I haven’t had much opportunity to explore yet. My plan to stay awake all night and sleep on the plane kinda backfired. I was barely able to sleep with all the racket travelling Africans make.

Anyway I took a few pictures and I’ll get more tomorrow and possibly tonight

Yeah the pictures suck but I barely made it to the balcony to take em. The food in my hotel is freaking amazing. Hit a brother with the itis so fast.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

Unfortunately RIM sucks and have no intention of competing with Apple so my blackberry cam sucks in low light.

Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.

December 1st 2009 and I’ve spent the better part of the morning sitting in my car waiting to buy gas for my car and I’m thinking, Nigeria is a bloody joke.

I think of the Niger-Delta people and the way they’ve been raped, brutalized and general ripped of for decades and we still can’t refine and distribute petrol within our borders and I say, Nigeria is a bloody joke.

I don’t even want to know what is causing the queues this time, I’m just pissed and tired. This is the end of 2009, how far have we progressed since 1999?

“Senator Xenophon used a speech in Parliament last night to raise allegations of widespread criminal conduct within the church, saying he had received letters from former followers detailing claims of abuse, false imprisonment, and forced abortion. He says he has passed on the letters to the police and is calling for a Senate inquiry into the religion and its tax-exempt status.”

Slashdot via AU Senator Calls Scientology a “Criminal Organization”.

Well its about damn time governments are starting see the dangerous nature of this cult.

why?

Is Lamido Sanusi a hero or simply another in a long line noise makers? Farida Waziri and Aondoaka have already proved themselves useless to Nigerians, but Sanusi is a new player in Nigerian politics.

Is he in it for the people? Are his motives genuine? Is his dedication unwavering? Does he have the will, the intelligence, the cunning and just enough flexibility to follow through till justice is done?

Hope is a dangerous thing to have in Nigeria. It’s a two edged sword that allows you to continue struggling every day and yet leaves you extremely vulnerable.

I really want to believe Sanusi is doing the right thing (and for the right reasons), but its hard to believe anyone who’s been touched by politics in this country.

The Nigerian bankers have been playing a game with far more dangerous consequences than the American banks that spearheaded this current global depression.

If 10% of the allegations against these banks are true (even though I’m reasonably sure of this, it still has to be proven in court) then the entire Nigerian economy could easily have imploded one fine morning, transforming us into West Africa’s own Zimbabwe overnight.

I see a lot of comments on various articles on the CBN’s recent action and while most people are tentatively cheering Sanusi on, they appear to do so not because they truly understand the significance of those actions and the situation that led to them, but because they simply want some "big" men and women (woman?) to be pulled down. Not a completely invalid desire in my opinion since a majority of wealthy people in Nigeria are crooked.

Anyway my ranting mode is almost finished. Read the last paragraph again and then remember the French revolution. There is nothing new under the sun, history repeats itself because humans are fundamentally the same, regardless of race, sex, location or era.

 Listening is fantastic. But maybe I should stop doing so much of that. Sharing is rewarding. Its also very good to be Ijebu.

 Its all about balance.

 When to speak and when to keep quiet. Its sometimes quite hard to make the right choice in certain situations. Like right now. Do I continue and talk about my day, and all that’s happened and that I’ve experienced? Or do I hit send?

  
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 When I read that report in the papers and on a couple of blogs, I was not scandalized. I was not initially horrified that the Nigerian police summarily executed a person. No trial. No proof. No procedure. Actually worse than jungle justice. I’ve gotten too used to it. You can’t afford not to in this country, you could go mad trying to understand certain things. Yet you must also never allow yourself to be completely jaded, lest you loose your humanity.

 What really separates us from animals in the country? Are we not as barbaric and uncivilized as the west makes us out to be? In this day and age why pretend to civilization when justice in any shape or form is an illusion? Justice is the foundation of civilization and without it society is pointless. What is the point of Nigeria? Where is Yar’Adua’s “Rule of Law”? How can a society progress when the very people entrusted with the duty of protecting it, of enforcing its laws, of protecting its individuals and collective rights, of ensuring that level playing field are the very ones who consistently and flagrantly abuse those laws. What is the point in pretending we are civilized? Its really and truly every man for themselves in this country and the government looks out only for its own. So, what is the point of Nigeria? Why Nigeria?

  
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Live Long And Prosper

My mind is like a boiling pot of water, a million ideas rapidly bubble to the surface and quickly dissipate leaving me stuck in the perpetual state of inception and wondering if my chronic condition of losing interest once I’ve figured out how to solve a problem was a form of madness.
I’ve discovered that it is. In some form at least.
Discovering, quite late in my opinion, that I was an INTP finally granted me a kind of insight into workings of my own mind that I had been seeking but was unable to grasp looking from the inside out. This discovery helped to unlock my ability to look at myself as myself and not through the eyes of the person I thought I should be. And you know what? I didn’t like everything I saw but it was real.

I think my biggest blessing and simultaneously my worst curse is this insane need and truly uncontrollable urge to ask a couple of simple questions over and over again. Why? How? What? Where? When? I have to understand. It must make sense. There is a logic behind every action or is there? I believe human beings as ultimately rational creatures so there must be a reason for everything. There must be a motive, no matter how trivial. There must be a goal, no matter how realistic or not. There must be a method, no matter how practical. But this is not always the case. We humans, myself included, do the daftest things for the daftest reasons and somehow the world keeps turning. I still don’t like it all, I still work hard at changing certain things but in the end I am who I am and I am not a vulcan. Or am I?

Live long and prosper.
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