Sahara Reporters
“When I was contemplating the struggle, I knew it was going to require a lot of energy, patience and money,” Ken writes in his prison memoirs A Month and A Day (which I am paraphrasing here since somebody has permanently borrowed my copy). Of those three things, Ken said he knew he had a lot of energy, that if he did not have patience he could cultivate it. But concerning the last one, money, he knew he had no money anywhere in the world. So, instead of waiting to win a lottery, Ken became a business man. But because his foray into business was for a higher purpose, it could only be a transitory phase. He knew when his trading career had served its purpose and then, even though he had become a very successful business man, had to call it quits in order to devote his energy to the Ogoni struggle. He did not succumb to the joys of money making and its attendant greed and glories.
Just as the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Osun State on Wednesday fixed December 5 for the court ordered re-run election for the Senate seat previously occupied by Iyiola Omisore of the PDP, a new controversy has surfaced over the authenticity and veracity of Omisore’s degree.
“By doubting we come to question, and by questioning, we perceive the truth.” (Peter Abelard, 1079-1142)
When you strip Nigeria of all its borrowed and illusive attires, what will be left is a wretched half-child-half-man nation on the verge of implosion. Nigerians and the rest of the world are beginning to ask themselves serious questions in the wake of a Nigerian man’s attempt at bombing an American airline over Detroit on Christmas day.
I saw Rachel Maddow on MSNBC yesterday discussing Nigeria. What grated most was not what she had to say about our current political impasse but her mode of address and style of delivery. Everything, including her facial expressions, pointed to humour. She was struggling not to burst out laughing on camera. She even poked some good old fun at Goodluck Jonathan. As I watched and squirmed in pain and embarrassment, taking a mental note of how the buffoons running – or not running our lives – in Abuja and Jeddah have turned us into the butt of depraved jokes at the international level, the telephone rang.
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