Oga at the top and a country called Internet | By: Sonala Olumhense
Once upon a time, a new country came to be. It was called Internet. It had many states and many peoples and many kinds. On Internet, you could live in different states. The state of Facebook, for instance. Or Email. Or Twitter. You could even choose to be a citizen of any or all of them at the very same time.
You could be in the state of Happiness, or of Unhappiness.
On Internet, you could do as you pleased. You could hold many passports and cause one problem to many. Or you could hold one passport, and cause many problems to one person. The country of Internet had an avalanche of opportunities and prospects, and everyone began to acquire real estate. Some people kept their feet on the ground, some chose to travel upside down. The country was free and exciting.
The young took their places alongside the older. The sick took their places alongside the healthy. The women shopped alongside the girls; the grandparents photoshopped with the best of the boys. That made for a lot of citizens who were happy and hopeful for the first time in their lives. Happy for hope. Hoping for happiness.
One evening, in one state, Wendell Simlin bellied up to the bar.
“Sir, he said to Oga at the top, “Sir!”
“Yes, Wendell, what is it?” Oga asked, evidently in high spirits.
“May I speak freely sir?” It was very late, but there were still several others at the well-appointed bar.
“Yes, speak, Wendell? Are you alright? You do not seem to be drinking anything. This bar is not going to empty itself you know?”
Wendell smiled. “Thank you sir. I am just pacing myself.”
Oga thought about that. “You are at home, you know,” he replied. “Pace has no meaning when both road and car belong to the driver. This is your home, your road, your car. You don’t need to pace yourself.”
“Thank you, sir. I just want to be sure I am always able to give you my best. I am grateful for all you have done for me.”
“Don’t worry, we have not even started. What did you want to say?”
“Thank you. Sir, have you heard of the country of Internet?”
Oga belched into Wendell’s face as he lifted a cup of beverage. “That I have,” he said. “Internet. You know that is why I brought you here. I have been told it is at the edge of the cut.”
“Cutting edge, sir!”
“What?”
“Cutting edge. But it does not matter. I just wanted to let you know that you are sitting on a gold mine!”
Oga jumped out of his seat. “Gold mine? Here? Under this chair? In this palace?”
Simlin laughed. “No, not here sir. Internet. An exciting land full of students, housewives, the unemployed, everybody. We can really take advantage of it sir. With one keystroke we can have all of them eating out of your hands!”
“Really? How?”
And Wendell talked. Oga at the top listened, nodding. He nodded off.
And so it was that Wendell, empowered, travelled widely in Internet to extend extending Oga’s reach and his message, using all kinds of messengers who carried different passports. Oga followed in all the territories, establishing a major outpost in the state of Facebook. There, he spoke every day.
He travelled to the state of Unhappiness and showed them his feet, clasped in glittering snakeskin designer shoes.
“Remember I once walked barefoot,” he told voters in the city of Poverty, “because we were very poor. Look at me now!”
In the villages and towns of Promise-and-Fail, he told them to fear no more because he had untold riches planned for them. He would give them electricity and jobs. He would build universities and airports and hospitals and roads and farms. Their wives would never walk naked, and their children would never lack honey.
Wherever he spoke, the people applauded widely, and Oga would turn around and find Wendell with a knowing wink and a grin. Some of the people were wary, however. They told Oga they hated the company he represented, but that they would support for him personally.
And so it was that Oga received the endorsement of all the states. The state of Facebook. The state of Happiness. The city of Expectation. The towns and hamlets of Doubt. The villages of Disappointment and Poverty.
“That caught out edge really worked!” Oga told Wendell. “You were right!”
“Thank you, sir. The country of Internet is a marvelous creation. We don’t even have to rely on the press or the Ministry any more. You don’t need the journalists. With Internet, you can say whatever you want whenever you want it, and nobody can tell the difference!”
“Yes. It is a canoe we will ride as long as we like and we can fish for as long as we want. And it is your house, Wendell. Eat what you like. Drink what you like. By the way, why are you alone again today? Na only you waka come? Have fun!”
And so it was that the exciting canoe ride began. They traveled whenever and wherever they went. Riches. Power. Life was wonderful. The only thing that remained was to prepare for another round.
Incredibly, the country of Internet also expanded, but nobody seemed to notice. Citizens of the states of Happiness and Disappointment, like those of Facebook and other places, began to raise their voices in anger. There were riots and mutinies and fights.
“What about our rights?” they were asking. “What about the promises made to us? Why are we so unsafe? Why are strangers killing our families and taking our livestock? Why are there so many thieves and liars walking unchallenged?”
But nobody seemed to hear them. There was just so much to do that nobody saw the roof as it unraveled, despite all the reports in Internet.
As so it was that, in the end, the country of Internet revealed itself as being everywhere and everything, of being without boundaries and being able to see into the bedrooms of Emperors and the hearts of Kings.
For the first time, the country of Internet was revealed to be the heart of every man and woman everywhere, and Oga and his people could hear, through the tongues of strangers in lands known and unknown, his own people’s anguish for service and responsibility.
In just two weeks, the horror of a government being unconcerned about using its vast resources to rescue and return hundreds of kidnapped children exposed Oga before the world as naked and weak and confused.
Wendell, unmasked as a manipulator and liar in the earlier days of the unraveling, had failed to tell Oga that country Internet gives, but may not forgive, and never forgets.
And now, country Internet roars on beyond all boundaries and beyond Oga’s control, in the effort to find the abducted children, with the unmistakable message that unless they returned home safely, there will be hell to pay, by the few, to the many
Credit: Ynaija.com
Open Letter to Nigerians – Please stop disrespecting your First Lady | By: Valentine
In the last one week the craze online is quite disgusting but Funny, with many attacking the first lady with malicious intent and purposes. Now I’m here to defend her as my mother and by virtue the mother of all Nigerians in this dispensation. She called a security meeting to contribute her own quota to finding lasting peace that is gradually evading us Nigerians as a nation.
I do know she has no right to summon the Head of the various military agencies, but she did had a security meeting…which those concerned ought to attend which they failed to attend for some political reasons. And you know Mama Peace is not a pretender, she says things the way she feels it, if you like lie about stuffs, when ever she grabs the mantle, she has this penchant of contradicting lies told to the general public.
But what disgusts me is the way many prominent Nigerians have castigated her in the last few days; starting with the Prof. Wole Soyinka to the last man out there who think they are well versed in the usage of English. The way folks undermined her prompted me to challenge and defend her because of the simple truth which is, we all have mothers and no one would fold his hands and allow their mothers disrespected the way we have done lately.
Way back in school the brightest student in our class had this same problem with ‘Spoken English’, the way he abused the language, with mother tongue interference will make one believe he is an Illiterate but he isn’t, when you try him in other spheres you will be amazed that he is a genius in obscurity.
Let’s not forget the language we speak is borrowed and nobody can claim ownership including the originators of the language, over the years many countries are adopting their own pattern of English, in years to come maybe we might just have our own peculiar unique Nigerian English, so before we start abusing the First Lady over some western Pedagogical concept, let us pause for a while and criticize with good intentions not this malicious wickedness that has been trending online lately.
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#Bringbackourgirls, #Nyanyablast: An Open letter to Boko Haram | By: Iyabo Obasanjo
I am moved to write about the current state of affairs in Nigeria. My first inclination was to write to the President but since all letters to him seem to elicit only open derision and even more stupidity from his inner circle, I have decided to address my letter to a group also currently causing Nigerians a lot of pain and agony that may actually have more sense than the country’s leadership.
Dear Boko Haram, the fact that you have taken arms against the Nigerian state is no surprise. The question should be why haven’t more young people organised themselves against the state? Even the fact that your motto, ‘Against Western Education’ is in a way reasonable given the fact that your leader, martyred by the Nigerian state had university education and found no reasonable employment but had to resort to thuggery for politicians to survive, as the story goes.
He, like millions of Nigerian young people and college graduates, seeing a blighted future are doing anything to survive. They have become opportunistic desperados, almost sub‑human as the stepping on and trampling on each other to death at the Immigration employment debacle indicates.
Where you’re wrong, Where I think you have gotten it wrong are in two areas, if you can pardon my giving you some unsolicited advice.
First, your victims are becoming more and more the people you should be attracting to your side. Take the Nyanya bus massacre. The people that live in Nyanya are usually the clerks, messengers and other lowly office workers that live out in relative slums compared to the rest of Abuja and take public transportation to work to receive monthly salaries they barely get by on.
Consult any written work of successful revolutionaries be it French, Russian, Cuban or even the more recent uprooting of communism in Eastern Europe, to succeed you need the people to be on your side. Right now you are not achieving this. You are targeting the group you need most. This does not make for a successful revolution but you are making yourselves into nuisances to the people and in the end while the state, including its military machine may not be able to conquer you, your downfall will be alienating these potential allies, i.e. the oppressed and down-trodden.
Secondly, the abduction of girls. It must be hard to stay in the bush as all male revolutionaries fending for yourselves with no sexual gratification. Cuban example. But again, reading up on past bush revolutionaries like the Cuban, for example, indicates that they were able to convince some women to go voluntarily with them into the bush.
Somehow, revolutionary zeal does not include sexual abstinence and cooking and cleaning by yourselves. Reading must be hard for you since you hate education but the past is a good guide to the future and if you can’t read, you are done for in organizing or succeeding in most endeavours as most things have been done before and reading up on how it was done can only serve as good guidance.
The parents of the girls you abducted are just trying to give their daughters a chance at having successful lives. Without an education there is very little anyone can achieve in this early 21st century. I know living in the bush; it must still seem like the dark ages but the truth is that even with the lack of jobs and opportunities for young people in Nigeria currently, it is still better to be educated.
An educated university graduate who was selling food from a food cart ignited the Arab Spring which was spread by use of the internet which is hard to use if you are not educated. There are writings, videos and stuff you post on the internet which I haven’t seen. But think of it, you can only post and use the internet because some of you have some education. But in the end you have no control over the distribution of your advertising and recruiting information because as you may know, the internet is really part of the western system you despise.
Why you’re succeeding:
The truth is that you have succeeded because the Nigerian state has failed to provide jobs and opportunity for its young people who you can now easily recruit. By disrupting education, you are adding to the burden of the people.
You may say, but how about our religious issue? Let the truth be told, just as there are indigenous southern Muslims, there are indigenous northern Christians even from your epicentre in Borno State and just as you are zealous for your religion, I don’t see them giving up their religion either.
The reasonable solution to this impasse would be for you to advocate for everyone to be able to practice their religion as they see fit with respect for each other’s beliefs. Remember, a couple of centuries ago, all of our ancestors below the Sahara were all animists worshipping various ‘gods. This ‘One God’ — us against them situation — is a relatively recent one in our human history and you will be advised to let the originators fight it out and let your people be.”
Culled from Vanguard Newspaper