Category Archives: What’s the Problem of Nigeria?

Dear Blogger: An Open Letter from Nigeria Witches

Dear Blogger,

It has been brought to the attention of the Witches and Wizards Association of Nigeria (WITZAN) insinuations about the economic viability of our operations. For the avoidance of doubts and to set the records straight this rejoinder is deemed necessary.

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Mr Blogger, you need to be careful of what you venture into and how you analyze things. Your blogpost called out the existence of the witches, our motives and even doubted our productivity; that greatly undermined our membership drive and we will like to state unequivocally there’s no better time to become a member of WITZAN than now. You don’t want to know how many members of the public are daily being conveyed to-and-fro their work via our flying network of UFOs. Yes, you read well. You don’t have fuel to power your cars yet your colleagues turn up at work daily and you didn’t bother to investigate them. And, what do we ask for in return? A few stopovers at some peoples’ heads to jingle over like a motor; what better deal can you get elsewhere?

While we vehemently reject the responsibility of making matrimonial-aged men bed wet we have core areas of interest that intertwines with everyone’s daily lives—and, that’s a blanket cover regardless of your fate or faith.

Let’s itemize active productive and economic viability of our operations:

Lagos Traffic:

If nothing else justifies our activities, the daily Lagos traffic does! For the information of the uninitiated, whenever you drive through the grind of Lagos traffic only to find there was no cause when you get to the front alas, a territory meeting is going on at that moment! Our convention points are usually at major bus stops but when there’s pandemonium at the coven we usually take it out on commercial bus drivers who then start manifesting strangely by parking on the roads to pick and drop passengers. The quick sales made by the gala sprint sellers can be seen as a bright side too.

Earphones and other strings:

Have you ever neatly packed your phone ear piece but found it tangled when it was called for use? Yes, that was us working there! Of Course, we do so just because we can—and there nothing you can do about it.

Other miscellaneous annoyances:   

Once in a while, just for the fun of it we throw spanners at your wheels and its breaks down; of course, this is after several ignored signals from your vehicles. Question, why does most vehicle’s break downs happen just on the bridge? Well, that’s another of our cooling joint and our actions serve to put limits to over speeding motorists. Yes, I know you never thought of it in that light.

The next revelation is a thousand year mystery: where are all the pens? All things being equal and without remiss on our part you cannot use a pen for its natural lifetime. It is annoying— yes, but that’s just what we do to increase the sales for pen companies. Do you know they never return losses? Now, that’s a good investment ground for you.

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Disclaimer:

We hereby absolve the Witches and Wizard Association of Nigeria (WITZAN) from all negative incidence and other corollary consequences resulting from peoples’ carelessness and insensitivity.

All efforts by some people to burn us have not and will not result to anything because most of the accusations are baseless.

Peace to all men.

This month I will do everything and I will do nothing…

Happy new month peeps!

Sure, it has been a while but pardon me, hustle came between the blog and me.

I have made a new year resolution soon after my country changed party leadership…

My new year resolution is similitude of my president’s inaugural declaration: “I belong to everybody and I belong to nobody” after fruitless attempts to make a sense out of such deliberate double-speak, that leaves one more confused and bewildered, I gave up and developed some more variations of my own speaking within talking.

You see, communication has become such an arduous taMuhammadu Buharisk in our society albeit more endangered  is comprehension skills.

Pray, a man mouthed such wicked Obscurantism but was hailed as a man of himself. I pity our collective approbation.

…My new year resolution is to henceforth do everything within my powers and do nothing outside my powers. I will hence wake someday and go everywhere and I will go nowhere. You can figure out the rest of my life’s story…

***Lights out***

A Close Call

Today, a quick story.

I have been at occasions you would call a close call.

I mean those days you looked back and exclaimed “what luck”!

There must be something and Nigerians’ paranoid with death? Paradoxically, living in Nigeria is a spanning game with Hades.

While growing up, there were communal clashes everywhere; you could lose your life like a coin in a gambler’s pocket, being at a wrong place at a wrong time. The streets were haunted for several days after those clashes.

Soon after the 2002 Mile-12 Hausa-Yoruba clash in Lagos, I was in a vehicle at a motor park waiting for passengers to fill up. A young man ran desperately through the park and a chorus of “Hausa

are coming!” paused the commercial activities in the area.

That was the day I knew how easy it was to scale through a bus window. Stampede took over and we all chased after the young man running. The man intensified his pace when he saw us coming. Left with no breathe he stopped to asked for his offence but someone shouted “No bi you say Hausa dey come?”

Just before you go.

On our daily drive home from work, tired bodies are in the habit of snatching naps on the long grind of traffic home. Some eyes still find it dutiful to access the driver’s maneuverings. On a certain day, we drove to the merging point of trucks and cars and supposedly (because we were all asleep), a trailer was inching closer to our car than a certain woman sitting next to the door thought appropriate… You know the type of warning you sound to your selfish brother, who is riding his bicycle towards a ditch and you standby with detached concern?

A typical Vehicle-Trailer mix on a Nigerian road.
A typical Vehicle-Trailer mix on a Nigerian road.

 

…the woman shouted, Trailer! Trailer!!

A young man in the middle seat rived to life and groped for an escape via the window next to me. All efforts to hold him down fueled his desire the more. He succeeded.

When the car came to a halt and we made to help him up, his condition was worse than if the trailer had hit the car we were in. I can’t even imagine if it had been on a fast-moving road.

What about you? Share your close call experiences with me, please.

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Happy New Year!

Nigerians have a saying: It is dawn when a man wakes up.

In a manner of speaking it is my new year when this blogpost comes alive.

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