– Ogbo Awoke Ogbo
I had an encounter recently with a friend that wounded me emotionally and knocked me out for nearly one week. I’ll come back to it and give you the simple key that got me out of the dark hole of self pity and bitterness.
In the meantime, I looked up the Nigeria Trends on Twitter a few hours ago: #HalaMadrid, Congratulations to Real Madrid, Eiber, #GloLafftaFestYenagoa, League, Lionel Messi, Neymar.
Technically, at this point, it is safe to conjecture that football and comedy dominate our consciousness as a nation. Data say so.
I’m truly saddened.
Football – not the economy. Not industrialization and job creation.
Comedy – not education. Not infrastructure development. Not entrepreneurship. Not governance. Not accountability of those in power. Not the urgent self determination agitations going on.
We don’t get into those big matter conversations. It’s for “our leaders” to figure out for us. When we barely attempt, we leave the facts and rain such horrendous insults on each other that the devil grimaces with shock.Take a look at Nigerian comments following Vanguard or Punch online reports! At the end, we can’t sustain an issue-based conversation as a nation!
Well, while you watch the League over a bottle of beer, the few men who own “Nigeria Lugard PLC” have plotted your future. They have already sealed the power game for the next 20 years. They know who will be President in 2019 (that is, if there will be 2019) and beyond. They have already allocated the ‘national cake’ – they have assigned who gets what. They have already allocated the C of O of your father’s land.
They have also perfectly mastered your psyche. I could hear one of the newest shareholders ask, “What about the public, won’t they stone us for this plain robbery?”
“Don’t be silly,” responds an elder among them who has been in the game since the 1960’s. “Just give them ’stomach infrastructure’ and make them laugh. When they ask about their future, tell them that ‘God is control’… hahahaha!”
I graduated in 1988 – my first degree. It’s incredible as I think about it but would you believe my class never saw a computer throughout our university years? You could say that we had manual lives.
I still have a prized copy of my thesis on cytogenetic of the “Lixus camerunus.” It was typed on the then ubiquitous IBM typewriter – and I think it was “stencilled” and “cyclostyled.”
How the world has changed in just a short time!
When eventually I was introduced to the magical world of zeros and ones, the reigning operating system was MS-DOS – – Microsoft Disk Operating System. We had no Windows OS as we know it today. You typed in the MS-DOS command at the blinking command prompt, and the computer obeyed you with an output. The system will keep blinking until you tell it what to do for you. No command, no output.
The Universe is like that! You type in the entertainment command and you get plenty of entertainment. You type in the destiny command; you get that…(To be continued next week)
I love you! Be healthy, wealthy and wise!