Merry New Year

As I write this, my year of suffering is drawing to its inevitable conclusion - we shall be required to, for the last time, put on our itchy uniforms and stand in the blazing sun while some government assholes harangue us from their comfortable seats and shaded pavilions with hackneyed speeches about how best to serve our nation now that we are no longer compelled to do so. They will then give prizes to the best brown-nosers, boot-lickers, snitches, finks, and ass-kissers. Then we will be ordered to sing the anthem one last time, and merrily tossed to the hungry, droolingly anticipating maws of the Nigerian "job market".

Of course, with my days of being a Federal government pikin coming to a close, my banker takes time out from his busy schedule to send me daily reminders that there shall be no more credit, slack, etc. The last note even mentioned that I should note that I would no longer be allowed to stroll into his office without an appointment. Frankly, the harassment is getting old. I've enjoyed this line of credit for more than 2 decades now, and have provided free services to the man on a personal level for almost as long. Perhaps Uncle Nuhu has been sniffing around his office, and he's getting nervous, but even so the amounts involved are puny. I can only hope to give him solid reasons to keep our arrangement open as it would be extremely difficult to get another "understanding" banker at this point in time.

Over the Christmas/New Year period, I got to understand exactly how soldiers feel when walking in sniper-infested areas. My voice changed several times between December 20th and January 8th or thereabouts as I had to simulate several nasty throat infections, colds, coughs, etc. in order to explain my "shocking" failure to provide Christmas presents for some members of the fairer (but not weaker - and I most solemnly urge all men to abandon that idea) sex who were under the impression that somehow, somewhere, they had been given the title Deed to my wallet.

The catfight/muckraking/mudslinging between Turaki and Baba reached interesting proportions when Turaki arrived the National Assembly and turned the tables so securely on his traducers that all Baba's collective spin doctors could do was mumble something about Turaki lying under oath while looking like snakes trying desperately to swallow several boiled eggs at once.

Funsho Williams' widow won the Lagos State PDP primaries only for her victory to be snatched from her amid statements that a "Lagos man" was needed to give PDP a chance in the elections. (Hilda Williams hails from Rivers State, in case you were wondering.) Once again, the issue raised wasn't whether or not she had a chance to win the state, and I wager she'd have given her opponent a massive fight with the sympathy votes she would have garnered over the as-yet (and probably never-to-be) unresolved murder of her husband, but rather that she wasn't an indigene of the state. I wonder how we are ever going to build one Nigeria with this kind of utter nonsense going on.

Anyways, to those who travelled, I say welcome back, and to those who, like someone-I-will-not-name ended up seeking warmth in the interior of a refrigerator, I say the cold won't last too long.

Have a happy 2007 all, and may it actually bring us happiness.