ktravula – a travelogue!

The Lost Country

This post, originally intended to be titled “Mitt Romney Hates Me” in response to the decision of whoever manages his Youtube channel to ban me from leaving any further comments after I spent last week debating with some of the commenters on one of his videos. There’s something else in the news however that is a little more disconcerting than being banned from further debate by someone who wants to be the president of the country that champions free speech and democracy. It is about the so-called investigation in the corridors of power about someone in the Obama administration leaking “sensitive” foreign policy information.

It began about a week or more ago when two consecutive New York Times articles came out one of them boasting that President Obama has a “Kill List” of wanted terrorists marked for death by the US drones that he personally supervises. The other talked about an extensive cyber war conducted by the administration and Israel in which computer systems in Iran were targeted with debilitating viruses. Responses to the two articles were mixed. The response to the Kill List article was definitely very mixed, and very weird. Republicans and other right-wing conservatives who had tried to paint the president as otherwise soft on terror suddenly found themselves faced with a well-done reportage that showed that the commander-in-chief had actually been personally conducting a strong, brutal, foreign policy. The Left however, the otherwise human-right touting base of the president who beat up on George Bush for being such a hawkish man who misled the country into war in which innocent lives (and of some bad people too, no less), kept curiously quiet. They found no contradiction whatsoever in the image of a president who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 2009 personally supervising the killing of suspected terrorists not yet convicted of any crimes.

Therefore, in a weird twist of fate, logic, and political identity, Democrats silently cheered that their president finally locked down the foreign policy cred (nevermind that his supervising of the killing of Osama Bin Laden already wrote him into the history of decisive leadership), while Republicans – otherwise usual supporters for whistleblowers who leak government information that show abuse/misuse of power – are now up in arms, jumping up and down, and making loud noises that the leaker of the said information should be found. Why? Because the leaked information made the president look good. Of course if the information “leaked” to the New York Times had included some embezzlement or some sort of information, these same Republicans would have been the first to find ways of protecting whoever the person is, touting him/her as a hero.

So, here’s where we are. The biggest developing news on TV today (bipartisan, nevertheless) is about the call for a private investigation, not – as you would imagine – to examine the rationale for the president himself personally supervising the life/death decision on who lives or who dies in Yemen, Afghanistan or Iraq tomorrow, but to punish whoever made that information public. The Republicans making the most noise about the call for this panel do not care much for those accused bad guys (and the innocent collateral deaths accompanying it), but they hope on some level that the investigation would lead to the president himself, and he would thus be embarrassed. Again, not so that the killings would stop or become more open, but so that he would be painted as a weak, narcissistic leader. The president himself, calling the insinuations that he purposefully leaked classified information “offensive” is investigating the leaks so as to plug it, and not really to stop or modify the draconian policy that made some mockery of his 2009 Nobel Prize and his earlier stance on the policies of the George Bush administration.

It all just seem weird to me. But what do I know. I’m just one naive observer. But all liberal observers now keeping quiet would do best to remember that Obama won’t be president forever. The spy and killer drones however, and the capability for government abuse, will.

Kano, Nigeria.

News from the BBC, and Reuters, at the moment says that there have been about 20 bomb blasts in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. A phone call to a friend in Kaduna confirmed the story of smokes and gun fires in police stations. The culprit is Boko Haram, the shadowy terrorist group mortally opposed to everything western, except guns and explosives.

Just a week ago, the federal government had sent soldiers to the streets in many cities to prevent the peaceful “Occupy Nigeria” protesters from becoming a nuisance to government business. This news of renewed violence by the real threat to the nation’s progress only highlights the negligence that everyone have long decried. It shows the out-of-touchedness of those that sleep in the government house in Abuja.

Whatever happens as that country goes through this violent wringer of a reform, here is hoping that what remains is still recognizable to those of us who still call it home.

A Nigerian Tragedy

There comes a time when talking about the same kind of tragedy, or idiocy, over and over again becomes a futile act. Once is an aberration, twice is a trend. When it happens a third time, it has definitely settled into a most horrific pattern. I speak, of course, of the terrorist acts in Nigeria committed by a small radical Islamist group*, as well as the inability of the government to respond in a satisfactory way. It has almost become an annual Christmas idiocy.

In 2009, just around Christmas, the idiot from Katsina Abdul Mutallab got on a plane from London headed for Detroit, and almost took all the lives on an airplane. He put the country’s name on the world map for terrorism, and the outrage from citizens was unprecedented. “He doesn’t represent us”, we shouted, as the United States placed the country on a terror watch list. In December 2010, a bomb blast in Jos killed about 32 people and wounded dozens more (along with another one in October sponsored by the Movement of the Emancipation of Niger Delta, to mark the October independent celebrations). This year, bombs placed strategically in churches where faithfuls were celebrating the Christmas holiday has now claimed another number of innocent people.

However, beyond the deserved rage against the deranged people to whom violence is an acceptable way of making a point, and the gross ineptitude of a government unable to provide adequate security for the citizenry when they need it the most, I have realized that what should be most deplored is also the lack of fast and competent emergency response. A common sentence to all the news about the recent attacks is a variation of this: “Nigeria’s Emergency services acknowledged they didn’t have enough ambulances immediately on hand to cope with the wounded.” If the government entrusted with the security of the country could not provide that security, it should at least provide emergency help whenever crises happens. This one did not, and thus the tragedy. I am outraged.

NEMA should either be made efficient, or be disbanded and its funding money given to non-governmental organisations that will provide real emergency response whenever citizens need help. It is anyone’s guess how many lives would have been saved if there was prompt emergency response by capable people on the ground rather than finger-pointing and vain tough-talking rhetoric by an incompetent government. When I’m in an accident and dying on the street, I do not want my government on television saying “(this is) a dastardly act that must attract the rebuke of all peace-loving Nigerians… These acts of violence against innocent citizens are an unwarranted affront on our collective safety and freedom” as Mr. Jonathan did last week. I want a president that directs all emergency vans to my help as soon as possible. I don’t know about you, but I would appreciate that a whole lot more.

* The crises in the country are not caused only by radical Islamists. Other radical minorities like the said Movement of the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (MEND) have also been credited with many acts of violence on innocent public structures, and killed countless innocent people. Then there are vehicular accidents, maternal mortality, and armed robbery. An undeniable fact is the decline of that country into chaos. A more heartbreaking one is the ineptitude of government response either in prevention, and in crises management.

PS: There is a new KTravula poll on the right sidebar. Please tell me what you think. —->>

Three Worrying Things

1. According to some reports, about 700 people were arrested yesterday for their role in the Occupy Wall Street protests. Many have also been pepper-sprayed by the NY police or attacked just for participating in the protests that has now spread to many states and has received endorsement from many activists.

2. An American-born terrorist (so-called because of his not yet disclosed links to the Fort Hood shootings and the Underwear Bomber of 1999) has been assassinated in Yemen through a direct order from the current Administration. Repeat: He is an American, the first in recent memory that has been denied the due process of law before any allegations against him has been proven. Most of what has been proven about this man is that he engaged in hate rhetoric.

3. Salman Rushdie, a writer known for his brilliant prose as well as for the number of years he spent underground being protected from a draconian death sentence placed on him by an Islamic (police) state has just gone on television to defend the extrajudicial killing of the man referenced in #2. On Bill Maher’s show last Friday, he opined that when someone has been accused of treason, they lose a certain percentage of their rights (and can therefore be killed without being brought to trial).

Worrying times!

Come September!

I resumed school as an undergraduate in September 2000. Sometime in early 2001, I took my first creative writing class in the department of English under a very brilliant professor (now author of several books). One of the first tasks he gave us in class was to write a piece of creative short fiction which we would eventually come to discuss with the whole class sometime before the end of the semester. I was barely twenty, and was just beginning to develop some of my political and literary sensibilities, so my first attempt at fiction was a combination of both in order to make a satiric point. The story was titled Sam’s Tragedy. It was a story of a fictional feud between two women, and the tragic way in which they exacted vengeance on each other mostly at the expense of the clearly incompetent husband.

A few months after I finished with the class with an excellent grade, I expanded the work into a play of the same name. This time however, the characters became less fictive and more resembling of real life characters in world politics. There was a Sadman, a Sam and a Chinese character whose name I’ve forgotten now. Sam was an oppressive landlord and Sadman was a neighbour – his nemesis – who also had his very disgusting attributes. The play – a quite anarchistic experiment – ended with an explosion that took with it all of Sadman and much of Sam’s very famed real estate in the neighbourhood. This must have been around June or July of 2001. I showed it to a few friends, explained a few of the conspiracy theories fueling my creativity, and expressed the desire to put more work into it until it became something more worthy of the stage. On the afternoon of September 11th of that year when I was called frantically to the tv viewing room of my hall of residence to watch the two airplanes crashing into the World Trade Centre, one of the things I remember my friend asking me about was “How much of this feeds into your gloomy prediction, Mr. Playwright?”

It was a sad day, one of the most horrible I’d ever witnessed. Human beings were having to choose between burning to death in a building and leaping down to their deaths hundreds of feet below. I remember feeling very confused about the extent of my own creative condoning of a sudden chaotic intervention in world affairs which had now come to pass, and the real life implication of a tragedy brought about by people far more sinister in motives than my fledgling creative mind. For many years afterwards, I read lines from the play occasionally and wondered if it was still relevant – first because the doom it predicted had already happened in a far more sinister way than the absurdist play could have predicted, and secondly because I grew increasingly discontented with my own playwriting abilities. America had fascinated me from then as I got increasingly removed from an ivory tower bubble that treated it like an isolated entity incapable of emotions. The movie 9/11 – the only movie I know that showed tv footage of the first plane hitting the building – gave distinct humanity to the residents of New York, particularly the brave fire-fighters that went up the stairs of both buildings as workers and other victims made their way out.

The world changed after September 2001, and so did I, slowly, and now here I am. Ten years after, it is hard to think back to that September evening in Ibadan without feeling just as overwhelmed as I did then seeing so much destruction the worst I had ever seen outside hollywood movies. Thankfully, the world has learnt some good lessons since then. Some of the evil political players of the days before and after the attack have become irrelevant, and some of the perpetrators have already been brought to justice. We will hopefully have all learnt to work for a world where such an attack and the responses to it would have become unnecessary. As for me, I have stopped pursuing a career in playwriting but will one day take a look at that script and see which part of it can still be salvaged. Not much, I’m guessing, especially since I can’t say for certain in what part of my room in Ibadan the script is now gathering dust.

It has been a very bumpy decade and I wonder if our obligation to the coming one might as well be to do everything in our power to never stop talking civilly to one another.

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