Peoples’ Planet
Stockholm
Sweden
6th of October
a day before the 7th of October
a day survivors will always remember
A nicer place to begin the beginning :
Jumping the gun
Right or wrong
Jesus once said,
Or, perhaps, they don’t
know what they have done…
More straight to the point
a latter day Rabbi begged,
“Father, forgive them,
for they know nothing.”
a bunch of wayward
God-forsaken
ignoramuses
jackasses
with yours truly
in mind
in the singular
a boyish, grown up, shiftless jigger
The general saying is that “With God, all things are possible”, but with regard to what happened on 911 (Baby Bush : “You’re either with us or with the terrorists”) or what happened on the 7th of October in the Holy Land, I’m sure that no one in his right mind can imagine a latter day Rabbi praying,
“Father, forgive them,
because they didn’t know
what they were doing”
As Dear Kenneth Harrow said back then, about the October massacre and he wasn't mincing his words:
“But the action hamas et al have taken will result in reprisals where thousands of gazans will die. “
Perhaps Hamas had reasoned that if in the name of pikuach nefesh the powers that be in Israel at that time had exchanged 1, 027 Palestinian prisoners languishing in Israeli prisons, for a single soldier named Gilad Shalit, by a mass abduction of Israeli citizens they would be able to exchange their Israeli hostages for all the remaining prisoners in Israeli jails and even make a Palestinian State a fait accompli
About what I’m about to say,
whilst every day Muslims pray
at least seventeen times a day
“astaghfirullah rabbi wa atubu ilaih”,
an average Roman Catholic prays
Our Father which art in heaven
please forgive this kind of venial sin :
I for one keep on jumping the gun:
just as ( possible Freudian slip)
out of sheer anticipation (great expectations)
I misread the title of Biko’s penultimate book -
I read or mistakenly thought I read the title as
“The World Bank” because (great expectations)
and I had already started singing
about Biko
like Samuel O
“(Lawdy, lawdy)
Feel just like a lion
(Lawdy, lawdy)
It's reborn today!”
I thought that Biko Agozino the criminologist
a key disciple of serious anti-exploitation’s Walter Rodney
(of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa fame,
had finally got down to publishing his definitive
magnum opus, a dress-down of the poor man's
enemy, The World Bank and the IMF - which some
debtor nations view as an evil, joint criminal enterprise,
welded & wedded together like Siamese twins
and enemies of the world’s debtor nations
enemies, not even frenemies, mainly because
because of these twin institutions they are currently
heavily in debt & shuffering, it noh funny, strangled by the high
interests rates which Islamically speaking is not kosher
and as every Muslim and Muslim nation knows, usury,
interest banking just like every other form of RIBA is HARAM -
and astagfirullah, without that pernicious practice of charging
such exorbitant haram interest on loans, some of the poor and
the poverty-stricken nations would not be in the mess that we’re in.
So, what ever happened to the nation of Halal Banking // Islamic Banking ?
Jumping the gun number 2 -
I had just listened to the latest episode of Inside Story where one of the savvy guests was none less than one Timothy Lenderking, a man of good intentions, no doubt, such a beautiful surname, so apparently loaded and soaked with meaning, in contravention of Polonius’ piece of advice, “Neither a borrower nor a lender be”
The prospect of reading
by Ojogbon thrilled me no end -
anybody’s guess how he would handle
Nigeria, from reforms to prosperity
Bola Ahmed Tinubu not having boasted
about Nigeria’s resilience with regard to servicing
Nigeria’s debt burden which astronomically,
allegedly “remains below 36% of Nigeria’s Nigeria’s GDP”
Ojogbon, backward never, ever-forward,
the ever seminal and unafraid,
going to clean up where the coward had
developed and dovetailed from calling
a spade a spade, dovetailed
from taking the bull -
the real bull, by the horns:
Ojogbon in word action
the word in flesh
the word made flesh
appearing in person
as Mark L Troy once remarked
at our forskarutbildning seminar
about the incarnation, yes
Jesus “ buckled on some mortal flesh”
and I was thinking of just that phrase
when Rabbi Meir Horden’s wife asked for
the meaning of nefesh and seemed visibly
annoyed when I suggested nefesh as
the opposite of flesh, Ojogbon flashing
(I almost wrote “ fleshing”)
some intellectual muscle
like Plato vs. Aristotle,
on the brink of giving the World Bank &
the IMF a good hiding or as Coz Yaya Fanusie would put it ,
“ an intellectual beating", little did I realise that
“cost of living get so high, rich and poor they start to cry”
I had some good reading to look forward to and was more
than pleasantly surprised and satisfied by the opening
poetic salvo of compassionate
down-to-earth, heart-breaking realities
faced by individuals, families, whole nations
reading through which I came to the conclusion
that the panacea to all evil could be this simple
and as above, so below, it’s the kind of advice
that, without a consultation fee he could freely
give to African Governments so that IMF & The World Bank
stop strangling them at the jugular 👍
“… the first thing to do is stop borrowing. When you borrow more to pay current loans, you expand the money you owe and push it further beyond your reach. It is just a temporary fix. Scrap that; it is not a fix at all. It is a trap they wanted you to enter. No matter how much interest increases, don’t borrow more. Only pay from your earnings. If you can reach out to the loan app for concessions, do. If you can afford a lawyer or can get one who can help you pro bono, have the lawyer write a letter or take it up with the loan sharks about harassing you. Then they can help you get a payment arrangement. But whichever way, do not take another loan.”
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