To steal a furtive glimpse, to ask:
What shape do knotted passions take?
Does dubious fervor gnarl your core—
Or does it merely impale you?

To love, perchance to mend
A broken heart
But does such a heart yet
Hurt, or beat, or love?

“Privatization sometimes works well, but can be a recipe for disaster, especially in developing countries that lack the necessary regulatory capabilities…” — Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism.

Each of us needs to be reminded every now and then that we aren’t nearly as infallible as we think we are; for surely, there is always that one person who is ever so slightly sharper, faster, glibber, better than each of us in any given vocation. Without this consideration, our general predisposition to overestimating our own abilities eventually becomes the bane of us, leading inexorably to the perforation of our over-inflated egos —whether by our own conscious and deliberate action or by life’s disquieting and discourteous interjection.

Dear Naija people: There is no Cabal bent on asphyxiating the rest of us. The ‘Cabal’ is a figment of our collective mythologization (should be a word if it isn’t) and this myth does no more than cause us to wring our hands in resignation. Neither our pleas to a myth nor our appeals to the gods will extract us from today’s quagmire. Our mantra, all the way to 2011, must be: “Fuck the Cabal—real or myth; we’re taking our Country back.”

Analyze the situation. Specify the desired state. Explore the solution options. Select the optimal solution option. Design the solution. Implement the design. Validate the implementation. Deploy the solution. Iterate.

Following a report by Sahara Reports that the CBN has sacked a number of Nigerian bank CEOs, a lot of discussion arose about whether this was part of the “Northern Agenda” to witch-hunt southerners and to generally re-colonize the south. There was also a lot of general applause for the CBN governor on this action…

BUT: Nigerians are incredibly apt to ask the wrong questions. The appropriate question to ask is this: Does the CBN have any statutory authority to intrude into the private sector in this manner? Unless the banks are owned by the government, how can the CBN legitimately “sack” private sector bank CEOs?

Harvard professor Henry Gates, one of the nation’s pre-eminent African-American scholars, was arrested Thursday at his home by Cambridge police investigating a “break-in” … He was already in his home when police arrived. He showed his driver’s license and Harvard identification card, but was handcuffed and taken into police cusody for several hours… If he had been a white professor, would they have arrested him?

Here’s a motion: Let’s stop referring to members of the National Assembly as “Honorable” — for obvious reasons: there is nothing honorable about them; and to refer to them as such is insulting to our collective intelligence.

Contemplating Facebook

At a thanksgiving party hosted by a friend recently, there was a noticeable frenzy to take, and be in, photographs. Apparently, everyone knew that the pictures would inevitably end up on Facebook and it seemed everyone wanted to ensure that they were properly represented. True enough, while the photographing was going on, one of our other friends was on … Facebook. Such was the fever that our host remarked, “Facebook will soon consume everybody’s life.” We all laughed.

I’m Back Here (Sort of…)

So, my last post here was to basically say that I was moving my blogging to my newly-launched bornAfrican.com blog. I have since blogged on that site, and am pretty darn proud of the strides we made in terms of number and quality of posts, as well as number of new bloggers. But, to be honest, I have learned a couple of things since I last expressed that resolution to move my blogging from here to there: