Skip to main content

yet again...

there are things that you must be taking for granted in your life. as you read this, if you reside in - say - the US or the UK, you expect to wake up this monday morning, grab a coffee, hit the train station, get to work. its a logical expectation. i mean, its so standard that it probably becomes a routine that you never even have to think about anymore. it just happens.

here in nigeria, the only thing that just happens is that you wake up in the morning. and then again, we all know that even that doesn't just happen (crime rate is soaring, people are choking to death from generator fumes, buildings are collapsing). it is now commonplace for a nigerian to go to work in the morning without drama, and find that he is not able to go home in the evening for a variety of reasons. you can never be too sure that the government hasn't blocked off your usual route home with no notice to anyone, or that tanker drivers have gone on strike etcetera or simply that the fares have hiked for no apparent reason. i bet many americans don't even know how fuel is transported to the various filling stations around them, much less about tanker drivers. here in nigeria, tanker drivers, oil workers unions and in fact anyone that has to do with petrol from production to distribution is a celebrity equivalent to paris hilton and britney spears combined. its just a part of your everyday life here that you must be aware of how fuel gets to your filling station otherwise you may find yourself stranded someday at the office.

as i sit and write this, there are long queues at filling stations everywhere. when i went to bed last night, everything was fine. this morning its chaos. i wonder if there is some midnight news network that people listen to and decide to rush to petrol stations and queue for fuel first thing in the morning but thats besides the point now. i'm clearly the last one to know.

when i wrote the blog last week on government's continued investment on the moribund power sector, i had recommended that we could realize savings if the government just utilized the money in buying generators for the masses. my friend aisha asked how the masses were supposed to fuel the generators and i told her that expecting the government to fuel our generators was going too far. i was wrong. now i see why she asked. it wasn't so much that the masses wouldn't be able to afford the fuel, its just that it will not be available. in this country, anything that requires more than your limbs to work, is complex and bound to fail. its really sad.

basically, the only alternative we had to the lack of public electricity (i.e. generating sets) has been grounded due to the lack of petrol today... so folks, while those of you in US and the UK will be going about your "routine" day, please remember those of us here who will be trying to sleep tonight by using our limbs to move newspaper pages back and forth in order to create some oxygen so we don't suffocate before the morning comes. thats my logical expectation.

i hope to see you again tomorrow if i'll still have clothes to wear to work...cos nothing is impossible at this rate. sheesh.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

nigeria and the needless debate

okay so usually, i avoid topics bordering on religion, politics and sexuality...but this one is hard to ignore (and as fearless blogger, i must bite the bullet). i woke up this morning and my timeline was full of comments castigating the bloody waste of time and tax payers money that is the the new anti-same sex marriage law. the nigerian senate passed it into law a few days ago (14 years imprisonment etc). the honest truth is that everyone is cautious about this topic because it is like holding palm oil while wearing white. no matter what side of the fence you're on in terms of your sexual preference, you are bound to get stained if you as much as say the wrong thing on the matter - and anything you say can and will be wrong. if you disagree with the new law, you're clearly an undercover gay person and if you agree with the new law openly, you're a shameless homophobe. i guess this explains why interestingly, all of the people i know who are vocal against the new law - o...

awards my big black...er...foot!

i'm hard pressed not to write about the nigerin blog awards but (i) it wont be fair to all my readers and people who took the time to vote for this blog (ii) i still don't understand my mental state when i decided to participate in it and (iii) i'm as bitter as a older wives meeting a new wife for the first time. to cut a morbid story short: i did not win a damn acknowledgement (much less an award). after all my toiling, having to degrade myself to the point of begging for votes from people who i really never wanted to know about my blog or read the contents thereof, after making people i hold in extreme high regard leave their daily activities and set out to vote for something so trivial, and aafter i waited ages for the darn result to be announced, i still didn't win a matchstick. i know there is something called graciously accepting the results of a competition when it doesn't go your way, but please. i'll probably never have a reason to spew out the diat...

of living vanity

as you know, i'm a stuck up lawyer, living out my innermost thoughts through this blog. i never let my guard down, i never do anything borderline wrong, i just never do anything, period. so the other day i decided on a whim that i was going to live life a little and take professional photographs, just because. i figured that life will go by whether i use it and enjoy it or just sit by and watch it. plus i could afford it so whaddaheck. at first i tried to justify this need for vanity by telling everyone that it was my anniversary year professionally so i would just go in and take one lawyerly shot with myself in full attire etc. but then i got into the studio, and it hit me: i am vain . case in point: not only did i go with four sets of costume changes, i had spent the day before doing emergency sit-ups and rehearsing my poses in front of my bathroom mirror. don't judge me. an interesting thing with photographs is that you don't see anything other than the subject. i...