I think it is germane that this was published the day before the 50th of the end of our Civil War. bit.ly/3aaze1a
It will be my only real contribution to the language debate that raged a few days ago.
The one time in my life (asides from @NGSuperEagles) that I've seen Igbos and Yorubas agreed on one thing was the day on @Smooth981FM's #FreshlyPressed981 I dared to suggest that Hausa should be the local language that #Nigeria adopts.
In the phone-in segment an hour later, every single caller bar none told me my life history.
One went so far as to suggest that my mother did not raise me properly.
Years have passed since that incident, I've gotten to understand #Nigeria a bit more, and I get why that rather naive suggestion was so roughly rejected.
However, the first part of the suggestion is still valid. #Nigeria needs a unifier and a common language can help.
A common language doesn't mean dropping our old ones.
Given our history, it has to be a variant of English.
We also need to trade with each other more.
If we don't understand each other, or exchange ideas via trade, we will build walls, and eventually kill each other.
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There has been a lot of recrimination due to the musician, Brymo's misguided tweets. I won't join issues with him except to mention that as a Tinubu supporter, he is simply doing what I have said, so many times, would be done by Tinubu supporters, ethnicise the elections.
What I want to talk about, very briefly, before returning to @EdPaiceARI's excellent book is the tendency for Nigerians, in general, to keep behaving like our country's civil war did not end 52 years ago.
Igbo people in #Nigeria are generally treated like we are all fifth columnists who secretly support Biafra.
This ahistorical view completely ignores that even during the war, there were Igbo people, Ukpabi Asika and Ike Nwachukwu as examples, that fought for Nigeria.
I had a discussion with someone yesterday that brings to my mind the nature, to some extent, of the damage that the current Japa wave is doing. This time, not to the body-corporate #Nigeria
The #LekkiMassacre of two years ago merely accelerated what was already a trend.
But not much is being said about the effect of this trend on the lower classes, the people who used to be house helps, nannies, stewards, drivers, cooks and maiguards.
Bear in mind, this was written before #America's mid-terms...
Faced with the implications of his words during his presidential campaign, the Biden administration rediscovered the concept of realpolitik and tried to make good with the Saudis by visiting #SaudiArabia in July and ending up with that infamous fist bump.
In November 2019, Joe Biden fingered MBS in the killing of @washingtonpost contributor Jamal Khashoggi and committed to making the Saudis pay.
He followed up upon assuming office by rejecting contact with MBS and stopping US assistance to Saudi efforts in its war in #Yemen.
On #FreshlyPressed981 with @SopeMartins and @monsieurceee this morning, we'll be asking how the NNPC came to the conclusion that petrol will sell for ₦462/litre without the subsidy.
The NNPC is just involved in unnecessary fear-mongering.
Our neighbours, who are poorer, pay a lot more than we do for petrol. What I see in all this is people committed to maintaining their cushy subsidy scam going on.
Consider the attached chart, published in February.
As of February, based on the exchange rate, we were paying 40 cents per litre of petrol. In #Benin it was 95 cents, in #Niger it was 97 cents, in #Chad it was 89 cents, and in #Cameroun, it was $1.09.
For all the flak that the Nigerian media gets, people tend to forget one crucial fact: they are products of their environment, working within that same environment.
Only a very few people in this life have the fortitude of Job.
The overwhelming majority of humanity, including me these days, would make the required compromise to just keep things moving.
One problem we have in #Nigeria is that we never interrogate these things. We must ask, "why"?
In the 1963 movie, Cleopatra, there was an interesting dialogue between Mark Anthony and Octavian, the man who would later become Augustus Caesar, the first emperor of Rome about the birth of Julius Caesar's son, Caesarion:
Mark Antony: "You were so shut at the mouth just now one would think your words were are precious to you as your gold."
Octavian: "Like my gold, I use them where they are worth most."
This is instructive...
Also instructive is that during his 19 years as chairman of the US Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan did not give any interviews. Having taken over from the inflation-busting Paul Volcker, Greenspan knew that words from his position carried weight and so had to be used sparingly.