Instagram

I don't understand many things. I don't understand smoking, I think it is unintelligent and obtuse. Intelligent people do unintelligent stuff.
I don't understand hide and seek, it makes no sense, there's no point to hiding because eventually, no matter how long it takes, you will 'un hide'.
I don't understand screaming. In my mind, there are only two valid reasons why anyone should scream, 1. You're dying. 2. You're being born.
I don't understand fashion, fashionableness, as far as I'm concerned, is relative. No one can possibly tell me what looks good on me.
I don't understand being cool. There's something not very smart about the idea of being cool. Cool, like fashion, is relative. Cool is something that appeals to kids, teenagers. If you are over 20 and you still go about hustling to be cool, please accept my condolences.
I don't understand Kim Kardashian, I don't understand people who sit in front of a television screen and watch Keeping Up With the Kardashians and actually enjoy it; then go on Facebook and add it to list of shows they like. I imagine that people like that are very likely to have issues with trust, weight, food and life.
I don't understand Rugby, overweight men jumping on each other so that, at the end, another overweight man can run with an oval ball and slide, like 5 year olds trying WWE moves 'at home'.
I don't understand gift wrapping, it just does not add up. I mean, what's the point of wrapping gifts when the singular purpose of gifting is to tear up the wrappings. I think it is unfair to 1. The gift 2. The wrappings 3. The unfortunate individual whose job it is to do the wrapping 4. The unfortunate individual whose job it is to do the unwrapping 5. The environment 6. Whatever it is that gift wrappings are made from.
And finally, I don't understand Instagram, and of all the things I don't understand, Instagram is the one I intend to talk of a little today.
Hi

I have never really 'gotten' selfies. I mean the 247 ones, when the only times you're not taking selfies are the times you are thinking of taking selfies. I understand how our minds need memories, and selfies, sometimes, some places, are fantastic ignition for memories, but still I don't get it. It is one thing that my mind has not been able to fully wrap itself around. I haven't been able to, on my own, figure out why people love selfies so much. I suspect, although I am not sure, that it is for purposes of self gratification more than anything else. I mean, there's probably nothing as self gratifying as one taking flattering pictures of one's self, lips pouted towards the heavens, for reasons best known to God, hips outstretched apart from the body, as if it is a separate entity and has a separate existence from the body. Narcissism, in my mind, is the mother of the selfie.
Now, Instagram takes selfie taking to a-whole-nother level. I joined Instagram at some point during the last year, I deactivated the account a little over a month later. Apart from the immense, absolutely unapologetic level of fakery that the Instagram app basks in the glory of, I feel it is also harming us, gradually but steadily.
These days an act of kindness is incomplete until it has found its way to Instagram. You are not yet a good person until you have taken a photo or a short video of you being a good person and have posted it on  Instagram and have embellished it with thousands of hash tags and have gotten a hundred oohs and aahs and 'you're such a kind heart' and 'it's so beautiful what you are doing for these poor children who can't do anything for themselves.' in the comments section. The danger in this trend is that the children who are being born into this Instagram and generally, social media generation will grow up imagining that kindness and thoughtfulness is incomplete without pictures on Instagram, without pictures on Facebook, without announcements. The moment one announces one's kindness, it stops being kindness, it becomes something different.
The next reason I don't understand Instagram is noise. Do you remember how in Primary School there was always this boy or girl who, during the holidays, had travelled outside the country and would not shut up about it? The constant waylaying of your eardrums with absolute nonsense about Shanghai's sunset and the people who do not speak a single word of the English language, remember them? Remember how they made you feel like tearing out your ears and keeping them in a safe place until you got home? That's exactly how it feels when Instagram users post a million pictures of arrant nonsense a day, each bedraggled in a million hash tags that have nothing to do with the stupid pictures anyway.

Fakery is important. It is important because the filters that remove all the blemishes on your face and in your life only exists on Instagram. If you are a shitty person, you are a shitty person. Instagram would only be able to change that on its app, not in real life.
Finally, therefore, more important is what you do in real life, what you are in real life than the make believe life that Instagram enables you have, that Instagram has created for your egoistic pleasure.

N.B. If this write offends you, if it upsets you, good. It's probably directed at your ego anyway.

The World Is For Rich People

The truth is, as bitter a pill as it is to swallow, one cannot blame the poverty of the poor on the wealth of the rich. Except in the rare cases where the politicians get rich at the expenses of the citizens of a nation, but that's a separate conversation.

The hash tag, #NigeriaIsForRichPeople, trended on Twitter this morning. I was interested in it because I have spoken/written a lot, on this blog and everywhere else I have gotten a chance to, about Social and Societal stratifications, the immense disadvantages of the rich people being so extremely rich and poor ones being so extremely poor, and both existing within the same space, and breathing the same air, and walking/driving the same roads.

In Abuja, where I have spent a lot of time in the last year or so, I find that the only sets of people that social stratifications occur to, that are conscious about 'classism', are the poor ones. The rich people do not pay attention to the fact that such a thing even exists. They mostly just drive in their exotic cars with their windows raised and honk their horns so the boys hawking air fresheners and handkerchiefs and breath enhancers or mints could get out of their way.

It is not actually intentional, this nonchalance, this unawareness of the rich. It is not something they wake up in the morning and decide. No millionaire wakes up at 6 in the morning and goes, 'You know what, today, the woman in the market who sells a bunch of bananas to me at 100 naira, will sell them to me at 80 naira even though I can afford the extra 20 naira and I am very much aware that she needs the 20 naira a lot more than I do.' No one wakes up in the middle of the night and says 'In the morning, I will not slow down where there is a puddle of water because I intentionally want to splash muddy water on the unemployed young man by the side of the road, who is looking to flag down a taxi because he has a job interview with a multinational company in thirty minutes; a job interview that I know he will not be successful in because my son also applied for same job and I'm friend's with the company's Director.'
Do you understand?
It is not intentional, this nonchalance. It is not intentional that a woman wearing a newly made fashionable, female agbada and too much make up, and who has car keys dangling from her over-bedazzled hands, and who is on the phone commanding someone to be at a certain place at a certain time, would walk right past the long queue in the banking hall, straight to the cashier; and the cashier, who has been ordering people not to break queue all day, would smile dumbly, like she has been tranced by some exotic potion from the fifteenth century, and do everything for this woman and have that miserable smile plastered on her face throughout the transaction. It is one of those things that exist because it is the way it is, because it is what it is. I am not defending over exuberance, I am not defending the wealthy, but the world is setup in a way that allows money to speak much more than the mouth ever can. Where there's money, the mouth becomes useless. We have setup society so that the poor are condemned, not reckoned with in any instance.

Solutions? Of course, there are always solutions, but the solutions to this immense degrees of inequality would mean tearing down everything we have built, would mean unlearning everything we have learnt. Would literally mean 'CTRL Zing' the world as we know it. Nigeria is not for rich people, the world is for rich people.
This is why I keep hammering on the next generation. We cannot afford to have them think the same way as us. It would be a travesty for social inequality, in such brazen manner, to continue up until the generation that comes after ours, it would be a disaster of giant proportions. We have to change things. We must.

The Hamartia that is Smoking

My favourite book of all time (this changes a lot), Looking for Alaska, had a single hamartia. Cigarettes! Everyone smoked in that book. Everyone. The only major character that was not a smoker was The Eagle. But if you think about it, he probably smoked in the privacy of his house when everyone was away, seeing as Alaska said one time,  and I quote: 

"He's just happy most everyone's gone. He's probably masturbating for the first time in a month."

I detest smoking, and that's smokING, not necessarily smokERS. I have found that smokers generally tend to be rad, - of above average intelligence individuals. So I don't have a problem with smokers, my problem is with the act of smoking. I do not understand it. I do not think it makes any sense. My view of smoking is perhaps mirrored perfectly by Hazel Grace's reaction to Gus Waters when she saw him pick a stick of cigarette from a pack and put it in his mouth in The Fault In Our Stars, my second favourite book of all time (this changes a lot!) here: 

'Then Augustus Waters reached into a pocket and pulled out, of all things, a pack of cigarettes. He flipped it open and put a cigarette between his lips.

"Are you serious?" I asked. "You think that's cool? Oh, my God, you just ruined the whole thing."

"Which whole thing?" he asked, turning to me. The cigarette dangled unlit from the unsmiling corner of his mouth.

"The whole thing where a boy who is not unattractive or unintelligent or seemingly in any way unacceptable stares at me and points out incorrect uses of literality and compares me to actresses and asks me to watch a movie at his house. But of course there is always a hamartia and yours is that oh, my God, even though you HAD FREAKING CANCER you give money to a company in exchange for the chance to acquire YET MORE CANCER. Oh, my God. Let me just assure you that not being able to breathe? SUCKS. Totally disappointing. Totally."'

Lol! The key word to point out there is "Hamartia" - A fatal flaw. And I really think smoking is a hamartia. No matter how cool and rad and intellectually blessed you are, you are fatally flawed if you are a smoker.
Did you know that in a population where smoking is common it causes:
— 90% of lung cancer;
— 15 to 20% of other cancer;
— 75% of chronic bronchitis;
— 25% of cardiovascular disease related deaths
— 16% of total annual incidences of cancer
— 12% of tuberculosis deaths?

Everything is wrong with smoking and there is no other way to look at it. It is a scourge, a murderer. It is like a prostitute serial killer that has sex with one before bringing out the sharp knife tucked under the pillow. I don't think smokers enjoy smoking because how do you enjoy inhaling smoke into your lungs? How? I have thought about this and I think it is the idea of smoking that smokers enjoy. The idea of 'yes, I have this killing thing between my lips and it is lit, but I am alive. I AM IMMORTAL.' The idea that smoking is cool, that smoking is what the 'fetch' guys do, it is what the cool guys do. It is how to be cool, taking pictures of you and your friends smoking and posting it on Instagram. Truth is, that idea is so twentieth century. These days, the cool guys read John Green novels and metaphorical poems, that is how to be cool in the 21st century. You are welcome!

 Till next time,, Stop Smoking!

Another Year.

Today, June 21st, is my birthday. I am thankful to God for this new year.

I went mountain climbing today and let me tell you, dear friend, mountain climbing is the best fun you can have alone. It is hiking, but it exhilarates a lot more. It almost intoxicates. And the air on top, the air on the mountain, it's so pure, so unadulterated... so airy. The world, this world is created so beautifully, so fantastically in a way that makes you just marvel in awe at the unprecedented profundity of it. The universe is such a beautiful place. Life is such a beautiful thing, such a precious thing. We all need, sometimes, to just stop and appreciate the beauty of this world. We need, once in a while, to marvel at the utter comeliness of this place called earth, this absolute pulchritude that God has created and has kept us in.The world, dear friends,is beautiful. 

Residues of Kubwa Camp - Last

Kubwa Camp ended up being a fun place; it ended up being a fantastic experience that will remain engraved in my memory for as long as I live. I felt like giving up at the start, I felt like screaming back at the soldiers wielding their silly whips and screaming at me. I felt like strangling some of the people I met, people who were absolutely, unapologetically nutcases and murdering them. I felt like laying waste to the already dilapidated Camp Secretariat at times when I was told I would have to come back tomorrow to get this or that form or to sign this or that document. I felt like grabbing for the jugular of the sky and beating the shit out of it on days when, without warning, and with me outside standing on some miserable queue, it would up and open like some deranged sesame, and a downpour would begin. I got to my wits’ end very many times in Kubwa Camp especially during the first week. But still, it was a fantastic experience, one I would not trade for anything in the entire world.

After Camp, for my Primary Assignment, I was posted to a Pharmaceutical Research Institute. Actually, the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development, the institute was located in Idu Industrial area, at poverty stricken Abuja. Idu was not very far from Abuja main town, in fact, on days of towering strength, one could walk from Idu to Life Camp, which is in main town Abuja. The fact that a place like Idu was located in Abuja was the first shock that greeted me. Idu is so irrelevant and minuscule, one could drive past it without even knowing it is there, and you should, too, to be honest. In my thoughts, Abuja was all mansions and paved ways and boys hawking fancy things like lavender face towels and short bread biscuits and Ribena and things. I was not mentally prepared for an Abuja where the roads were not tarred and were red and disgusting when it rained, an Abuja where there were more dumpsites than people, more little shops that sell tomato and pepper than houses, an Abuja where houses were made from mud and old aluminum roofing sheets. That Abuja was definitely not the one I had in mind on the day I collected my call-up letter and saw FCT. The trouble with Abuja, the biggest trouble with Abuja is that there is so much difference between rich people and poor people. The poor people are just so unfortunately, miserably poor; but the rich are rich in such brazen, in-your-face manner that makes you want to ask serious questions about inequality. I tried to do that in this piece I called ‘What is Abuja?’ Potentially, this trend is extremely harmful, especially for these rich people because a time will come when a rich man will blare the horn of his Chrysler Jeep in the ear of the poor man and the poor man would not have it in him to take it on the chin and would match towards the Chrysler Jeep and open the door and bring the rich man out and only your mind can complete this story.

I did not enjoy my time at the National Institute for Pharmaceutical Research and Development in the real sense of the word, mostly because a) I did not care much for the type of work they did there and b) the sheer drudgery of monotonousness. I got used to it at a point and I began to enjoy the idea of it but not it itself. And so it continued and continued and it seemed like it would never end, but now we are here! NIPRD only served, for me, as something to add to my CV, I worked at NIPRD for a year and I prepared lots of media and cultured lots of microorganisms and did lots of sensitivity tests - none of which gave positive results, by the way - and a whole lot of walking from the Microbiology and Biotechnology Laboratory on the second floor to the TB Laboratory on the ground floor, and a lot of confirming that people had Tuberculosis. SMH. The list is endless. There is time for everything, as people say all the time. My sun has almost set as a Corps member, and therefore also has this title ‘Residues of Kubwa Camp’, I could have written more, I just did not have the time, or I was lazy, or  both. Thank you for reading if you read. And if you did not, you should.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!

Blood on These Streets

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There is blood on these streets if you look carefully. Those who do not look carefully step on people’s blood as they walk. I think it is bad to step on people’s blood especially since they are dead. There are lots of dead people in this country: I think about that sometimes when I have not had food to eat in days. Thinking about it helps me not to feel too sad about having nothing to eat. How can I feel sad because I am hungry when people are dead and their bloods are being stepped on? This clime smells like smoke, like something that is burning, but we are used to it. Almost always, there are houses burning, cars burning; many times with people in it. Things are not too bad, although. On alternate days the big, white ‘UN’ truck that has a couple of blue feathers drawn under a net-like ball, bring us food.

I learnt about the UN from school. Our school is not the same as it used to be. A missile landed on it two months ago. On that day, I did not go and that is why I am alive. Everybody that went died. Their bodies were seared, melted as if they were wax from a burning candle stick. Talatu’s mother could not identify her. She and her husband packed an amount of debris into a wooden casket and buried it to represent her amidst tears and unbearable pain. My mother said that was also how my father was killed and was buried. She said some white people from countries faraway sent a plane with a missile where my father worked. The missile landed and even though it killed many rebels, it also killed many civilians, like my father. She could not find my father’s remains so she packed some debris into a wooden casket and buried it.

Our school is under a Neem tree now and our teacher is a woman’s voice from the radio, she calls herself Miss Kimberly. She teaches us English language and French sometimes and she tells us that the UN, who she works for, is trying to help us. But I don’t like this method of teaching because there are no rooms for questions. She has funny pronunciations and so it is difficult to understand some things she says. I wish we could get our old school back where we can ask our teachers questions and understand their pronunciations. I prefer our old school.

Today, for the first time in my life, I saw fear. It was sadness mixed with anxiety and then somewhere underneath, mixed with hope also. It was not exactly what I expected. I have heard a few times that fear is a bad thing, but when I saw it today, it did not look bad, in fact, it looked quite the opposite. It looked as though it had no choice, it looked natural, it looked pitiable, even. I saw fear in a photograph; a photograph of some girl. She was young, maybe four or five. They said she lived in one of the camps somewhere with her mother close to the border. The border is where the rebels and the soldiers exchange bullets and bombs on close to a daily basis. She probably thought the cameraman was one of the soldiers or one of the rebels or an assailant of some unknown variety. She raised her hands up in surrender and the look on her face was fear, defined. I wanted to cry not because of fear exactly, more because of what she had become due to fear, of what fear had turned her into. At first, she reminded me of myself a few years ago when I was her age. But I was never so fearful. It is not that I was more mature at her age than she is now. It is that the war has ravaged us so much that these days, our constant companion is fear in its most unadulterated form. It is that when I was her age, I did not know fear in the immense degree that I know it now. It is that those years ago when I was five, we needed not to fear cameramen imagining that their cameras were weapons to hurt. It is that our peace has disappeared and war has taken its place. It is that there is blood on these streets and children stepping on it.

***

The pictures above had such profound effects on me. I had to write a story on. It truly is unfortunate what society is doing to the children.

Till next time,, Keep dreaming!!