Funmi Iyanda

My heart was felt with joy, like other soccer-loving Nigerians on Tuesday as the Dream Team IV beat the Belgians to qualify for the Olympics Soccer Final.
The “epic” final will takes place on Saturday, 23 August at 5.00am Nigerian time. My whole body is ready for the final; my generator is ready for the task. I cannot rely on NEPA or PHCN for the day. They are bound to disappoint me.

Moreover, the Saturday game made me to flash my mind back at the 1996 final where we met the same Argentina at the Sanford Stadium.

It is going to be a great day, because Dream Team is our only hope for medal at this Summer Olympics. Kudos to the Samson Siasia's boys

Blogville people!
How has your day been? Since August 2nd 2008 partial closure of third mainland bridge, Lagos roads have been busy and you have to spend almost a day on some roads especially on Ikorodu road.
Lagosians! How have you been able to find your ways around the city?

Anyway, FI is now on holiday. I’ll be here till she resumes.

My friend Geebs sent this to me an hour ago, I read it and immediately forwarded to the giants and then to the omowe, the omowo, the alaye mi bambam, the orisha, the...... what the heck, I am just going to post it to you all. Its an absolutely fantastic speech by JK Rowlings whose babalawo I'd always wanted to meet. It is long so please download and read at leisure, who knows maybe like me it will reassure, reaffirm and then energize you.


The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination
J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series,
delivers her Commencement Address, "The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and
the Importance of Imagination," at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard
Alumni Association.


President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of
Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.
I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations,and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all - in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:
As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

So what’s with the odenku denku children who waddled unto the pitch during the Manchester United/ Portsmouth match on Sunday?
As it is my new year (its not new year?) resolution to mind my business I will not wonder aloud why the match to promote the Calabar based Tinapa was played in Abuja or why the children were not properly and uniformly kitted? Or why…..

My concern really is about those poor roly-poly children and an emerging tendency towards juvenile obesity in middle and upper class Nigeria. For starters I can bet you my last kazo that those children are off springs of government officials. Why bother auditioning deserving athletic children from a cross section of the society when you can use your own bored, sedentary over indulged little geezers? Why give little aspiring footballers a life enhancing opportunity to meet their heroes when you can give your Nintendo addict a nifty bragging tool amongst his and her mini Dolce and Gabanna wearing friends in school next session?

I totally get that. What I don’t get is the sort of crass ignorance that this alarming trend amongst the children of the rich (don’t have accurate starts but how many obese children have you seen in your neighbourhood ramshackle local government authority school?) betrays.

Why is it that as soon as a bewildering majority of my people earn, acquire, obtain or receive their blessing, they stop eating whole natural food and proceed to clog their arteries with fat, salt, sugar and additives saturated, over processed, imported food? I often see my people at supermarkets pushing bulging trolleys of dead, dehydrated food with a huge swagger and a huger purse.

Affluence seem to be encouraging too many to over indulge, over feed (mostly on fast food) and over protect our children.
Most of the children on that field on Sunday do not deserve to be there and their inclusion has done nothing but reinforce a sense of entitlement and nepotism which will stunt their development and send signals to other children that their efforts won’t count. As a friend once said, the child sitting at home in his original Arsenal souvenir shirt and shiny Nike boots waiting for the driver to take him to football practise at the Astroturf will never be as good a player as the one who has hopped on okada or BRT bus and gone to play on the patched sands under the bridge at Orile. No be curse.

I had a Forrest Gump moment. You know that moment in the film when Tom Hank’s character stopped running, turned back and wearily walked home.

Like the Gump character, my race started with the need to get away from something although l did not know it at the time. So about 13 years ago l started running. I ran long and hard, hardly pausing for breath, maybe l occasionally paused to help a few people along the way but l ran with every fibre of my being. Along the line people took inspiration, imagining l had a great big reason for running, some threw me pure water, some watched in various shades of fascination, exasperation and irritation. A minute number watched in growing concern.

As the years wore on I began to flag as my unreplenished physical and emotional reserves ran dry but my mental strength carried my aching bones, blistered digits and spastic nerve endings forward. Sometime this year l had a few emotional upheavals (you will need to wait for the bookJ) that unbalanced my finely tuned knife edge existence and stopped me in my tracks. I stopped and looked back and l saw the many eager faces behind me, so l summoned all my mental energy and took a few steps forward then it happened. A complete blackout, a Paula Radcliffe at the Athens Olympiad moment. I just could not go on. I figuratively collapsed at the sidewalk exhausted in everyway impossible.

In the last few weeks, l have come out of the metaphoric coma, picked myself from the sidewalk, dodging the okadas and gawking onlookers and wearily walked home. I have embarked on an intensely personal journey of recovery, healing and nurturing. I have had support from and taken inspiration from the most unexpected things, events, places and people (living and dead). I am trying to take care of all bases, physically, spiritually and emotionally. I feel fucking fabulous.

It is still work in progress but l am quietly excited about where l am, how l am evolving and where l am going, the products of which will become clear in the near future.

I am in my rest period and thus will be irritating you with a few convoluted ideas and explanations in the next few weeks but yes aje ti de o, Ms Witch is back in the building.

Yes it is my birthday today and thanks to Facebook and other social networking tools, l feel so loved this morning. Thank you all so much, eri mi wu o, gbogbo yin na le ma a r” alanu o. Ditto all the requests to please start blogging again, l am appalled at how many of you read this rubbish ramblings of a bipolar and how geographically, socio-economically and chronologically diverse y’all are. Don’t you people have anything better to do with your online time? No mind my waya mouth o, l am tickled pink, blue and orange. A daa fun yin jo, eyin alaye mi bambam! Blogger abeg translate.

Hello people!

You may have been wondering what has been keeping FI from updating this blog for the past weeks, like I said in the last post, FI has been busy.

But don't worry; she will be back with you on Monday.

Have a lovely day

It has been hectic days back here. FI has been super busy with world dom plans and Funmi's Favourites which has been taken her round some media houses and events.

For me, I'm going all the way to Delta State for my traditional wedding engagement this Friday

Here are some of the pictures at the events and media engagements.

Enjoy!


FI & Terresa Essien of Channels TV




















FI on Today's woman with Adesuwa Onyenokwe

now what does one do for this?

Xenophobic violence instigator

so, what does one do with this?

Last week, government at state and federal levels marked the 1st year in office with various degrees of half truths, lies and bloody lies. As it tends to happen, the initial euphoria of getting rid of a problematic leader and attendant hope in the new as we grasp at straws of fairly good points and magnify these with evangelistic fervour has dissipated into despair as the much touted man of honesty and order goes in the mind and slangs of the populace from baba jeje (gentle father) to umoru go slow (sluggish umoru) and now umoru no go (non performing umoru). Yardua's rule of law government has become rule of lull as the ailing president makes no moves forward but reverses in painful to watch and hear epileptic fits. As he reverses many of Obasanjo's policies and "achievements", he neither has any viable replacement nor innovative new policies of his own.

As global oil prices rise (with our own little contributions and no gain) the country appears to be on autopilot as we all siddon look and life gets a little more stagnant, a little more fuzzy everyday. When will Mr. President wake up and start moving in a particular direction? As per the governors, the most outstanding one, to the best of my knowledge and deserving of a quick pat on the back and a call to keep working hard at it is Mr. Fashola in Lagos. The judiciary is also a beacon of hope in this literal darkness.

Are the xenophobic attacks a result of jealousy or what???? Can someone tell me now!!!

This was originally an email to my Tutu Fellows around Africa but I have edited to fit an open letter mode as I feel the issues are deeper and more complex than my last emotive post would suggest. The challenge of a situation such as this is not only to SA or her leadership but the entire continent.


Dear brothers and sisters,
I wrote this almost a week ago but was unable to send it as we have had total black out in several parts of Lagos as well as attendant problems with telecommunications and Internet connections. This coupled with a stalled economy, complete lack of political direction, militancy, inflation, unemployment, rising crime, rising food and diesel price (which powers generators which we all live on, my older friend has invested over N60m in her business in the past 3 weeks 60% on power, her brand new super industrial generator exploded yesterday). I sing you this little dirge, which is just the story of our unique questionable resilience as Nigerians and perhaps one of the reasons Nigerians are seemingly so aggressive and abrasive to others. It is also the reason for economic migration and the celebrated inexcusable scam artistry and crimes (performed by a small but loud percentage of Nigerians). This state of affairs is the real reason for continued religious, ethic and class intolerance and polarization in Nigeria. The result are flash points of conflict some in the past, as graphic as what we see happening in SA (of course Nigeria does not get as intense an international media scrutiny as SA and perhaps the world's media has disaster fatigue towards Nigeria).

The point I make in usual long torturous manner is that the underbelly of xenophobia, prejudice and exacerbated crime is huge economic disparity, the inability to provide a level ground for all to pursue happiness, injustice (past and present), political brigandry, corruption and graft. This of course is long code for bad leadership although I will continue to be fascinated by the idea of bad and/or complacent or complicit follower ship. This is a global issue but Africa continues to take the cake and make the damn cake in this regard. No country is immune, I have studied Nigeria's slide from a rich, promising, functioning civil nation to this state of suspended anarchy and near total dysfunctionality (no matter what the briefcase economics analysts say with meaningless bars, charts and fancy presentations having dodged bullets and pot holes to make same presentations in a generator powered office without running water). I saw Zimbabwe in her fragile (I had noticed the huge discrepancies of class, resource, color and reality) beauty in 1995 at the All Africa Games and now this, barely a decade later. Ditto Kenya, It may sound alarmist now but no matter how glorious SA may seem now in her promise, she can quickly descend the way of others before her. This will not be a result of single incidences like the current situation but underlying issues of representative economy policies, innovative, enforceable all inclusive education, mass education and orientation on tolerance, (race, religion and nationality), economy dynamism and zero tolerance towards corruption and bad leadership as well as an educated and vigilant follower ship. This underscores the reason for an initiative like AfLI and the need to understand the depth of our unique generational challenge. I am often dismayed by the inability of gifted young people to see the errors of the past, the urgency of the present and the dangers that await us in future.

I am impressed by the debate of the past week and wish we had the kind of powerful African media platform to have raised these issues, that said I do agree that a position paper often comes across as impotent but I disagree about quiet diplomacy, in true African tradition, most of our political leaders should be taken to the village square, read a condemnation from the gods and banished from the empire:-). Yes there are well-meaning leaders but when the house is burning you must not whisper in alarm but shout. The people from whom they borrowed quiet diplomacy are known to loudly abandon it when it becomes expedient for their national or continental interest. The EU is a bastion of diplomacy and point-to-point negotiation built on lessons learnt from centuries of conflicts, agitations and wars. We cannot paper over our problems, they will become gangrenous. True bravery and ensuring progress lies in honest self examination and will to chart a better course based on the wisdom that comes from a real understanding of the non symptomatic issues. Yes I agree that the SA AfLI fellows should practically help on with aid and materials, it appears small but every life counts, beyond that what could also help is sort of like an armchair virtual advocacy which can surprisingly work to effect not only some immediate action but huge awareness and education of those reached. This must be in conjunction with organized and focused on ground country to country advocacy on areas and issues that directly affect development, sort of an ideological revolution.

Also important is the need to identify simple but far reaching policy changes, which can be championed. Finally we must continued to become enlightened and expand the circle of enlightenment perhaps one day some of us will be in the unique position to make those changes and will thus be fully prepared to be these great leaders who builds the good society. However like all muscles, leadership must be practiced at all times or it will atrophy or wear out and certainly be unusable when the race starts.

My prayers for and deepest regards to you all.

Why do they hate us I asked him? The answer was long winded and convoluted but there was no denial. My South African host on my last visit had struggled to make sense of the many incidences of unjustifiable rudeness, aggression and verbal attacks I had received from many South Africans in shops, restaurants, spas, hotels and even in polite company. Most was from black South Africans. In fact I quickly got used to the scowls, frowns and baleful glowering at simple enquires; my Nigerian friend tells me I fit the profile, prosperous looking black foreigner from (impale them all now) Nigeria!

I am of course too studied on the issue of xenophobia and prejudice to accept such simplistic explanations nor am I unknowing enough to think this to be a uniquely South African problem but I have always felt a little less safe, a little less welcome in South Africa. Perhaps the problem is my expectation and the unravelling of such.

Here are my friend Pamela's thoughts on the issue. If South Africa is to host the world at the FIFA world cup in 2 years, she must begin to seriously address this issue.

In a hotel room outside my country I am watching International media reports on the Chinese earth quake disaster and those on the pipeline explosion in Lagos. I had contacted my office to get reports and more.

Years ago during the "bomb" explosion I had been doing New Dawn as a live daily morning show I was able to do daily reports, alerts and mobilization for aid. The letter of appreciation from the Lagos government still sits in my office. I say this because as a journalist I am not only frustrated by the awareness that we haven't got powerful and professionally well run media platforms to effectively report these occurences (they are many) and interprete them. We also don't have enabling law to feret information which might help public accountability. It will change I hope but note this; The Chinese quake is a natural disaster but it has been identified that one of the destroyed buildings had been built without following required standard required-earthquake safety standards. The people involved will be proscuted and executed.

The Lagos explosion is said to be an accident caused by a caterpillar at a road construction site in Ijegun.

Will there be an investigation into the possibilities of negligence on all parties involved, will they be prosecuted, what is the penalty?
Before the next pipeline explosion or collapsed building and other disaster we seem to have become resigned to should be not answer the question.
What should be the penalty for murdering hundreds of people due to negligence, criminal refusal to follow safety standards and corruption?
Whilst on the point, will we have reports that takes the human tragedy beyond mere numbers (often contested) to the ripple effect of families, society and its structure.
Think I'll tune to sports now or continue reading Gore vidal's point to point negotiation.

Just got 2 emails pop up on the ole crackberry, one from a friend who is now an ambassador informing me he had just presented his papers in the host country. The other is a viral mail from another friend bringing me stress relieving mirth as I sit in the usual traffic, you probably have seen it. It helps if you have followed the Ali and ambassadorial post saga. Here it is....


Dear President Yar'Adua,

Ranka dede sir. Saanu da aiki sir. I hope this letter finds you well. If so, doxology. I am constrained to write urgently to intimate you with the frustrating conditions I've had to contend with since I assumed duties as Nigeria 's Ambassador to the Republic of South Africa . You will recall, sir that I had serious misgivings about being posted to this place but you reassured me that things would work out insha Allah. I must regretfully inform you, sir, that you were wrong. This place is hell and I don't know what I am doing here. The ways of the South Africans are indeed very strange.

The first serious signals of South Africa 's backwardness and dysfunctionality became apparent when I landed at the airport in Johannesburg . I was profoundly shocked to discover that only two official vehicles from the Nigerian embassy and three embassy staff were on hand to receive me. This was a serious breach of protocol. When was the last time I moved in anything less than a motorcade of twenty five cars, heralded by AK-47-wielding soldiers and koboko- swishing mobile policemen sweeping civilians out of my way? I felt naked, empty, and vulnerable. I felt betrayed by those embassy boys who appeared to have forgotten how we handle matters of protocol for people of my standing in Nigeria. Obviously, I wasn't going to subject myself to the indignity of leaving the airport in a 'motorcade' of two miserable embassy vehicles. I sat put and told the boys to organize. They finally found a solution by renting five cars from the Avis car rental outlet to bring the tally of vehicles to seven.

Needless to say your Excellency, I had to 'manage' a convoy of only seven cars. Without siren! As if this outrage weren't enough, we had barely made it out of the airport when we found ourselves in one of Johannesburg' s notorious traffic jams. Again, our boys from the embassy had no idea what to do? When we post these boys out, we must insist they visit Nigeria twice a year your Excellency. They are completely out of touch. Just imagine, I had to suggest to them to phone the Chief of Army Staff and the Inspector General of Police to send troops to come and clear the road for us. Rather than act, they sat there looking at me with eyes so wide open they almost popped out of their sockets. Then one obsequious fool explained that 'things don't work that way here, sir'. 'How do you know, have you ever tried', I asked him.

I did not fare any better on my first day on the job, your Excellency. The first thing on my agenda was to present my letters of accreditation to President Thabo Mbeki. Regrettably, I left arrangements to our boys in the embassy. Their shoddy handling of the airport situation should have taught me a lesson! I had expected them to rent a white horse and a crowd of at least one hundred singing and drumming Nigerians to form a procession. I was going to ride the white horse through the streets of Pretoria, all the way to Union Building, with our people singing and drumming. You know, the way we do things back home. What did I get instead? The Ambassador's official car, a driver and one miserable aide! At my urging, they had to rent five cars from avis! If I hadn't insisted, the boys would have done untold harm to Nigeria's image as the giant of Africa by having her Ambassador drive to that ceremony in only one car. No policemen. No soldiers. No siren!

The humiliation continued when we got to Union Building. Only the official car with the Nigerian flag was allowed in. They wouldn't allow the rental cars in because they were not accredited. I told my aide to go and 'see' the appropriate people only to be told by the rude boy that they don't 'see' people in South Africa. How do you run a country where you don't 'see' people? How do you get things done? Anyway, the ceremony went well your Excellency. The only disappointing thing is the simplicity of the surroundings of President Mbeki. Things were so simple you had no idea you were in the Presidency. They are not doing Africa proud at all sir. From what I saw, my estimation is that the budget that maintains the South African Presidency for a whole year is approximately the size of the weekly entertainment budget of a Nigerian Minister or Governor.

My second day on the job was even more frustrating, Mr. President. I was briefed that we had an application for a new plot of land languishing at the Pretoria city hall. There is an embassy expansion project in the pipeline. Apparently, the application has been at city hall for more than two years because the plot we want happens to be in a protected green area. My predecessors have had no luck with the Mayor. Pray, your Excellency, why deal with the Mayor when things could be accelerated the Nigerian way? So, I phoned the Mayor and respectfully and politely asked for the name and phone number of his Godfather. My intention was to 'see' his Godfather and promise him an oil block allocation in the Niger Delta if he would prevail on his political godson to alter the Pretoria Master Plan and give us a plot in the green area. To my surprise, the Mayor told me that he had read Mario Puzzo's novel but had never seen the movie! These South Africans are unbelievably backward! When I finally got him to understand what I meant? After almost an hour of explanations? he laughed condescendingly and said 'we don't do that in South Africa , Mr. Ambassador. We cannot alter the city's Master Plan'. Unbelievable, isn't it? Have these people never heard of Abuja? So, what exactly do hey do here? What is this idea of people getting elected to political office without Godfathers? I banged the phone on him. If I had continued the conversation, I couldn't put it past him to give me the extraordinary yarn that they also organize elections here without thugs, guns, and ballot box stuffing.

My nightmare in this country continued last week when I went to the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg . One of our very useful boys? an unemployed graduate of the University of Ibadan who helped organize the shipment of arms and recruited cult members to help us capture the Oyo state government house for Alhaji Chief Alao Akala ? has decided to quit the political scene in Nigeria and return to his studies. He emailed to notify me that he has an application for graduate studies at Wits. Could I please look into it? The boy served the PDP so diligently and I was inclined to help him. So I went to Wits last week to see the Registrar. She informed me that they did indeed receive the boy's application but he did not meet the minimum admission requirements for graduate studies at Wits. Duh, as if I didn't already know that before asking to meet with her! I asked if we could come to an agreement and opened the Ghana-must-go bag I had with me. Crisp bales of rand notes smiled from the bag. She screamed and sent me out of her office, claiming that she would have had me arrested if I didn't enjoy diplomatic immunity. As I did not want to return to Pretoria with the money, I made one last ditch effort. I phoned the University's information service and requested to speak with the Registrar's Garrison Commander. Predictably, nobody had any clue! I gave up on South Africa at this point. I mean, what kind of country is this? People get positions and appointments without Godfathers and Garrison Commanders. I don't understand. Your Excellency, there is really no place like home. All I would have had to do in Nigeria is place one phone call to any Vice Chancellor. The boy would end up in the Vice Chancellor's discretionary admission list with immediate effect.

Your Excellency, these unending insults and indignities are nothing compared to the stubbornness with which people address me here as Mr. Ambassador. Nonsense. I've insisted that they use the full list of my honorifics to no avail. Who would dare leave out anything from this list in Nigeria ? Ambassador, Senator, Doctor, Chief Ahmadu Alli.
Nobody here seems to understand that none of these items can be left out when addressing me. Mind you, to make things easy for the South Africans, I've even reluctantly left out all the items that would compulsorily come after my name in Nigeria ? MON, OFR, GCFR, etc etc etc. Pray, if they can't get a paltry total of four honorific prefixes right, how are they going to contend with the suffixes?

Your Excellency, it is clear that I am not going to be able to stay here. I can't function. There system is completely upside down. May I humbly request to be posted to Cameroon or Benin Republic? They are our neighbours. Years of associating with us have rubbed off them. They know how things are done. They understand. If the slots in Yaoundé and Cotonou are not available, I won't mind the UK. The British are far more tolerant of the way we do things. They see no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil in order not to endanger the oil flow. London is far more amenable to the Nigerian way than Pretoria. I should be able to function there.

Yours in service to Nigeria,

Ambassador, Senator, Doctor, Chief Ahmadu Alli, MON,
PSC, NDC, MNI, FSS, DSS, MSS. ZSS.OFR, GCFR, etc etc etc.

The storm was awful, through it I shook, I screamed, I shouted and I wept. At the end I felt drained, achy, confused and depressed. As I lay back on my bed unable to control the tears, one of the survivors peeped through the door, she is 7 and her almond eyes looked at me in reproach.

We had a conversation.
How does it feel when I beat you? Painful
How does it make you feel inside? Like someone is angry with me
How else? Sad
And? Unhappy and my heart feels like there is ice block in it
Do you think you deserve it? No it is not fair, it is not fair because it is painful and makes me very sad
But it was supposed to be painful. It is not fair, I just made a mistake, I forgot.
So what should I do when you are naughty? You should punish me.
How? Hmmm, maybe make me do what the aunties do.
But you won’t do it well and you won’t feel it, how do I know you will feel it? Well you can just try it. Think about it mummy. And don’t shout at the aunties, I feel sorry for them because sometimes they just make mistakes.
Okay darling I am sorry I beat you when I was angry and shouted at the aunties I won’t do it again.

But I might. She did not deserve it as she had only misplaced her ruler. They are inefficient but then they always are so why scream and shout when it clearly is irrational and ineffective? Well because, every month for 10 to 12 days the clouds gather until it crescendos in a storm which destroys everything in its path. I have severe PMS and all my psychological and mental will power cannot stop the monster, which is of course part of the problem, too many of us see PMS as a sign of weakness to be conquered. Too many people do not understand or acknowledge it. Gods knows how many PMSing, pre menopausal and menopausal women have been stoned to death as witches in our communities.

I have started to find solutions and as soon as I find solutions that work for me, I will share them with both the women who suffer, as well as their confused or angry partners, family and friends.

Having a supportive BFF who is an exceptional gynaecologist and academic who also happens to suffer from PMS helps. Here is a really good piece she wrote about 6 years ago.

The longest two weeks

For a change, I’m in a place and time where I am thinking of writing or in a writing frame of mind and my laptop is right next to me (albeit shut down so I started off with paper (quelle horeur-modern writer you see), and I also have the time to do so, but I digress.
I want to write about depression. I was about to start explaining why I wanted to add to the mountains of material that has been devoted to this issue but then stopped, as I owe no one any explanation; I want to write about a brief low point and I shall.

I am not about to pretend that I have been to the very bottom of the pot as far as depression is concerned. At best I have only skimmed the surface as it where. For one I had insight into my problem and two, I could still function relatively well i.e. go through my daily routine with only my look and (I like to think) uncharacteristically irritable behaviour giving me away. It was at a time when I had everything to be happy about. I had just been promoted at work; I was looking forward to earning almost twice my previous salary. I was two weeks away from travelling for a conference in Sydney, Australia, and I was presenting a paper for which I was being sponsored to go. I was also going for an 18-day workshop in medical education in Philadelphia, a few days after the conference, also sponsored. I had just been given another prize for a postgraduate medical exam I passed a year ago. My work was going well, I had my husband and an adorable and –as well-behaved-as-she-can-possibly-be two and a half year old daughter.

So life was great yet I was waking up in the morning not wanting to face it, crying or being close to tears if someone so much as looked at me disapprovingly. A few problems I had such as some financial debts, the thought of leaving my family yet again after just coming back from travelling just two months before and I can’t even think what else suddenly seemed insurmountable, even though I could see that I could make good by just trying to save a bit more than I normally would and my family would survive without me for 5 weeks!

It was awful. I had a presentation to finish preparing (for my conference), a major lecture to prepare, my postgraduate student’s case book to correct and so much else to do. As an academician i.e. a lecturer, as well as being a clinician (in my case a gynaecologist) I am an extremely busy person. Part of the reason for this is because I guess I am someone who strives high to excel. Although I’ve never really seen myself as being over-ambitious, I suppose there are many who would think I was and innately-lazy-always-looking-for-an-excuse-for-their-own-inadequacies people would probably say I was aggressively so.

Anyway the stress of all the preparation probably aggravated my problem, which was quite simply ‘Pre-menstrual syndrome’ (PMS) or more specifically ‘Pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder’ (PMDD). And it’s a mother-fucking monster. I have had a close friend who is also medical describe depression to me before and I got to fully understand what she was talking about.

I was tense, had perpetual symptoms of body aches and pains, stomach upsets, was moody, snapped at people, got emotional at things I would normally ignore. I managed to be normal with my patients but it took a great deal of will power to do that. I was running on reserve though and I knew something had to give at some point. It did. My period came and my mood started to lighten. Wild eh. It’s for real oh. And we say it happens to less than 10% of women. Can’t move, don’t want to get out and face the world-certainly not the Lagos traffic world, can’t laugh, don’t find anything funny, shut out the people who care about you the most, crave certain foods yet feel bloated or get stomach upsets after eating them, can’t speak about it much ‘cos it’s so difficult to explain without seeming ‘precious’. Oh I’ve got PMS you say after you’ve just bitten someone’s head off and Oh, get a life at the same time they think. It’s not an ephemeral ‘onyibo’ type thing for people who think too much either and ‘have no real problems but are trying to create some for themselves). It’s for real. Trust me, I’m a doctor.

I suppose it’s quite easy to brandish it around as an excuse for poor behaviour. Manipulative people would see it as a tool against their spouses, their colleagues and the like. But I am not a manipulative person and I suspect that most of the people who suffer from this cruel mood and physical disorder are not either. Something was wrong, luckily for me because of my profession, I knew what it was, yet even I could not help myself in time to prevent it going the whole hog. Like all ‘mind’ illnesses, it is quite difficult to treat or prevent. But it is not impossible and I promised myself that it was not going to get that bad again.

To prevent it, I’ll just keep making sure I keep the stress away-get a driver, try to convince myself that I can’t make everyone happy and so stop worrying about things I can’t change (part of what causes the stress), drop the work and do other things that make me relax. This must include doing so during the week as opposed to just weekends, and forgetting about the deadlines. During this last episode, as busy as I was, I was still trying to fit in an application for a reproductive rights fellowship whose deadline coincided with that of the presentation I was trying to finish. I gave it up albeit reluctantly. Some things should be allowed to go; they are not worth the consequences.

After prevention, there is treatment, some drugs have been found to work and it is just a matter of finding which one suits one the most. So if anyone reading this finds they have similar symptoms (they need to go out and describe it to a professional first) I hope it is at least a comfort to know that they are not going mad, it’s their hormones that are. PMS usually happens during the last two weeks of one’s menstrual period and gets relieved when the periods commence. The symptoms vary from person to person, ranging from the physical (bloating, breast tenderness, headaches, stomach upsets) to the non-physical (moodiness, irritability, weepiness). It is worsened during periods of stress but can be prevented to an extent. Treatment also helps reduce the symptoms.

Watching British Airway's reaction to the ongoing fiasco brings to mind Marie Antoinette's famed let them eat cake comment on being told that her citizens were starving, getting desperate and restive. Very much in line with my own perception of the airline's Nigeria, nay general operations: Archaic, out of touch, Neanderthal, disconnected, shabby, discourteous, unjustifiably superior and a real dinosaur.
I have waited in vain to see the airline wake up and manage the public relations disaster in a proactive way but the sluggish, rather strained "gba ma pa mi" (morsel throwing) sulky reaction is not only painful to watch, it is galling and indicative of complete lack of interest in our market or perhaps an assurance of untouchability.

I have had so some bad experiences with British Airways thus I avoid them like a plague usually taking convoluted routes to destinations not properly serviced by other airlines. Last year I was forced to fly BA as I couldn't get a seat on any other airline for an impromptu, time bound trip to Washington. As I had not flown with them in a while, I forgot how bad they could be. I flew 1st class but the experience was like being kicked in the teeth with a padded boot. Now I like to think I am one of those people who have learned to talk to non Nigerians in a way they will find non threatening (yes Nigerians can be irritatingly abrasive but it is also true that the world prefers its Negroid of gene, either foolishly smiley or liver curdling subservient in manner) but I still found the response of cabin crew curt and unhelpful, rude (I don't need them to be friendly, I have my own friends) and unprofessional. The planes, even the ones to and from DC were shabby, the sleeper facilities like an old weary pseudo grandee hotel, and the food was unimaginative and tasted suspiciously like braised plastic. There were no undue extras like adequate supplies of fruits for 1st class passengers so l ask what do people in the economy get, oh yes they get throw off the plane for talking back to cabin crew. The lounge staffs at Heathrow were unhelpful and barely courteous and one of the lounges is like a trounced up diner anyways. At the end, it took 4 days to get my luggage in Lagos after I threatened fire and brimstone.

What I noticed was that majority of the people in that 1st class cabin with me were Nigerian old money" (e ma tan ra yin je, fool yourselves), government officials and an unquestionable number of insufferably mealy brained (you should have heard their conversations, my dad this, my dad that from grown up young men, one of whom actually said to me "you are in the media, you must know my dad" to which l replied, "no I do not know your dad, what important thing has he done lately and you, what do you do"? His father is currently indicted in one of the ongoing energy probes) children of such in laughably misinterpreted designer togs returning from expensive schools. It occurred to me then and there that British airways is perhaps sustained by a class that is used to treating people badly and is thus blind to being treated just as badly as long as it remains convinced it is of a better class. You see them living in multi million dollar homes without running water in over priced neighbourhoods that require a canoe to access.

It is perhaps this same class and its cohorts that is unaware (or uncaring) that the world is looking for new emerging markets beside China and India and that we can thus attract stiffer, better competition to airlines like British Airways and certain others (SAA is on this list) into our market, the same that does not realize that freeing people frees you. That social and political reforms alongside economic reforms and effective educational reengineering builds better societies which creates wealth across board and will happily make you even bigger and bloated and hence blissfully superior and oblivious to your own ridiculousness (translate that to bourgeois nirvana) but allows the rest of us get on with the business of living and working well.

British Airways and any other airways or entity will continue to treat us badly as long as we permit it. What will the Nigerian government do (not say but DO) about the Nigerian people's outrage at the treatment of Nigerians on that flight and many others? That is the koko.

I met professor Akande as an indigent 19-year-old JAMBed (3 As, 6credits out of a tin roof, no teacher, Jakande school and a Jamb score well within cut off for the course I wanted but caught in the indigene trap) university hopeful. I wanted to study law; she was the Vice Chancellor at LASU. I wielded a letter from a person who knew a person, who knew a person who knew her. Nevertheless, she ushered me into her office without undue drama, a small, smiley but severe lady. Watching her attend to the endless stream of visitors as well as talk to me was like watching an octupoid table tennis pro. She patiently explained my lack of options and advised I re sit the exams applying to LASU 1st and 2nd choice (I have repeated that advise to many other students). I of course went on to the university of Ibadan instead to study geography as I would be damned if I worked another six months teaching kids from house to house to raise the JAMB fee.

13 years later she sat opposite me on NEW DAWN and I told her the story, after which we developed a mutual admiration society. Prof Akande was a true leader of people, women and causes. She was always available, always helpful, always concise and no nonsense but eternally committed to the projects that sought to improve humanity and deliver a better society for all especially women. We will miss her but we are also challenged to carry on her baton.

Here is the last time she was on NEW DAWN.

Video

On the comments page from the last post, Omohemi Benson asked a very important question, WHAT IS AFRICA GOING TO DO ABOUT MUGABE?

Beyond the yeepa (head/chest grabbing recoil) factor, I am hoping that a new generation of people who are from and live on the African continent (the discourse on what the word African means is one for another day, read Chris Abani's piece in the current edition of Farafina magazine edited by Chimamanda Adichie) might have an answer.The politicization of the issue of land reform to legitimize this sort of mass thievery and sheer inhumanity is a crime and we must not just stand by and watch. The tacit support and lukewarm resistance of certain African leaders is unacceptable and their people should soundly chastise them. Part of the resolution from the Southern African leaders' summit in Zambia should be a collective decision on the continued brutalization of the mandate and people of Zimbabwe.

Here is a call to action in an open letter from the 2007 Tutu Fellows that is worth signing up to.

On a pleasant note, Hopewell has been nominated for a CNN/Multichoice journalist of the year award. Excellent, mai broda! Charlie, (pronounced chaley) when you come to Accra we West Africans will show you real hospitality.

Sometimes I don't always have the words, especially as I sometimes oscillate between anger and despair so deep I cant be coherent, this is not always productive so the wise thing is to let some else do the talking, Reuben does it succinctly on this issue.

The Bride, Abby
And our untiring, practical, loyal, effective Abby is now Mrs. Okolo. Congratulations.