JUST AS IT IS………..

Again it’s been quite a while that I have been here. Last I was here was a whooping four months ago. Whew *wipes eyebrow*. It’s been a tough but surprisingly short year; full of unexpected turns and twists here and there. In the midst of it all, I thank God. Yea, I said Thank God. That statement coming from me is a bit shocking for at some point in my life, I have been an atheist and an agnostic at other times. 

I still find my agnostic tendencies come to the fore here and there but I go to church much better now. Versus past five to ten years, I probably went to church at least 200% more this year. Now that’s a record. I was even shocked to have actually emotionally missed church when I skipped it for two or so weeks in a row. I was flabbergasted. Me Foye miss church. God is truly on the throne. 

My mum still doesn’t believe that I go to church now and my lady acts like it’s a normal thing for me. Maybe she doesn’t want to upset the flow or jinx it by celebrating it. But if I were asked, I’d probably say that this is the single most important achievement this year: the fact that I went to church more and I actually missed going when I skipped it for two or so weeks in a row. For other areas, I can’t say much.

Now, by my judgment, I have probably sinned more in this year or maybe I was more conscious of those sins because I get to be reminded and reprimanded of those sins immediately I step into church. But then, one thing I have realized is that there is an uplifting that comes with going to church even though one is a bona fide sinner. 

Few months ago, I almost thought I was going through my mid-life crisis. I felt stuck, messed up and done. I’m not married yet with no kids and no hidden kids anywhere. Emphasis on no hidden kids. Why then was I feeling like I was going through a mid-life crisis. This got me thinking maybe there should have been a kid somewhere to make this supposed mid-life crisis sort of valid at my stage. 

I found myself thinking back of any ex or one night stands that could have gotten pregnant for me whether she declared it or not. None. Not one. Was I that careful or were they more careful than I thought and couldn’t risk having my baby. I know I’m not that bad. At least I’ll like to think so.

Anyways, It’s still a little puzzling that as much as I philandered back in the days no girl has ever come forward to say she is pregnant for me and meant it. Only one yeye girl tried to test me by saying she was pregnant for me to which I didn’t express any emotion as she may have expected.

I just listened to her all the time she said it and never ran away. She eventually passed the phase. Today, we are still friends even though I supposedly broke her heart maybe twice. I’m not sure anymore. I don’t think I broke her heart. She broke mine first in the University days. No, it’s not tit for tat.

In the midst of this, I got thinking what my mid-life crisis will be like. I knew exactly when my father passed through his mid-life crisis and it wasn’t pretty. There was no hidden child at least none that I know of yet. He was just more or less so broke and had to convince my mum to start a small business together with her job to make ends meet and feed five hungry mouths. No I wasn’t born with a silver spoon unfortunately.

However, things got better pretty much soon. Dad was promoted in his government job. Mum’s business grew bigger and things really got better. I was barely ten or twelve years during Dad’s mid-life crisis but I remember pretty much everything. I have a lot of respect for my Dad; how he handled the family during his mid-life crisis is one of them.

I had once made a write up about my proposed mid-life crisis about three years ago which I shared with just one very close friend. I never published it. This friend pressured me till I sent it to her to read. I wonder if she still has a copy as I lost my copy with a stolen laptop during the year. This year en. An entire thesis proposal was lost with the laptop. I’m yet to recover from that.

Anyways, I hope this makes you think of all the possible mid-life crisis matter that may arise for you down the years and take a step to mitigate it. I hope you go to church a little more often like me. Who knows who might turn out to be a pastor?

Needless to say that as a young lad, someone in the family church once walked up to me and said I was going to be a pastor later in life. I must say I have lived my life ensuring this doesn’t happen and I still do so. Pastor ke in all of this. Lol.

Merry Christmas and a happy New Year guys. Thanks for the readership in the year even though I churned out very little material. Blame that on my job and on me for allowing the job take my love for writing away from me.

Foye. 

WEDDINGS: PUDDINGS AND PREJUDICES

Weddings can be so much of an emotional encumbrance. So much so you avoid going for church weddings as you always end up in a bated brawl with yourself. So these days, you just show up at the receptions in the simplest of attires and attitudes.

Loaded attitudes, colorful attires, immaculate decorations and a horde of good looking women all but make the wedding reception an emotional hijack for your unmarried self. You find your girl – if you are at the wedding with her - asking you deep questions like when are you marrying me with her eyes? God help you if she’s not the one.

But then you still ask yourself pertinent questions like why are you not married yet and why haven’t you proposed to the girl that has stuck by you for a long time. You think back at how many of your married friends now have kids who call you ‘Uncle’ and how many ex-girlfriends do you ntor when they send you wedding invites or get engaged.

A particular ex had rubbed it in so badly inviting you to both her wedding and baby naming ceremony. This life en. You shake your head transiently, swallowed your egos and allowed the thoughts to slip away while smiling at your girl. No you won’t give in to her questioning eyes. You should be used to it by now.

So when the wedding date of Fola, your childhood friend, family friend and one of your closest friends of all time approached, you got the wedding fever. By the time the wedding ended on that warm Sunday evening in Avianto, Johannesburg you had started inventing a wedding in your head.

If your girl was there with you, you were almost sure to have proposed for the wedding was flawless - right crowd, right number of people and right venue.

By the time you got back home, your girl noticed the change for you got more excited and lovey-dovey than usual. To this she said it won’t last more than a few weeks. Almost true to her words, it lasted a little more than a few weeks. Blame that on the busy job and schedule. But then, a wedding had been invented. In your head.

You have often told yourself that you are not a perpetual bachelor. But truth be told, you were almost becoming one as you realized that you might have been living in a bubble; the one that makes you feel too comfortable with status quo. You are scared of this.

Healthily for you, you realized that if you didn’t marry your girl and on time too, you’d end up a long term perpetual bachelor. You didn’t want that for its tougher getting a down to earth girl these days. You have one already. And all these omo wobe are not it.

You had a dream wedding. Fola’s and Caroline’s wedding was the standard for their wedding is one of the most beautiful weddings you have attended. It was small, gracious, exquisite but expensive being a destination wedding. It’s the kind of wedding you want but you are almost sure to be marooned on this.

May God bless Fola and Caroline’s union.

Foye.

Open Letter to the Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Human Rights Commission, By Fola Adeleke

The Executive Secretary,
Nigerian National Human Rights Commission,
No.19, Aguiyi Ironsi Street, Maitama,
P.M.B. 444, Garki-Abuja, Nigeria

Dear Sir,

Four years ago, a little girl, Darasimi Adeleke was born under the most phenomenal of circumstances in a hospital in the UK. Her mother, Remi Adeleke, had a medically complicated child birth but due to the competent and effective medical care that she received, both mother and daughter survived the ordeal. Four years later, little Darasimi is in the process of suing an Abuja hospital for mishandling the birth of her baby brother during which her mom, Remi, and little brother, Jimi, died on the 22nd of April 2015.

Remi Adeleke has become one of an estimated 52,900 women and Jimi one of 250,000 new born babies who die annually in Nigeria as a result of poor health services and lack of adequate health care in Nigeria.

Remi lost her life because a private specialist hospital located in our federal capital could not offer the most basic of services such as blood transfusion. The birth of Jimi was medically uncomplicated like his sister’s; it was supposed to be a straight forward birth.

While little Darasimi heads to court with her father to sue the hospital, I, Remi’s brother headed to the Human Rights Commission to seek the help of the Commission in seeking systemic remedies such as making findings and recommendations on the minimal standards that should govern not only the so called private specialist hospital in question but also applicable to all hospitals in general when it comes to child births.

Afterall, this is a question of right to adequate health care, this is about right to dignity and ultimately, it is about right to life, all guaranteed in Nigeria’s Constitution and for which your Commission has been constituted to promote, protect and monitor.

It was a traumatic experience for me to visit your national office in Abuja on the 27th of April where in your complaints room, I felt powerless and invisible. There were four employees of the Commission packed in a small room and who had little interest in serving your clients – the public.

There were three different complainants, including myself, in the room. We were offered no privacy in recounting our individual traumatic stories. Your colleagues consulted us simultaneously and in cases where some of the complainants broke down in narrating their ordeal, rather than offer comfort, your colleagues coldly requested them to keep quiet. While a lady sobbed her way through her complaint, one of your colleagues attending to her happily played with the infant of another colleague. A complainant was sent on her way to make photocopies of the complaint petition she had been made to draft. Your colleagues walked in and out, laughing and sharing food and disrupting the whole process of consultation. The unprofessionalism on display was very painful to watch. In simple terms, we were robbed of our dignity.

I sought help in seeking systemic redress but your employees told me to go and hire a lawyer to sue the hospital. What if I could not afford one? Their lack of understanding of the mandate of the Commission was evident. In that little space where we were made to narrate our complaints, in that space where we were already vulnerable, the undignified way with which you treated us made us invisible. In that little space, your employees extinguish the last hope for justice vulnerable Nigerians have.

I headed a department at the South African Human Rights Commission and in 2014; I hosted a senior delegation for the Nigerian Commission who visited the South African Commission. In my interactions with that delegation, I marvelled at how extensive the powers of the Nigerian Commission are in investigation and enforcement as guaranteed in the enabling law of the National Human Rights Commission Act, 2010. I was impressed at the amount of financial resources we were told that the government had allocated to the Commission. On that day in South Africa, I felt proud to be Nigerian. I wished I rather worked for the Nigerian Commission. I looked forward to visiting your office as a colleague. Little did I know that slightly over a year later, I would visit as a victim and as a complainant, and I could hardly believe that the Nigerian Commission with so much resources, so much legislative powers, would be another institution that could also rob Nigerians of their rights – the right to dignity and the right to privacy. I expected more and I left helpless and hopeless. It is a crying shame.

Sirs, kindly train your employees who receive complaints at your office and serve as the interface between members of the public and the Commission on how to treat members of the public with dignity.

Train them on what your role is and the powers you have, including what you can achieve.

Please allocate office space within your very large offices and let each complainant have the dignity of narrating their complaint in a private room with no more than one or two of your employees present and no other complainants.

Sirs, train them on the importance of professionalism, train them on the importance of empathy and sympathy and ask them not to offer personal opinions and judgments on people’s life choices.

These are but minimum considerations that should justify why you have been rated an A status National Human Rights Commission. The mediocrity that governs public institutions in Nigeria should not be found in an institution like yours. But perhaps you can take solace in the fact that in your sister institution, the Public Complaints Commission, their professional incompetency can hardly be salvaged from their inevitable death throes of irrelevance to the average Nigerian.

Those other complainants were silenced. I felt their silence too. They may have no opportunity to speak again but I speak on their behalf.

I refuse to be silenced and will ensure that my complaint lodged with you is addressed with the level of competence and execution of powers that every Nigerian should expect from the Commission.

My sister, Remi Adeleke, and little nephew, Jimi, should not die in vain. We have a collective responsibility in making sure that little Darasimi will grow up knowing that the entire Nigerian system did not fail her when her mother died. Women need not die or lose their babies in child birth in 2015. It is the job of the Commission, along with a number of several other institutions to prevent unnecessary maternal mortality and uphold the human rights of all Nigerians.

CC: The Chairperson of the Nigerian National Human Rights Commission.

Fola Adeleke is with the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

DSTv TARIFFS AND THE REST OF US.

I don’t watch a lot of TV in recent times. In fact I stopped paying for the DSTv connection in my house for close to 6months. Reason: I was hardly home to watch it. So when my brother sent me this write up, I initially didn’t make much out of it until I searched online and read some unprintable tweets about the treachery called DSTv.

Honestly, something needs to be done about this sky rocketing DSTv tariff. No water, No light, No good roads and then hiked DSTv tariff. Haba!!!! Sai Buhari better do something about this. Lol. Enjoy the write up.

I need not begin to introduce to the readers that the biggest singular cable-service provider in Nigeria is the MultiChoice DSTv. I would also not need to remind the readers that MultiChoice DSTv have increased tariffs arbitrarily in the past without consideration to the rest of us and they have in fact made tariff increment a yearly affair.

I do not need to remind us that the even the service delivered to us under the current arrangement is below par (when compared to the service enjoyed in the outside world) despite the acrimoniously heavy tariffs – please share with me what happens to your service at the slightest indication of a rainfall. Share with me how many minutes you have to wait for the decoder/service to come back up when there is rain downpour.

My job today is to throw open to us the exploitative nature of the billing system adopted by MultiChoice DSTv in Nigeria and deception sold to the rest of us overtime. Same MultiChoice DSTv is a South African company and they run pay-as-you-watch (which I will henceforth refer to as PAYW in this write-up) over there in South Africa. I am aware that's the system run in Europe as well, to a larger extent.

The question that bothers the mind is why the same billing system can’t be implemented here in Nigeria. Why is this so difficult? The current system being implemented is a complete a rip-off and smirks of cooperate cheating.  

Look at it this way. I am here in my office at the moment typing this. Nobody is in my house right now because my wife is also at work and my kids have gone to school, hence my house is currently devoid of a living soul and so the Tv is not on. Yet my DSTv bill is running. This is completely outrageous.

MultiChoice DSTv is taking serious advantage of the Nigerian situation. It becomes more appalling and nerve-wrecking when you realize that our leaders, policy-makers and industry regulators make no concerted effort to correct this imbalance, despite their claims to being well-travelled.

When GSM came into Nigeria, there is no manner of argument that MTN (another South African company) did not put forward to say per-second billing is not possible nor realizable. Then enter Globacom and the rest is history. Today, we are all living witnesses to the situation on our telephone billing. This exactly is what we are demanding MultiChoice DSTv to adopt….a PAYW billing mode, just like it happens in other places.

Some people have attempted to throw up an argument of the content providers in defense of the service providers. And my position is simple. Give me the choice of the content that provides PAYW and the ones that stipulates a flat rate, and then let me choose. Let it be my choice these are the contents I want to use my subscription to watch, and then charge me on PAYW.

There are currently about 6 different bouquets on the DSTv, each with different fixed prices (flat rate). The lowest bouquet has about 14 channels or so, with an obvious exclusion of the choice sports, movies and news channels. Whilst the premium bouquet has the over 100 channels including the ones we never watch. And then the 30 days subscription expires, whether or not the subscriber tunes to all these channels or not.

I need just a few channels that show what I need to watch and what catches my fancy, and that's what I want to pay for. Let me pay for that. I should not be in the office and my bill is running when no human being is in my house. I should not be away from the country and my bill is running. It's a complete rip-off. It needs to stop.

But then again, this is Nigeria where anything goes. Where all manners of anomaly are permissible. Where people are allowed to get away with all manners of impunity. It is sad and frustrating.

Now what is the option available to MultiChoice DSTv as it will amount to a pure academic exercise to criticize without offering a solution?

I think MultiChoice DSTv should consider implementing something called fixed service charge per month to cover their fixed costs. The concept of fixed service charge is understandable, acceptable and fair. The fixed service charge plus the PAYW would be the billing to the user and not just a monthly flat rate as it is currently operational.

The concept of the fixed charge is what is being used by PHCN in Nigeria as of today. It’s an absolutely fantastic idea. You can charge me fixed service charge on a monthly basis and then let me choose the content I pay for (which is now the PAYW part of the bill, on per usage basis). Let me choose how I use my subscription.

Let me determine how I use up my N14,000 subscription. Let it be my choice to determine how long it takes me to do another recharge. This is all we are asking should be operational. It makes valid sense and makes things easy for all parties as nobody feels cheated.

I am of utmost believe that this approach will make everybody happy….and it is a win/win situation for MultiChoice DSTv and the rest of us.

Adetomiwa

Twitter - @TitoBankz

THE RE-INVENTION.......

Elated. That's the word. The word that best describes how I feel. Good feeling, they say, is the beginning of good things. So when General Muhamadu Buhari was declared winner, I was elated. I was so happy I could have hugged the closest transformer without even knowing. Ok that’s a metaphor.

No, I wasn't one of those that monitored the election result through complicated excel sheets. You see en, I'm not that good with excel other than the basics I need to perform at work. But I did monitor through complicated excel sheets designed by colleagues at work. With the way I was made to feel bad that I couldn’t design complicated excel sheets, I penned Excel training down as one I had to attend soon. HR better be reading this. Lol.

Luckily, my office has a dedicated schedule for trainings like this. So come next general elections, no bagger will #buga me. Shame I’ll have to wait four years to demonstrate my newly acquired excel skills. I'm hoping we won't be voting #Sai Buhari out then or clamoring to do so. The angst against #Jonathan was so much it had become hatred in some quarters. People were just tired; I was too.

For me, #Sai Buhari wasn’t a natural choice but he was the better choice given the circumstances foisted on Nigerians. I wonder what the KOWA woman was thinking. That she stood a chance of winning? No?

However, winning isn’t all that #Sai Buhari will deal with. Success, they say, comes at a price. He has to deal with not ending up as an anticlimax. He doesn’t want to do that to Nigerians; what with the massive support he received home and abroad. The way the earlier perception of #Sai Buhari as a cruel military administrator was doused and he was turned into the better choice was incredible. 

David Axelrod was just the man for that job; the job of convincing the massive citizenry of Nigeria and making #Sai Buhari a better choice than #Oga Jonathan. The question remains that would #Sai Buhari have won this election without the Axelrod and Obama angle? Methinks Axelrod improved #Sai Buhari’s chance by far greater than in the last twelve years he had been contesting.

No doubt, Insecurity (Boko haram), economic downtown and massive corruption already made Jonathan a poor and horrible choice. This was probably the undoing of PDP. They underestimated these issues and the power of the Axelrod connection or maybe they didn’t just give enough credence to it. Jonathan had always been one to throw money at every problem just like he did with the elections. Maybe Jonathan would write a book on this sometimes later to give us some clarity on how it all went down.

By the way, David Axelrod was the man behind Obama winning the 2008 and 2012 Presidential elections in America. He was the Chief Strategist and Media Advisor to Obama’s Campaign. His firm – AKPD Message and Media - was hired as a consultant by the APC campaign team.

So I came across The Time's list of books one needs to have read to be labeled well read here. Well, I haven't read any book on the list apart from Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. In a bid to feel more well read, I went out and bought myself another Wole Soyinka (WS) and books from two writers on the list.

I wondered why Soyinka is not even on that list. The Man Died should have sufficed. Anyways, I'm an ardent follower of WS. And yes, I have been engaged in an argument of who is a better writer between Wole and Chinua. Guess who I chose? Yes you are damn right. Wole Soyinka.  

So it’s been really hectic. And it took the emergence of #Sai Buhari as President elect of Nigeria to get me out of my shell. More like writer's block induced by less time and more mental stress from work. No doubt, I love my work; its just taking me away from other things I love doing.  But I’m working my way back to the old me though. I’m not a hooligans yet. #Tesojue.

As I wind down, one question comes to mind: How will PDP fare as an opposition party? Will they be as intellectual and formidable as the APC? Or are we on our way to becoming a One party state all over again? Time will tell as the Nigerian nation re-invents itself.

See you again soon.

Foye.