairobi, especially in Nairobi's slum headquarters Kibera a Raila Odinga's stronghold, the sort of place where Ogbeni Anthony Chidi Opara would like to break bread and commiserate with Kenya's blesséd downtrodden, even if theirs is not yet in the Kingdom of Heaven.
Now that the sham elections have been completed in the rest of the country, the corrupt electoral commission is giving the supreme Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta their anointed appointer an extra day of grace and on this coming Sabbath at the behest of Mr. Uhuru Kenyatta their commander-in-chief, just like an invasion, Kenya's paramilitary and Police will be deployed to all the Odinga strongholds to ensure that Uhuru Kenyatta harvests his share of votes - i.e to reap where he has not sown or may not sow. The problem is that he might not get even a single vote from Odinga's people and he desperately needs to win twenty-nine districts and to garner more than fifty percent of the votes. What I don't know - so please tell me Funmi if you can : does it mean 50 % of the registered voters ? Because since it is a one-horse race and Uhuru is the only horse in town , it means that even if only ten people vote for him in the whole country, he has garnered 100 % of the votes cast and - of course - no matter what happens it's a foregone conclusion that he's the winner of the one horse race - just like in Iran - for Supreme leader, for better or for worse, in sickness or in health till GOD do us part sure , it's one man, one vote , your one and only…
Since they are supervising themselves and there's no one else to supervise them It's more than likely that the corrupt and discredited electoral commission will inflate the number of votes cast on behalf of their boss and they have no alternative if they want to survive in their posts, unless of course they opt for a re-run within ninety days - according to the Holy Kenyan Constitution and Uhuru ( worth at least £500 million Sterling at the start of his presidency) some of that and a dip into some of the national treasury money can play a strong role when it comes to offering an olive branch to the opposition.Other-wise, can you see a way out of this impasse?
But let us temporarily desert the negativities above.
Here's some thanks and some more negativity below:
Some appreciation to/for you : Many thanks for broadening our horizons with your blog and by the exciting diversity of your postings to this forum - yes, thankfully, most welcome diversionary items that turn our attention away from the perennial concerns that permeate this forum through and through and mostly consumes us :
About the war against pernicious corruption ( I read His Eminence or - and n-b. no lazy intellectual is he, so should it sound better if we gave him the even more benevolent and more fitting title of His Royal Highness Oga Farooq Kperogi, custodian -in-chief of Queen Elisabeth's Twenty-first century Universal speak - then so be it - relatively speaking that is, and what he reported on his Facebook pages yesterday , i.e about that which he wrote about a year ago and confirms now with much glee, as usual the dismal dead news that not much has changed, that the Buhari apocalypse and the messianic age that both Brother Buhari and Biafra's Messiah Nnamdi Kanu have failed to usher in, we are probably living in the last days and heading for the doomsday scenario, here on earth and down below the whole nation heading for hell - although he has not yet recycled that view here, for our consumption but rest assured that that dire prediction will soon resurface to pollute all optimism, along with the usual view from his veranda in Buckingham Palace, about the infelicities of neologisms and the new big grammar embedded in the always creative, newer, more flexible,more artistic and more explorative forms of Nigerian English coined in both home and faraway diaspora environments - in complete freedom - sometimes competently rebelling against the grammar police and up in arms and making Jihad on the pristine grammar imams and chief priests ,
also from their holy rosary religious points of view, those who trace their ancestry through Mr. Adam and his Wife Hawa, the infelicities of divisive Naija ethnic chauvinism, the later generations sprung from the testicles of some of the lost tribes from Babylon,
the usual one-upmanship about the winners and losers in the short-lived and tragic Biafra conflict
in the same breath the virtues of Field-Marshall Emeka Ojukwu and Doctor Nnamdi Azikiwe according to their loyal clansmen, avid supporters and passionate advocates ,
male and female created He them.
According to some, some men are created wicked, bad breath - pure evil -
and there is none, absolutely none, not even one virtue in those two
and everyone must concentrate specially on the major sins of Zik & Ojukwu
as maintained by Ogbeni Baba - and I know he will not agree with me when I say,
" Have mercy, Baba! "
"Baba, have mercy !"
It's getting kinda long.
I don't know how you can believe that a mere
" 1-2 million Nigerians of all ethnic groups at Aso Rock, peacefully protesting for a month, and demanding an end to incompetent government, corruption, nepotism, infrastructural decay, unemployment"
would transform the country?
It seems that not even the majority that elected President Buhari or any of his predecessors - Chief Moshood Abiola the most notable exception since they never thought it fit to give him a chance
How any of them could, would, should be able to force the seismic structural changes/ restructuring that is called for without the willing cooperation of an unfaithful senate - unfaithful to their constituencies and unfaithful to the nation is too difficult to imagine
From the negative to the positive: I said "seismic" just now, thinking about my mother , this poem
To My Mother - by George Barker
Please forgive me; I haven't read any of the above, over...
Here's something
On Thursday, 26 October 2017 21:50:40 UTC+2, Funmi Tofowomo Okelola wrote:
Mr. Hamelberg,Thanks for sharing. I replied to a posting on iCloud that the game changer for Nigeria is to have at least 1-2 million Nigerians of all ethnic groups at Aso Rock, peacefully protesting for a month, and demanding an end to incompetent government, corruption, nepotism, infrastructural decay, unemployment, etc...It's shameful that the educated Nigerians are consciously/unconsciously destroying the country through corruption, deprivation, incompetency, etc...Ire o, Mr. Hamelberg.
On Thursday, October 26, 2017 at 4:02:31 AM UTC-7, Cornelius Hamelberg wrote:Brother Okoth Osewe has a Fidel Castro quote emblazoned at the top of his Facebook page, a quotation that I assume is some kind of motto for an African's life's endeavours:
'A revolution is not a bed of roses. A revolution is a struggle between the future and the past" (Fidel Castro)
As we know, there are many revolutionaries among us, many of them, armchair revolutionaries, from on high on their bed of roses, in their lofty ivory towers, directing some of the troop movements on the ground. I used to go to a pub on Vasagatan and sit at a round table with a whole lot of East Africans, some of them Marxists and ex-Marxists who had studied planned economy in the then Soviet Union and at the time what I thought was most remarkable was that they were still talking as if the cold war wasn't yet over…
Okoth himself knows that revolution is not a bed of roses, as I remember almost thirty years ago, a much younger revolutionary Okoth, a friend and comrade -in-arms of my son Nathan, spending some time in bed at our home in Vasastan in Stockholm , recuperating from a broken leg, after some racist skinheads had attacked him viciously, brutally breaking his leg.
Okoth knows that revolution is indeed not a bed of roses and that often, a man has to pay his dues in order to sing the blues. It is from that time that I started referring to him as "the young lion of Kenya" a title wholly unconnected with any Safari idea and well deserved when several years later he started an online petition that he needed his Kenyan passport . The authorities were dragging their feet, but they young lion was not denied his patrimony and he eventually got his passport...
What I remember most about this period of his recovering from a broken leg is that he was down in bed but his spirit was not down and when I started telling him about the glories of the Holy Quran he sat up and pointing his finger me assured me that the holy book was just a "document" and subject to critical scrutiny just like any other document or book, and so , me, thinking of F.R. Leavis, I thought that we had better terminate any discussion about revelation right there so that he doesn't go to the next stage/ page of saying something like "and the author or prophet Mohammed is just a man" after which there could be the possibility of entering the territory of uncharted waters, the unholy waters of blasphemy.
Recently, I asked someone the same question : "Are you a Muslim?" His answer which I thought was evasive, was:
" I am a human being!"
As some of the pious among us know, it was St. Paul who said, "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things"
Among us also there is surely more than one person that belongs to the category of "Big Youth", seasoned minds still young at heart...
Curiously enough, after reading this little topic below sent by an Edo brother this morning, it was not Alexander the Great but The West African Youth League came to mind.
Anyway, without any further delay here it is for your perusal.
He is 31 years old
Austria today made history by electing the world's youngest president who is 31 years old.His name is Sebastian Kurz, he is just 31 years old and with him is his girlfriend Susanne.Before today's election, he was the country's foreign minister.
While our youths are contented with being ass lickers, praise singers and Special assistants on social media in Nigeria, youths elsewhere are disrupting the status quo, pushing for innovation, changing the narrative and pushing for new frontiers.
From Facebook to Snapchat and Taxify, these tech giants were founded by millennials who are youths.
Mark Zuckerberg is just 32 years old and the youngest billionaire in the world.
The bar has been raised in Austria that elected a 31 year old man as her leader today.
A 31 year old man in Nigeria is probably in his parents house, unemployed and broke, eating free food and not bothered.
The 31 old Nigerian man is feeling big supporting politicians (who directly or indirectly put us in the mess we are in) on Facebook without seeing the nexus between the failed leadership and present unemployment predicament.
I weep for our youths many of whom are wasting away forgetting that time waits for no one.
The condition in Nigeria is not helping matters though and then the current generation if youth is not ready to push for change.
Those who have bank jobs think they are on top of the world, forgetting that the owners of the banks were billionaires at their age.
The women get married and drive their husband's cars and think they have arrived.
Those who work in IOCs see themselves as great achievers, not knowing that they are slaves.
I ask young people reading this, what are you doing with your life?
Are you happy with the way Nigeria is at the moment?
What are you doing to push for change?
I wish you a Thought Provoking month.
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