Giving Beyond the Season

It's that time of the year when some of us would embark on journeys to their towns and villages of origins. For those that remain in cities like Lagos they bask in the respite from the madness of Lagos traffic, as the city gets a little less densely populated. For both sets of people; those that remain in the big city and those bound for their origins, visiting family and friends is sure to be one of the seasons highlights. Of course this is other than the strenuous activity of food processing that the mouth and digestive organs will have to endure.

Unlike the western world we won't be building snowmen or riding sledges as seen in the western movies we watch. Rather we would enjoy the harmattan caused by the Sahara desert winds. The people in the north would enjoy it more especially if they ride on a motor bike, then they get to become the Nigerian version of a snowman or harmattan man if that suits you better. So if you are not looking to travel out of the country you now know where you could go to find walking snow men, that's definitely not something you will find abroad.

Also for both sets people (the travelers and the stay behind city dwellers) at the center of this season's festivities, merriment and visitations is the spirit of giving. The spirit of giving as portrayed in the gift of Christ's birth to us from God, which is the reason for the season. Giving as it relates to putting smiles on the faces of people who have not had much to smile about during the course of the year. Just to clarify though I'm not referring to giving in terms of responding to the calls for 'anything for the boys'. Neither am I referring to the discount gift shopping that you might have done for yourself on Black Friday or Cyber Monday. Giving here as it concerns those that cannot help themselves, people in so sad a situation that both the forces of good and bad seem to have aligned against them. Giving to help them see hope and have something to be grateful for.

However, like it is said about a funeral that the good things about people are said after they have passed on. Why wait for the end of the year, till this season, before showing them how loved and cherished they are. Christ our role model did not restrict his giving to a season. Even when challenged about healing someone on the Sabbath which was seen as against the law, he refused to let it serve as a deterrent to giving someone a healing. Orphanages which are usually at the center of most of this giving, receive more than needed in this season but throughout most the year hardly get visits that could have saved a life.

Giving refers to more than just the gift of food which will surely keep people from dying of hunger or malnourishment. Or clothes that certainly lets the receiver have something that keeps the cold out but also allows them to look good. Giving is also empowering someone with an education via a scholarship which doesn't necessary mean that you have to pay every dime of the person's fees but you could pay a percentage based on what you have available. You could also contribute to someone's skills acquisition or help another person start a business by contributing your intellectual prowess that you get paid for during your 8 to 5 or for your own business.

So if and when you go gifting this season inquire as to how you can give a helping hand during the course of the year ahead. So that the smiles, hopes and joys remain on those faces beyond this season and into the year ahead, for their lives to evolve beyond the present situation in which they find themselves.

Have a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

P.S: You can start your gifting by sharing this with a friend.

But a camera

If I had but a camera
I would show you the real world
Not the world CNN or BBC shows
But the true world endowed with colors and images

If I had but a camera
I would paint the world in a way you never imagined
Paint I shall, with nothing but a flash and lens
I will show you the power of pictures, pictures which shall wow you.
For they hold the key to far more than we know or can ever imagine.


Oh but a camera to paint the world
As a professional captures I may not be able to replicate
But to paint the smiles, sorrow, anxiety, fear and courage on the faces of many, I shall paint.
Oh but a camera that I shall show you images that will keep your mind craving for more like the drug addict on crack.

If I had but a camera
I would show you the terror and destruction caused by people,
People promoting and promoting ideologies that they do not understand.

If I had but a camera
I would paint the pictures of those who suffer but yet smile in spite of it all
If I had but a camera
I would paint the picture of those hoping, trusting and having faith in what they have not seen but have only heard of.
Faces of those who have longed and waited for so long but yet are ready to wait for a while longer
For it says, wait for it, thou it may tarry wait for it, for it shall not tarry.

The Mosquitoes of Mosquito City

The buzzing of the Mosquitoes on that hot and NEPA-less night were signs of the groggy morning that lay ahead. At the peak of the night's discomfort, the buzzing became voices, voices that I could understand, shrill voices but voices all the same. Voices of the winged flight bound suckers desperate to tell their story. On that night I was to be their mouthpiece to the world.

Mosquito City was among other frontiers they had left in the world and they were sworn to keep on breeding as long as they could. They said they were not willing hosts to the destruction they carried, neither was it a nature of choice. It was a burden, a burden with a story communicated verbally so often down their long ancestral linage. A story so often told that add-ons and extras had left it abandoned as confusion seemed to be the end goal. Anyways the story was not the case at hand on that night.

They wanted to obtain sainthood, they no longer wanted to be the cause of a thousand tears.

The unwritten truce in Mosquito City was not of their doing but rather co-habitation had just seemed like the likely option when the superior beings seemed to refuse to do the noble thing, drive them to extinction, just like the West African Black Rhinoceros and Javan Tiger.

Rather it appeared that the superior beings preferred to torture them with sadness. They want us to know that they were becoming resistant to the bio-chemical weapons, they were slowly evolving. They wanted us to know that they had no intention of being driven to extinction with their wings folded. As they were tired of the thousand tears in both camps. Their death toll was high and the casualties mind numbing.

They were not interested in truces or treaties of any kind, they wanted an all-out war to be waged, with victory for one side, second places weren't an option, a war without captives or sympathy. They had no true intention of winning but of stopping the torture of sorrow. Their greatest confusion was how the superior beings seemed to carry on, caring for their individual selves and nothing more. How funds meant to rage war and achieve their longing for extinction were diverted and misappropriated.

They and their forebears had stayed on too many walls and listening on too many of such selfish conversations while waiting for an opportunity to sap, to know that this was the case. They certainly knew that there were no conspiracies between the insecticide companies and government institutions to keep the situation at status quo in order for profits to continue, or were there?

Well that was really not for them to think about, their one request to us was simple, they wanted a monument to be built in Mosquito City so that when we do finally put our acts in order and drive them to extinction, they would be remembered as having flown the earth.

Me in Mosquito City

I wake up in the morning long past my alarm has sounded, feeling drowsy but yet surprisingly refreshed, though my eyes tell the consequential tales of last night's moonlighting.

The body count around me is high, higher than the average. Numerous bodies lay slew across the battlefield. The death toll will once again go undone, the names, the ranks and the code numbers of the brave soldiers around me will go forgotten.

Even if a death toll was to be done, who would do it? Certainly not I, as I lack the Time, the Will and the Strength of Heart to do it.The Time because I could be late to work once again as the city's traffic has no sympathy for empathizers.

The Will because there is always something to do that I have left in procrastination's never filled chambers, this task definitely does not deserve to be brought up.The Strength of Heart because I don't want to burst into tears brought upon by sleep deprivation which could be mistaken for empathy.

Wait maybe if I do have empathy for the fallen soldiers I will be able to live peacefully with these beings. How else was Adam able to live peacefully with them? A truce driven by mutual empathy?

Stop why all this talk about a truce? When I know what needs to be done. I need to wage a war, not an individual one of insecticides and mosquito nets but a communal one that aims at ensuring no breeding grounds are left untouched. How can I belong to the class of superior beings but live life getting fat in the day but getting sapped at sunset.

Okay, here comes the problem, I am a Netizen, a digital native, a social media citizen;  an activist online but a sluggard offline, a boisterous loud mouth online but a mind my own business talk not kind of fellow offline. My reason, social media has helped project my voice across borders and boundaries, all I need to do is sit back and rant a lot. Someone somewhere will be motivated by my words and get it done, so that I may later down the line reap the fruit of my social contribution.

P.S: To the brave but dead mosquitoes who lay across the battlefield of my room l salute you. To those still left readying for the night's battle, bear in mind that there will be no songs, no recitals and no moving speeches at your death.

Mosquito City

Welcome to Mosquito City

Where the welcoming sign board was created by a million and one mosquitoes an unsuccessful attempt to scare mosquitoes from migrating to the city.

Its a city like no other where an unwritten truce had been forged between us and mosquitoes. The truce simply laid bare is that the night belongs to they that fly and suck and the day to the supposed superior beings they that get fattened and healthy for the suckers.

The night is filled with their buzzing as they call up on their partners for the feast.

The superior beings try to break out of the unwritten truce by employing mosquito nets. The mosquitoes see this strategy and acknowledge that the superior ones are at their antics again so they wait because the superior ones have failed to see that the individual battles they fight is of no use when the bushes and the still waters remain as healthy breeding grounds.

The ones who suck and fly take advantage of the breeze-less nights, the superior ones are left with two choices; hide under the covers where heat and discomfort drives you to experience nightmares and bad dreams or do away with the covers and sleep without a care in the world only get prepared for the onslaught that lays ahead.

A few superiors rely on the power of electricity to power fans and air conditioners but the costs and noise population of their generators stack up against them.

The superior ones use chemicals that leave hundreds of casualties and mourning in the suckers camps, only but a few escape, leaving their comrades lifeless and flightless. Their sadness is not that they could die of  blood thirst but that their friends whom they grew up with a couple hours ago died without achieving their life's sole purpose.

Those who are left behind reassure themselves that their breeding grounds remain intact and every biochemical attack will slowly lead them in developing greater resistance.

Welcome to Mosquito City where the superior ones think only for their individual selves, without realizing the power of the communal self.

Do-Chop-Go

In the global village of today, one thing that most multinational companies talk about is thinking global but acting local, hence the word glocal. This simple phase has come to see companies restructuring their operations, supply chain, recruitment and marketing to fit the culture of the different countries that they operate in.

I looked at this and thought what if Nigerians have unknowingly adopted a glocal approach into the key area of selfless service in government. The typical Nigerian is so used to bad government caused by so many  years of corruption that he seems to have localized the international concept of selfless service in governance to fit his reality. 

Sometime recently I was speaking to a colleague of mine at work who stated that a certain governor who had been recognized on an international level for doing great work to improve the state would be stupid not to have stolen money. When I queried him on this his reply was this Igbo proverb;

Onye nwetara onwe ya rienu ukwu orji ga e ji si ke kpata nku nke nnukwu maka na omaghi zi ubachi nga enwe uhere ozo ria elu osisi ahu

Translated it means 'he who is fortunate enough to find himself on an Iroko tree should be wise enough to gather all the firewood he can, as that may be his only chance to climb such a tree'

As I pondered on this I came about my own interpretation, Nigerians elect people who climb on the Symbolic Iroko tree of leadership, while they are there, they should do well by throwing firewood and other useful resources that they see on the tree, which was what why they were elected. However, while they are at it they should ensure to take for themselves as well. But at the end of their tenure when it is time to leave, do kindly leave.

From this the Nigerian interpretation of selfless service of 'Do, Chop and Go' emerges.

Nigerians seemed to have agreed to a concession of some their expectations for truly selfless government to this ideology of 'Do, Chop and Go'. That's why you can hear a Nigerian congratulating the governor of a certain state for providing basic necessities that typically should be there but because they have been deprived of it for so long, what would have deemed inconsequential in a developed country is cheered and ahhed in Nigeria.

What is Art?

Art is a story.

It tells the tales of a city yet untold or told differently.

It is motion picture without the motion, without the audio, a still image that speaks with light, colors and shadows.



It tells the story of unspoken beauty, it conveys emotions in ways only few can understand

Its more than just a pricey piece on a wall.

It portrays the period the artists lived in, the challenges he might have faced, his likely triumphs and downfalls, his thoughts and perception of society around him, his failed and successful love conquests and experiences.

Art is the painters imagination brought to reality, an imagination sometimes lacking in words to convey it or too bizarre to say out loud.

Art is an embalmed moment in time, a moment captured without lenses, a moment imprinted in time, never to be  forgotten.