i be naija

On my taxicab ride from O’Hare today, the driver no sooner asked for my destination and bawled fluent Yoruba over his cell phone than inserted a Fela CD into the vehicle’s CD player.

While I have heard Fela’s indictment of Obasanjo, Nigeria’s two-time president, for killing (or at least having to do with the killing of) his mother during Obasanjo’s first presidency in the 70s, I (and I suspect many Nigerians in their characteristic complacency) have not really, and I mean truly, fully absorbed the import of Fela’s charge.

Perhaps I was roused by Fela’s lamentations of the murder of his mother by the fact that I only just finished reading Wole Soyinka’s childhood autobiography, Ake—in which he recounts Mrs. Kuti’s valiant headship of a women’s liberation movement in colonial (i.e., pre-independence) Western Nigeria, that rendered the Alake, the King of Egbaland, the white District Officer, and the at once feared and revered Ogboni, all summarily impotent.

Did Obasanjo kill this woman of whom Soyinka wrote? The one that dared lambaste (to my utter joy) the insolent white colonial D. O. with the riposte,

You may have been born, but you were not bred. Would you talk to your mother like that?

The one that inspired the march on, and siege of, the Aafin, the palace of the Alake? Did dark-hearted, cowards of men, on orders of President Obasanjo and his vice Yar’Adua, really throw Fela’s mother off a balcony onto her death?

Countries and cities vie to host global events like the Olympics, the World Cup, the Miss World pageant, etc., in hopes that the literal convergence of the world onto that geographic space will translate into some real contribution to the local economy, etc., etc.

It leaves one really, truly aghast then, when the argument purportedly advanced by “the spokesman for the Nigeria[n] Olympic Committee (NOC)” to support his country’s bid for hosting the Commonwealth Games in 2014 is the need to:

… celebrate the centenary of the unification of its northern and southern protectorate[s].

This refers, but of course, to the British “amalgamation” of northern and southern Nigeria in 1914. BUT… What exactly are we celebrating? The invasion, violation, and exploitation of the peoples inhabiting the Nigerian space circa 1914? Or the arbitrary drawing and re-drawing of geo-political maps and interventions into those peoples’ collective fortunes?

What an absolute goon.

According to BBC News, Nigerian Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) presidential contender, Umaru Yar’Adua (pictured) was flown to Germany last week after he collapsed at a campaign rally.

In other words, the man collapsed out of I’ll bet, no more than mere exhaustion, and had to be rushed—not down the street, or to the next town, or to a neighbouring country—but half way across the world, to an entirely different continent, to be attended to. What does this say about the state of Medicine (amongst a host of other things) in Nigeria? Or, does this reflect the Nigerian perception of local products and services relative to foreign ones? Perhaps it’s a combination of both and many other factors?

How much of an indictment is this of the Nigerian leadership?

We’ve all received that e-mail, right? The one that urges us to “forward this to 20 people” in return for anything from “a laptop from Dell” to “a miracle in 7 days” to an outright “surprise right after you click ‘Send’”. Who hasn’t seen the one that says Bill Gates will send you a check for $1 for every single person you forward the message to?

I just received one such e-mail today, and couldn’t help but shake my head at the gullibility and outright folly of the universe. The e-mail appeared to have traversed a good portion of the Internet, for it appeared to have been forwarded many a time. Scrolling through the multitude of e-mail headers (To, From, CC, etc.), revealing the e-mail’s traversal path, to the bottom of the message, brought me upon:

Hi everyone,

The Ericsson Company is distributing free computer Lap-tops in an attempt to match Nokia that has already done so.  Ericsson hopes to increase its popularity this way. For this reason, they are giving away the new WAP laptops. All you need to do to qualify is to send this mail to 8 people you know. Within 2 weeks, you will receive EricssonT18. But if you can send it to 20 people or more, you will receive Ericsson  R320.

Make sure to send a copy to : anna.swelung@ericsson.com

The scheme here should be fairly obvious: you send this to 8 people, cc’ing Ms. “Anna Swelung” at “Ericsson.com”. Depending on how gullible your 8 friends are (let’s say that an arbitrary 50% of them are in fact gullible and forward the message to 8 of their own friends), Ms. Swelung now has your e-mail address, plus the 8 e-mail addresses you forwarded to her (via cc), plus the 8 e-mail addresses that 4 of your recipients sent to her… (and this doesn’t even count the e-mail addresses of the folks upstream to you; i.e., the folks that sent you the message in the first place).

Now, let’s say you and your friends are really, really gullible, and decide to up the ante by forwarding the e-mail to not 8, but 20 of your buddies… Think about how quickly (read: exponential growth) Ms. Swelung’s e-mail box will fill-up with the e-mail addresses of folks thirsty for a free laptop computer… Ah, thousands, if not millions of e-mail addresses, harvested, and ready to be spammed with Viagra, Cialis, and HornyAsianVixens.com come-ons.

Out of curiously, I copied ericsson.com from the contact’s e-mail address, and pasted it into my browser’s address window (which resolved it to www.ericsson.com). The site I came to appeared to have no more than a slightly subliminal connection to the telephone company at www.sonyericsson.com.

A couple thoughts:

1. If it’s too good to be true, it probably is.
2. By extention, if it doesn’t make sense, it probably, well, doesn’t. (A company gives away its high-cost/high-margin product, on a large (Internet-wide) scale—to “increase its popularity” and match its competition? How sustainable is that?!)
3. And, finally, there is no such thing as a free lunch; in fact, there is no such thing as ‘Free’. Everything has a price.

I really do hope that those little programs that scour the Internet in search of e-mail addresses, ALL grab Anna Swelung’s e-mail address from this page, and that they all collectively spam her to no end. That would give her a taste of her own medicine.

Postscript:

The clincher: neither Ericsson T18 nor Ericsson  R320 (pictured) are laptop computers; both are cellular phones.

And, both are discontinued models.