ktravula – a travelogue!

Browsing the archives for the Opinion category.

Bye Bye Mr. President

Those who have read my rants in the past few days about the Nigerian election cycle would have noticed my preference for the incumbent as the best person to win the ticket and the election for 2011 in Nigeria. I made this choice because of his image as a uniter and someone whose ethnic background doesn’t becloud his judgement of his position as a responsible leader in a time of difficulty. For one, he is also a better and (to my opinion) more politically savvy person than the rest of the contestants. All that changed a few minutes ago.

I’ve spent this whole day at a public exhibition. You can call it “stuff white people like” if it makes more sense to you. It is an exhibition of food, wine, artworks, upholsteries, and other pastries at the Missouri Botanical Garden to last all weekend. It involves food tastings, wine sampling and a few other past times one could do while in a public park. The Botanical Garden itself was an ideal location and I was privileged to visit its amazing Climatron for the first time. It’s is an indoor garden with a tropical feel hosting hundreds of vegetation, many of which are already endangered in many parts of the world. One more peculiar thing about the market was that all the food, wine, upholsteries, artworks etc in the fair were all produced in the state of Missouri.

I have now just returned, only to read on the news that the President of Nigeria (Goodluck Jonathan) had, in a speech to ECOWAS yesterday come to the defense of MEND, the group who had yesterday claimed responsibility for the bomb blasts in the capi tal Abuja a few blocks from the independent anniversary celebrations – a blast that claimed the lives of about 8 people and wounded about half a dozen more. The president claimed that MEND who had already publicly claimed responsibility was not the real perpetrators, but was a stooge of some faceless enemy. “WTF”, I first thought, then “What a shame,” and it was all over. Ethnicity, greed and nativity has taken over again, and the silver lining wiped out, all in an instance. Just yesterday while watching the independence parade on NTA, I was filled with some sense of solidarity with the president standing alone while his “brothers” from the oil-rich delta took the country to ransom and lose all previously-held goodwill. It would have been a source of political capital for such a president to be decisive, and to do what was necessary at the moment in time to show the perpetrators that killing innocents was not a way to show grievances. But now, he has relapsed into good old denial and it is all over. I have wiped my eyes from all drowsiness and confirmed that the wine has nothing to do with what I’m reading in the news. This is actually not the man we can trust with our votes for providing security for the nation.

I am now shopping for a new candidate.

Looking Forward

To October 1st, 2010

Clapping on the green hill with one withering hand, a loner
dances in the dust with trumpets blarring around his head.
A cake on the side, and black drying welts half a century old
around his back, he swirls with the new colours of the wind.

It’s dawning around a river of sweat, and a cool breeze blows.
The earth is wet with shining slivers of light, and tongues,
and mixed memories of glee, and a past of bilious giggles,
and smiles, and fond thoughts of what might have been.

But the bright day returns, as slowly as it must, within beats
of a thousand heart drums on a global stage. An orchestra
of sounds that must heal or yet renew the promises of dawn.
An old baton into new hands of hope within hope. A gamble.

For here is another gathering of tribes and a dance to promises.

At the DMV

While applying for my driver’s license last week, I had to answer a few questions at the Secretary of State’s office. One of them was whether I wanted to register to vote. I found this very helpful, even though I’m not American and I turned down the offer immediately. But the fact that the system is set up in such a way that voters can register at the nearest Secretary of State’s office even when elections are far away made a lot of sense. It will reduce the rush that must attend such events when elections come close. There are many things to learn from that.

The other questions I was asked was whether I ready to sign up for the Organ-Tissue donor programme. This is a programme of the state where one’s name is put in a list of prospective donors and a card is put on one so that in case of a fatal accident, one’s body would not go to waste but would be put to immediate use to save someone else’s life somewhere else. One of America’s socialist programs that makes sense, but my immediate response to that, which I didn’t immediately understand, was tufiakwa. No way. Why would I donate any body organ? Who needs it anyway? And more importantly, why am I being asked this question right now? Are they saying that I am going to die the first time I get behind the wheels? And, to borrow a thought from George Carlin, would anyone who finds me at a point of death on the road at the site of an accident have any motivation to save my life if he knows that I have a body organ/tissue that he needs to some transplant for some other dying person? Yea, crazy questions in one moment of answering a question: “Yes or no, sir?” It didn’t help that a first attempt to donate something to the Red Cross ended up in a rebuff tied to the part of the world from where I came. Read the very annoying old piece here.

The next time I talked to someone about it – someone who had actually signed up and technically donated all her body parts to science in the case of her demise (in a motor accident or such), I was told a very revealing statistic: over ninety percent of black people answered “no” to the organ/tissue donor question. Is this surprising to me? Not really. Africans have a strong attachment not only to life and its selfish preservation (do they, really?), but also to their own dead bodies for which they really have no further use. What would it do to me, for instance, if after I’m dead, the remaining useless body is cut and distributed to help someone still living, and the rest burned up with the ashes scattered across some peaceful place? The real reason for objection is that we really really don’t want to consider dying. The same reason why people refuse to make wills, immediately one begins to consider dying, there is a prevalent belief that one has set the process in motion.

Now, before I go, I must tell you that while sitting and waiting for my license to be printed – which was like two to three minutes after the road test – three white people answered “no” to this same question, without any visible change in comportment – the kind of which I had experienced the first time I gave the answer. I say this to somewhat debunk the racial aspect to the objection. In any case, the whole matter has got me thinking very deeply about not just what it means to be selfless, but what it means to die.

Why did I decide to get a car and a driver’s license in the first place? Yes, it beats me too. 🙂

PS: Contrary to the selfish sentiments in this post, it is not meant to discourage people from donating organs to save lives. It’s a very worthy endeavour.

Dotdotdot

This is how writing procrastination works: you tell yourself that you have nothing worth saying, and you wait until such a time when you think you do. Usually that time never comes and you stare day by day at the empty page hoping that something miraculous would happen and fill up the page. You could be lucky to have tonnes of other things to do to take up your space and time, but if you have been notorious in the past for writing even under extreme pressures of work, teaching, classes, events and many things else, you would usually not be forgiven for taking any kind of break. Yes, I know the works.

The evil thing about procrastination however is that it never ends. Like the fabled Sisyphus bound to head to the top of the hill with a ball of garbage only to be sent downhill rolling with no brakes, and to be condemned to repeat the same process for eternity, each day comes and goes, and the readers wait, and wait. In some cases the writer gets a kind of cruel satisfaction from keeping them in that kind of wait. Well, I never promised you to publish my everyday thoughts. I keep some of them for private people, or send some of them to newspaper editors in hope that they find them good enough to publish. And well, I’m such a risk taker myself and I wouldn’t mind to hear news that someone actually placed a bet that I would not write as much this month as I usually do. Wait a minute, why am I talking to myself?

All of this make a kind of sense, doesn’t it, and there is a win at every turn. The other thing that could bring a greater fun would be hours spent talking to people about an intending road trip: twenty-three hours on the road towards Las Vegas and California. Now wouldn’t that be something? Yet, it won’t be sufficient excuse to stay off the blog for that period of time. Well whatever, life goes on. 🙂

Of Beliefs and Denials

Living in the America of today, it is unlikely that anyone is oblivious of the raging debate about a religious centre close to the former World Trade Centre buildings. Even those who didn’t believe in anything seem to have something to say about the project. It is like the issue of belief, tyranny and spirituality always manages to bring us together if only to disagree. Last week, I heard a news story of a New York cabbie getting stabbed by a passenger who said or thought he was Moslem, and nearly got him killed.

A few days ago, I heard that a friend of mine had told other people that I was moslem, maybe in jest, or maybe because she was confused after seeing me praise the architecture of the Abuja National Mosque on my blog. Eitherway, it was my response to this discovery that has made my question even my own liberal mindedness. I really won’t mind if anyone thought I was Hindu or Buddhist as long as I am sure that I am not. That’s what I thought, but I found myself vehemently denying the charge on the spot, and later asking a few others if they have harboured the same thought for a while or heard the same rumours. A few days later, after an amount of thinking, I’m wondering why there shouldn’t be a reason for me to have said “Oh, screw it. So what?” It should even have been possible to make stickers saying “I’m not moslem, but I could be if you wanted me to.” and put it all around my living space. The only problem with that would be the ignorant folks, like the New York stabber, who might consider me a good target practise for his bigoted rage.

So I’m thinking, if intolerance and fanaticism are vices, what about a kind of bigotry that might manifest as immediate and loud denials of claims as simple as a mismatching of religious belief? For – as I’ve found out – there is usually more to explain whenever someone in a conversation looks at the other in denial and screams, “Oh me? No never. I’m not a _________”.

Just thinking. It should make for interesting discussion.

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