Awww! Super cute boys. The Manchester United star who just joined photo-sharing website, Instagram posted this selfie of his two little boys, 3 year-old Kai and Klay (9month old). He captioned it ‘Chilling with my two boys’. Kai looks more like Rooney.
This recent picture of Former Director General of NAFDAC, Dora Akunyili has set tongues wagging. I really screamed when I saw it and kept wondering what really happened to her. The once bubbly and chubby woman now looks frail and emaciated after a major sickness. I pray she recoups the lost weight soonest.
“I just need to put on some weight. There is a saying in Igboland: “Let the sickness take the flesh but leave the bones because with time the bones would grow new flesh. I just came out of a major sickness, for which I thank Almighty God for delivering me. I know that God did that for a purpose, this National Conference being part of that purpose. I am well now but only need time to put on more weight” She stated.
A-list thespians, Rita Dominic and Joseph Benjamin are starring in a new movie on the Benin kingdom. The title of the movie is unknown and I think shooting is still going on. Rita is as stunning as ever!!!
Chelsea striker and former Barcelona player, Samuel Eto’o has opened up on his relationship with his former boss, Pep Guardiola while at the spanish club. The Cameroonian revealed that during the 2008/2009 season, the incumbent Bayern Munich coach spoke to him on few occasions and used other players to communicate more.
“I first of all reminded Guardiola that he’d never been a great player. He was a good player, that’s true. I told him. As a coach, he had proven nothing. He came in and didn’t even know the story of the dressing room. Guardiola has never had the courage to say things in front of me. He passed by the players. Xavi told me they wanted me to stay but I had to talk to Pep. I say “never, if you do not respect me, I do not respect you. There were three occasions when he spoke to me that season.
One was when he wanted me to speak to Yaya Toure, who didn’t want to talk to him either. Another was when he told me how to move like a striker. I told him: “You’re not normal!” The true story is that Pep didn’t respect the things in football.
He shook hands with me when I was at Inter and I played against Barca, but this was just for the cameras and TV. Behind the scenes before the match, he did not greet me.’
Majority of people no longer keep to their words. The result of their promise is lies. Even when the person they have lied to brings it to their notice, they do not care. You call their phone lines and write emails to them, they neither pick nor reply. The sad side is that these people with ‘deformed behaviours’ are persons we so hold in high esteem, not that they are faraway fraudsters or gangsters. I’ve always told people that in human relationships, “distance is not measured in miles, but in affection.”
I’m not sure they even know the cost of their aberrations. I feel like the ground should open, when I placed calls on people I have something to do with and, they did not pick or replied the ‘missed calls’. Or, even when I wrote emails, they did not reply, because they were dodging. I feel that I have lost myself a lot in the process of loving and being honest to others, whom I would later found out have ruinous tottering-manners.
Then-again, I have often found consolation in the words of a Woody Allen, which say, to love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.
Some would pick the calls and quickly tell you how busy they were and that they were going to call you back shortly, when their intention was to ‘discharge’ you. You would wait for their calls that would never come, till eternity. And somebody who finds it very had to fulfill his or her promise of ‘I’m going to call you back’, how would the person, have the time to reply your emails?
My worry is that people do not know the commitment of their words. Even when they knew, their belief is that they can easily pray or ask for forgiveness from their ‘God’ at will. While they have this mindset, they do not care about what pains their actions have caused the person they have wronged.
My belief-system is that without honouring your fellow human being with your word and action, it would be very had to honour any sky God or underground God. You can’t say “I honour God in everything I do” whereas your fellow human being is dealing with the pains of your betrayal of him or her. Not one, two, three, or four times!
I’m easily convinced by people’s words, but I’ve found out that many people, we think we respect in the society, are just liars and cheats. They do not regard your integrity. Rather, they see a man with integrity as a fool, because he does not cheat with words and always believes in his fellow man. I can remember as a kid that all people needed to keep to business were a handshake and word.
These were seen as sacred. Some of us grew up like that, but into a society that is windswept of quality character and principle. Many people today do not or, have refused to recognise that a man’s word is his bond that should not be played with. Rather, they see how fast and often they sermonise their religious principles as the bond, without which they feel that they are incomplete, whereas they are gnarled of humane manners.
Wonder why the society is falling apart every day? People are ever ready to risk their relationship with promises they can’t and won’t keep. In marriage, I laugh when I see people make promises on the altar they cannot keep, at last. I have suffered in the hands of people who made promises to me in business transactions, but later they unashamedly dishonoured their personal word and, without bathing their eyelids.
And they do not make any attempt to salvage, in order to show that conscience is not only a word in the dictionary, but that which should also be the guiding principle of every living man. It is imperative that we keep to our words. To me, I see this as the essence that we live as human beings, not as beasts. I have had cause not to relate with people deeply, but on the thought that one man does not make an island, what could I do. People should understand that words are the tenets that should prove how honest a man is, not how often he goes into the streets to win persons to his religion.
There is no ‘reality’ without people keeping to their words in this world. I have suffered dishonesty in the hands of many people. And when I sit down and ruminate, I wonder what influence these people were creating in the society. I wonder if people know that the best of impacts in influencing the world is to keep to words. I tell people not to always want the honest man in their lives, but have to also be honest themselves to help encourage the world with healthy ways of co-habiting.
It is sad that many people want an honest man around them, upon that they do not have what the honest man needs. They incessantly betray the honest man with lies and cheating and also call him a fool in their closets. Nonetheless, a Alan Greenspan said that regulation – which is based on force and fear – undermines the moral base of business dealings. (People think) it becomes cheaper to bribe a building inspector than to meet his standards of construction…
Conversely, for healing, I’m taking succour in the words of a Belinda Taylor, which say, don’t mire up in self despair of your losses, learn from them and move on to other good things in life. Don’t stop allowing the sunshine in, because of the fear that winter will come and engulf the warmth. Hold it close to you to help you through those cold winter days.
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Odimegwu Onwumere is a Poet/Writer and a social commentator. He writes from Rivers State.
It is an inquisitive thing that Fulani herdsmen are apparently taking laws into their hands in Nigeria. From their occupation in the rearing of cows across the bushes and lands in the country unsolicited, but especially in the forests and lands of the South-East and South-South zones, they have become merchants of death anywhere they went, as gory stories of their sophisticated mayhems rent the air.
Over 150 people were reportedly killed recently, by Fulani herdsmen in an attack on three villages of Ugwar Sankwai, Ungwan Gata and Chenshyi, in Kaduna State. Their killing sprees in a place like Berom of Plateau State, have taken precedence. The killings against Christian Southerners and
Northerners are a story for another day, so that no one is pushed to cry. The sad side of it is that the affected villagers from the villages these Fulani herdsmen cum gunmen have meted out their shoddy acts, say that the herdsmen opened fire on them immediately they entered their villages. Initially, these Fulani herdsmen were known for the little knives they hold around their waists while herding their cows. But today, they are armed with AK 47 rifles. Terrorism everywhere!
On March 10 2014, a sitting Governor of Benue State, Gabriel Suswam narrowly escaped death. His envoy was said to have been ambushed by assumed Fulani mercenaries. They engaged Suswan and his security aides in exchange of gunfire at Tee-Akanyi village in Guma Local Government Area of the state. The herdsmen had earlier sacked those within the Uikpam-Mbabai. The attack on Suswam’s convoy compelled the governor to say that it’s a real war and beyond the Fulani herdsmen.
Without hiding for the fear of arrest, the Fulani herdsmen after they had spilled the blood of the innocent people arrogantly declared that the violence should be blamed on Suswam. It’s the National Vice President of Miyetti Allah Cattle Breeders Association, Alhaji Hussaini Yusuf Bosso who was credited with such a goofing statement for. whatever reason. Needless of going to look for who the sponsors of the marauders were, Bosso might tell
Nigerians.
Police who were supposed to bounce on the statement made by Bosso and make arrests, have rather been busy urging Fulani herdsmen and Benue Farmers in February to embrace peace. That was after over 35 persons had lost their lives in the Gwer West local government area of Benue State in that month, in the hands of suspected Fulani herdsmen.
Over 80,000 people were reported to have been displaced in the outbreak of the attack. Is anybody mouthing the police? But if Ndigbo were the Nomads/Herdsmen that have been killing countless innocent people in different parts of Nigeria, police would have been set on motion to be arresting anybody found with cows across the country and there could have been legislation to the effect that rearing of cows, is part of terrorism and the rearers, terrorists.
Go ask the MASSOB members what their experiences are in the hands of the Nigerian security men and women and how many of their men and women have
not been lucky with their lives in the hands of the security people, even when the MASSOB is a non-violent group. The members’ sin in the hand of the Federal Republic of Nigeria is that they said they need Biafra.
The killing spree continues to be the new found love of the Fulani herdsmen. In 2012 a serving senator, Dr. Gyang Dantong, and the lawmaker representing Barkin Ladi in the state house of Assembly, Gyang Fulani, were killed by suspected Fulani herdsmen at a mass burial in Maseh, Plateau State. Yet, governments at all levels behaved and are behaving as if they did/do not have a feel of the dastardly act, except in the newspapers.
Not even the deaths of such glaring prominent people have brought peace between the herdsmen and their host communities where they feed their cows without paying any remuneration. The other time, the women of Ubima
(Governor Chibuike Amaechi’s place) in Rivers State protested to Government House, Port Harcourt to lodge their grievances that the Fulani herdsmen were allegedly raping them in the farms and using dangerous weapons to harass them whenever they complain that the cows were destroying their crops.
The same story is applicable to all the villages and towns in the South-East and South-South zones of this country where the herdsmen have become the Lords of Manor. They do not listen to anybody against the backdrop that their cows destroy crops; and the government is even, always mute to react or act, whenever the people lay their complaints against the herdsmen.
Gradually, the uncalled-for-attitude of the Fulani herdsmen is turning into terrorism. Their cows are terror to farmers’ crops and to the environment, while the herdsmen have become terrorists to human lives at a slightest provocation. Where are we going in this country? This is very unfortunate! And the government security apparati, like the police that should not relent to curb the menace, as we have seen above, were using plea as the new way to fight crime in Nigeria.
Calculating these killings, it has become pertinent to say that the lives of the cows being reared by the herdsmen are preferred by the rearers than the lives of innocent people who advise them contrarily to their already programmed mindset of: ‘we better kill villagers who ask us to pull our cows out from their village’.
While the Fulani herdsmen brag of the number of people they killed in any village they invaded, the problem with Nigeria in checkmating their excesses becomes intelligence. Imagine that in some of the stories, these Fulani herdsmen would group and take uniforms to attack, and no security person would halt them.
Let the government be alive to its responsibility. The government should stop being busy always changing top security personnel, without any iota of change in strategy and new approach to curtail the nuisance of the Fulani herdsmen and their supporters.
In a civilised clime there will not be noise to it as even trained dogs can arrest the activities of the herdsmen. When some goons took to activities such as the herdsmen’s and wanted to take over the South-East, local vigilante group that was called Bakassi, was formed and arrested the situation.
Government should do something about the Fulani herdsmen-initiated killings and harassments of Nigerians in any of the areas they graze. The worst is that when they are provoked, they even attack in a broad daylight and yet go unhurt.
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Odimegwu Onwumere is a Poet/Writer and a social commentator. He writes from Rivers State.
Limpopo crooner, Kcee shared this photo of himself hanging out with Real Madrid star, C Ronaldo. I know he was (or probably still there) in Madrid of recent but ermm, dunno if this picture is real though. C Ronaldo’s left hand is “missing” and I’m still *confused*.
These are additional pictures of Anita Isama and Paul ‘Psquare’ Okoye’s traditional wedding held yesterday March 22nd, 2014 at Port Harcourt.
