Nigeria is 25.The odds we did survive.Arise salute the Nation .Come join the celebration The people united will never fallThe sun will shine and the rain will fall

On our land …… [Fill in the blank spaces]

Richly blessed by the Almighty

……………………………..[cant remember the rest]

I woke up this morning with that song on my lips.

I am sorry if I got some of the lyrics wrong and for not finishing it. Forgive me. I was only 9years old when I learnt and sang that song.

 But I wasn’t the only one who loved that song. At that time, it appeared the entire nation knew the song.

The year was 1985. Nigeria was 25.

I remember Independence Day celebrations meant something back then. The whole country participated in them. Students, Civil servants, the private sector… everyone. As a student, it was a big honor if you were chosen to represent your school on the Independence Day Parade. It was a big deal.

The year 1985 was special, more so because it was our Silver Jubilee. We had survived 25 years, together, as a nation. It was worth celebrating!

 

That song reflected our past, mirrored our present and projected our aspirations for the future. And we all loved it. We were all happy. At least that’s what I felt. 

Perhaps I saw things from the perspective of a nine year old, shielded from the realities of life by loving and caring parents. In my mind’s eye, everything was great. Things were not perfect, but I was convinced they couldn’t get worse.

My father told me so. All the elders reaffirmed the same thing. My teachers said things were going to be better than they were. That they were working hard to make things better for us, the leaders of tomorrow.

That was their promise.

And I believed them as a child would, completely.

23 years after that, things have gone worse. Unbelievably so. The hopes of a child, dashed, completely.

What went wrong? How did this happen?

We were a nation heading for greatness; a people destined for prominence in the world.

Instead we have become a failed promise; an aborted destiny. An example of what could have been.

My heart weeps for this country of my birth; this land that I love so much.

Every time I look at my son, I make him a promise in my heart. The same promise that my father and his generation made to me years ago. They failed on their promise. I wonder if my generation will do any better.

Can we give our children a promissory note today, redeemable sometime in the future, their future, in happiness, pride in the fatherland, prosperity and wealth?

 

I have decided, I will give it my best shot. I will not fail them. But I know I can’t do it alone. It’s a promise too big for one individual to deliver on.

Therefore I am asking all like minded people out there to share this burden with me. Let’s make a difference in our lives; in our areas of influence. Let’s lift up our country together. Let’s be great again.

One more thing though, can we also pray together on this? It’s a simple prayer we are all familiar with. We all learnt it as children. It will only take a few minutes.

Arise, O compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey
To serve our fatherland
With love and strength and faith
The labor of our heroes past
Shall never be in vain
To serve with heart and might
One nation bound in freedom, peace and
unity.

Oh God of creation, direct our noble cause
Guide our leaders right
Help our youth the truth to know
In love and honesty to grow
And living just and true
Great lofty heights attain
To build a nation where peace and justice
shall reign.

 

Thank you.

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I know…God loved me first

I know…

My parents love me unconditionally and;

My wife loves me too much

I know…

When there is hope, there is life

Hope never disappoints

I know…

Procrastination is not just a thief of time;

It is a thief of destinies.

I know…

He who has tried is better than he who has done nothing

I know…

Givers never lack

I know…

Impossible is nothing

I know…

Life is not always fair

I know…

I will not always get what I want

But also that contentment in what i have now is great gain

I know…

There is an enemy called average;

And that mediocrity thwarts greatness

I know…

As he thinks in his heart, so he is

I know…

Nothing happens by chance.

I know…

God answers prayers;

A broken heart and a contrite spirit, he will not reject

I know…

Patience is a virtue

I know…

The way up is down

I know…

Weeping may endure for a night;

But joy comes in the morning

I know…

I love my job and

I am enjoying this blogging thing no be small

What do you know?

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  Sometimes it takes an event of cataclysmic dimension to cause a change of behavior in a human being. Ok…maybe the word cataclysmic is a bit too dramatic, in any case, Pastor Chris Okotie has got that word pretty patented and locked down already. But it took a catastrophic, disastrous, calamitous, and earth shattering [you get the gist now] incident to stop me from using swear words.You see, swear words have cost me a lot. They are the reason why I do not have a matriculation photo today. Yeah! Oh, so you think matric photos are not important? Wait until you become a public office holder in Nigeria and you will know.

Unfortunately, I also didn’t attend my convocation ceremony as I was serving in far away Jigawa State and didn’t think it made sense [economic sense] to go all the way to UI because of a few photos. Now I wish I had traveled down because I do not have any pictures to show that I really finished from UI. Not like I don’t have other photos but no other photos prove that you actually went to college better than matric and convocation pictures.

So how did swear words cost me my matric photos?

I was one of those students who didn’t receive their admission letters on time. While I was at home waiting for the letter, my colleagues had resumed at school and school work had already gone almost halfway for the first semester. By the time I got my letter, most people had finished their registration and most of the accommodation had been allocated; those who knew people got [or bought] the remaining. The rest of us squatted with them.

My landlords were Kay, Femi & Gbesan [coded names]. Gbesan and Femi were very cool guys. I got along pretty well with both of them but Kay I couldn’t stand. Kay was the ultimate bully. He felt because he was older than the rest of us, he had a right to tell us what to do and how things should run in the room. Kay decided everything. What we ate, how we ate, who cooked what, who swept, who cleaned…everything.

Apparently things were running ‘smoothly’ until I came into the room. Being the rebel that I was, I couldn’t understand why I should be dictated to. I wasn’t having none of Kay’s crap but there was a limit to what I could do being that I was a squatter. The other guys, rightful occupants, were also not comfortable with what was going on but they seemed to have been cowed and bullied into some sort of submission. They complained about Kay’s ways behind his back but neither of them could face up to him.

I knew one of us had to stand up to him eventually and I was sure it wasn’t going to be Gbesan or Femi. Eventually things came to a head one day when Kay told us to contribute money so his girlfriend, Sandy, could cook a pot of soup for us. Sandy was a marvelous cook, I must say, but she was ripping us off all the time. We felt what she was giving to us was not commensurate with the amount of money we were contributing.

When I told Kay I had decided to cook my own pot of soup and the other guys also said they would prefer to cook theirs as well, he was shocked, surprised and very furious. He never expected anyone of us had the balls to stand up to him.

Na so katakata come burst. Before long we were arguing, shouting and screaming at the top of our voices. Kay attempted to shout me down but I refused and stood my ground. When things got really heated up, we both started using swear words and I guess because my repertoire of swear words was more than his, It appeared as though i was having the upper hand. I really can’t remember what exactly I said to him but it must have ticked him off real bad because the next thing I knew, I was seeing the sun, the moon and stars all at once. I didn’t even see the punch coming. It was a sucker punch; knocked me out flat. The fight was over before it even began.

When I came to, I couldn’t recognize my face. It was swollen, broken, blood shot and the pain, physical and psychological, was indescribable, more so because I knew there was no way I was going to have it back in shape for matriculation.

Matriculation was three days away.

I left for Lagos the following day and spent the next few weeks visiting different hospitals and learning more about the human face and eye than I did in my biology class in secondary school. While my mates were in school having fun, eating, drinking and taking pictures on matriculation day, I was in Lagos, nursing a broken face and a black eye.

Looking back now, I do not regret I stood up for myself but with the benefit of hindsight, coupled with maturity, perhaps I should have gone about it in a different way. Kay and I became very good friends after that although it took me a while to completely forgive him for rearranging my face but I knew that forgiveness is enlightened self interest. I knew I would be doing myself more harm than good by not forgiving.

I haven’t forgotten though. Every once in a while, my jaw locks and I have to move it around in a certain way to unlock it. As the rainbow serves as a reminder to humanity that God will not destroy the world with water ever again, the locked jaw, I feel, also reminds me to choose my fights with wisdom and not to use swear words again.

I still use swear words occasionally [to my shame] but whenever I do, I always make sure it is from a safe distance.

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I spent a greater part of my weekend saying, shouting and sometimes screaming these sentences:

‘B’, stop it!

Don’t do that!

Come here!

Come down!

Please come down.

Yeah, you guessed right. Those were directed at my son, my 17 month old son. When the shouting did not work, I tried to get his attention by singing some of the nursery rhymes I had heard him attempt to sing. But those only worked as long as the songs lasted.

As far as he is concerned, the whole world is a playground and every item he sees has a play function to it. In his hands, my phone becomes a football, even though he has 3 footballs that I had bought for him. My laptop sometimes becomes a drum set and my CDs & DVDs? In fact you don’t want to get me started on what he does with them. 

When my son notices I am too engrossed in a TV program or football match and he sees I am not paying him any attention, he moves to the TV and switches it off and shouts NEPA! And before I can stand up to get a hold of him, he switches it back on and shouts NEPA again and bolts for the door, laughing. I have started saving up for another TV because I am almost sure my TV will not survive the second quarter of this year. OK, I was just kidding, but maybe I really should start saving for another one because at the rate at which that boy switches off and on that TV, hmmm, the poor thing might just kaput any time.

But what really freaks me out and have influenced my decision that my second child must be a girl [by God’s grace] are the dangerous things that the boy has started doing. Nowadays, he’s started treating my sofa has a launch pad of some sorts. He climbs on it and jumps down on to the floor, in superman fashion, and I am left wondering where he learnt that from. The one that really gets to me is the somersault thingy. He puts his head on the ground and attempts to flip his entire body on his head and I am usually left open mouthed and shocked and scared at the same time. I say to myself, what if no one is present to stop him from doing these things. Don’t get me wrong, I love my son to pieces & appreciate the fact that the boy is strong and active but I sometimes wish he could just sit still and watch football with me instead of trying to cartwheel on the stool all the time.  

This is why I want a girl as a second child. I heard baby girls are gentler than, and not as playful, as boys. I really cannot imagine having two boys in that house. Nah! Now I can imagine what my Mum must have gone through with my Brother and me. I heard we were quite a handful. When I also remember some of the dangerous things we did as children, I just thank God we both survived.

One incident I remember clearly got us both in big trouble and almost cost me my manhood; at least that’s what the Doctor said. How many people can remember those really dangerous and rough plays we used to do in school in the 80s? I don’t know if kids still do those things now. I hope not.

We would pull out the seat from underneath our classmates or friends just as they are about to sit down, causing them to land on the hard floor unexpectedly. The harder they fell, the harder the class laughed.

The other one which was more dangerous is you placed a sharp pencil or a bic biro on the seat and just as your victim is about to seat, you quickly removed it but not fast enough for him not to feel any pain but you ensured that he didn’t sit on the pencil with its base still on the seat. That could be disastrous.

 

And that’s exactly what happened to me. I sat on the pencil before my brother could remove it from the bench. I remember it was a Friday evening and we were just fooling around in front of the house and happy we weren’t going to school the following day. When it happened, the pain was excruciating and I knew I should have told my parents but I knew Maami was going to beat both of us silly before taking me to the hospital, so I decided to keep quiet, hoping the pain will go away and everything will be alright.

Unfortunately, the pain didn’t go away. It only got worse and by the time I was leaving for school the following Monday, I was walking as though I had huge rocks between my legs. My Dad noticed and asked what was wrong but I said nothing and tried to walk normally but the pain was too much and I couldn’t keep up the façade for longer that 2 paces. So he asked me to pull down my pants and when he looked at my, you know what, it had become swollen and there was a deep cut at its base.

I was rushed to the hospital and my brother got the beating of his life. I remember it took a while for the nurse to stitch me up at the hospital because I every time she attempted to, my 9-year old ‘gbola’ would stiffen up and she would start to laugh. It took my mother’s intervention for me to stay ‘humble’. Years later, I overheard my father asking my brother if I have erections when I wake up in the mornings. Hello!

Back to my ‘babygirl’ desires.

I ‘warned’ my wife yesterday not to give birth to another boy when we are ready to have a second child. She laughed saying she is not God and that in fact, it’s the father that ‘determines’ the sex of a child. If he donates X, he gets a girl, if he gives Y, he gets a boy.

So right now I am trying to figure out a way to ensure that the only thing that comes out of me next is an X. I remember one of my bosses once told me that if you want a boy, you do it with your feet on the wall but if you want a girl, just do it missionary style.

I don’t know if there is any truth in that but I know the next time my wife and I will be ready to try for another child, I will be praying and hoping it will be a girl and I will not be putting my feet against the wall, just in case.

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This year marks the 10^th anniversary of my coming to terms with being bald, although the journey to that significant decision started about three years earlier. For someone who grew up with rich, curly dark hair, accepting that fact was a very difficult one.Growing up, there was no reigning hair style I didn’t try. Grace Jones, Tyson, Brother Johnson, anything. I experimented with everything and why not, I could. My hair grew so fast that I could afford to be adventurous when it came to hair styles. If any hair experiment went awry, I was sure I could grow my hair back and try another one in less than a month.

This promiscuity led me to try ‘Jordan’ / R.Kelly [gorimapa] in my 300L at the university. That experiment went bad, very bad. The first signs of trouble appeared when I noticed some part of my head didn’t quite grow as quickly as the others. At first I dismissed it as a barbing error. I convinced myself that the barber must have scraped some parts more than the others.

But the panic started setting in when some ladies in my class, who used to tell me they wished they had my kind of hair, told me I was going bald around the vertex/pâté [the area just before the ogo]. I remember telling them I had some scalp infection that caused me to lose some of my hair and I promptly rejected baldness in Jesus’ name. Who was I kidding? I knew I was growing bald and I didn’t know what to do.

I remember I started wearing a lot of caps and when people asked why, I told them I wanted to change my appearance for a while. They didn’t know I had something to hide. However, I knew I couldn’t live the rest of my days wearing hats every time I wanted to go out, that realization led to the slow & painful journey to accepting I was a baldie.

You might not understand why I was so distraught because I was going bald. But you would be too if you became bald at 20. I mean, who goes bald at 20? It’s alright if you go bald at 30 or 40 but at 20…hmmm. That’s exactly when you needed your hair. For a 20 year old, how you looked was important to you. It was all you cared about. At 40, you probably would be married and your wife would have your wedding pictures to remind herself that she didn’t marry you bald. If you are 40, bald and rich, you are called sexy. But if you were 20 and bald, you were disadvantaged. So I thought.

One thing that I also remember is that you quickly acquired a different identity when you are bald. In my class in school, I had about three other guys that I shared the same name with but when I started losing my hair, it became easier for everyone to identify and differentiate me from the others. You also acquired a lot of nicknames. Oh, I had all kinds- Parioro, aparijo, ajirebi …and my God did those names sting?

I got used to it after a while though but not before I had accepted that I was bald and there was nothing I could do about it. I also accepted the fact that being bald wasn’t some kind of disease & didn’t make me any less than I was, although I must also confess that the fact that I had a beautiful girlfriend [and several admirers] who didn’t think anything of it somehow aided that acceptance.

A lot of my friends are now where I was a decade ago. Some have accepted the fact that they are growing bald and like me, have adopted the gorimapa style, for life, but I see many still struggling, refusing to admit the inevitable. I see the signs and I laugh. They refuse to cut their hair, keeping ‘forced’ afros, hoping to keep their hair, and perhaps, their youthfulness, their vanity, for as long as they possibly can.

For those of them with a good sense of humor, I always share a saying I heard while losing my hair. A lady I had just met looked at me and called me a thinker? Puzzled, I asked her why? She said;

If you are balding from the lateral sides of the forehead, you are a thinker;

If you are balding from the vertex, you are a lover but;

If you are balding from both parts of your head, then you think you are a lover.

These days, I see a shiny thoroughfare from my forehead to my vertex, bordered on both sides by slick slippery dark hair, especially when I leave my hair to grow longer than a week before visiting the barber’s. By my friend’s imaginative taxonomy, I do not qualify to be called a thinker, a lover or someone who thinks he is a lover, although I would like to think I am one.

Does anyone have a system of classification that caters for my ‘kind’?

 PS: Found this poem on Bald R Us, liked it and tot u might enjoy it too

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