“A broom is drearily sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life “ ( mostly corrected )

[Cornelius Hamelberg]

“A broom is drearily sweeping up the broken pieces of yesterday's life “ ( The Wind Cries Mary) Nowadays, the only blog that I read consistently is Porter’s Pensées . I have read every entry for both the language and the substance, mostly in order to keep reliably abreast of British politics from a confirmed lefty's point of view. Over there in Nigeria and her widespread mostly English-speaking diaspora, united in understanding by that common language, sure, the language is the tool and in this internet age of Naija fora in cyberspace and news & views outlets like “Daily Trust “ - as is the sign on the dollar - Dollar Akbar , “ In God we Trust”, to some extent the medium is the message is a Mcluhanesque message that still rings true today about the journalese served not least of all by Naija's partisan press. If it's from the so called “Daily Trust” then you know what to expect. Discerning Naijans should thank their ancestral spirits that they don't have a president like The Donald who rejects anything, anyone, everything and everyone that rejects him or points out his every folly, as “fake news”and on that basis - on the basis of opinions formed on the aforementioned “fake news” we have yet to hear Trump blowing his trumpet @ f♯ maj announcing “fake opinions !”. If he could he would make both - such news and such opinions either a criminal or a treasonable offence and in his golgotha quest “To Make America Great Again” accuse such perceived perpetrators of un-American/ anti-American, anti-Trumpian  monkey activities even as he turns a blind eye on the murder/ murderer/murderers of Jamal Khashoggi and the hit squad that savagely dis-membered him or would savagely translate the life of anyone who criticized one of his biggest business partners, by which token Nigeria being such a huge market for the industrial waste of many a developed country, Trump could well look the other way whilst they made kebab out of some dissenting Naija journalist or other who was proving to be a nuisance. Just that Brother Buhari is not the type to get even with those that hate him. So please feel free to go on scribbling to your heart's content. Why does every piece written against Brother Buhari and his administration have to be in overdrive, riddled with bombast and invective? One reason could be that such articles are written for home (Nigerian) consumption : write (tortuous big grammar) to impress the educated second language fools who are beholden to big grammar and those who pen such articles for local consumption are to some extent playing to the gallery – their galleries – including the gallery of rogues and scoundrels who grease their palms... Is every hyperbole (extreme exaggeration) more trustworthy, less treacherous to party loyalty than just stating the unvarnished truth – or is it a case of truth being stranger than fiction? ( Circa 2000, I wrote a shorti true story in almost neutral language – nobody was “bad”, “very bad” or “evil”, not even the Bank Manager of Savannah Bank, 10, Aba Road, Port Harcourt who "took" my £ 6,000 sterling , I just recalled and named people and things by their real names and to my surprise I was deemed to have written a satire, which only goes to show that to the uninitiated (e.g. those who have never been near Nigeria) the unvarnished truth, too true to imagine, is often stranger than fiction: the real becomes surreal through no conscious effort of your own. The mere fact that electricity / a continuous electric current which is in short supply in Nigeria unknowingly becomes a Zoroastrian metaphor of the darkness, indeed just as Baba Kadiri's proverbial “professors of electricity who produce darkness only” served on a platter would be hard to decipher by any of the uninitiated who might forever be wondering, what the hell is he talking about, because e.g. in Sweden ten nuclear reactors produce about 40% of the country's electricity, so electricity is cheap and the supply is constant and uninterrupted , otherwise how would we survive the nuclear winter that is fast approaching? Next summer just as this summer , solar energy will be on the rise., even tough we don't have sunshine the year round... Also, unlike some of the Daily Trust's crusading journalese ina Sweden everything doesn't have to be in the high negative superlatives and when this is so for example in some of Daily Trust then how uniform – how un-nuanced, “How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable Seem to me all the uses of this world!“ And as a result such a paper is likely to lose some of its credibility, at least for some the educated who can read and understand and not swallow everything they read, uncritically, hook, line, and sinker because it was written by someone with a liberal arts education or not even quite that. One of the virtues of the English language is the power of understatement – and more often than not,  a sense of humour which does not necessarily presage a departure – radical or otherwise running with tail between the legs from the high intellectual & political seriousness of the kind that Don Kperogi and his disciples usually indulge in. But any sense of humour is consistently missing in the diatribes levied against Brother Buhari and those accused of lacking a sense of humour will probably, most readily confess at least to themselves if not to us, to all and sundry that the state of affairs in today's Nigeria is not a laughing matter and therefore the necessity of some serious big grammar, a big grammar for the intelligentsia only and as we have observed lately even some of the most worthy among the intelligentsia are accused of “ toxic ignorance “ and similar ad hominem... When it comes to a sense of balance and proportion, of course, there are several role models, there's Ali Ibn Abi Talib // Imam Ali ( alaihi salaam) , there's even George Orwell and his then assessment of Politics and the English Language published way back in April 1946, before Cornelius Ignoramus was born. Things have changed a lot since then, especially in Nigeria... As a specimen of all of the above, I have just read “APC’s “NextLevel” of Fraud, Incompetence, and Sorrow” by Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Blow by blow, I could comment on his word by word , sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, but let me go directly to the usual Himalayan peaks also to be found in this his penultimate piece and they stick out like a sore thumb : to all intents and purposes, according to him there's nothing good about the Buhari regime and he would like us to believe that it's a national disgrace: Re - “ The campaign’s logo and slogan, as most people know by now, are unoriginal. They are also the product of willful intellectual theft.” Are “ unoriginal.” Does the logo or slogan have to be “original”? In what sense? How can can anyone in his right mind believe that something as common, as trite, as banal or as profound as “change” ( the Buddha's watchword) or “Next Level” should have a patent or monopoly as an idea/ logo? Is Kperogi aware of pop bands called “Another level”, “Level 42 “? What about Morgan Tsvangirai's MDC and Charles Margai's PMDC and Barack Obama's clarion call for “ Change” ? Next level : is there a patent or monopoly on such ideas?Must we apply for a poetic, philosophic or political licence to use any such expression? Like a family coat of arms ? The hyperboles are many , no time for any, it's more a style or manner of habitual thinking and in this case the intention may be fanciful, but what is this supposed to mean : “ the Buhari presidency is a veritable graveyard of creativity, intelligence, and basic decency. “? That's where you bury creativity, intelligence and “ basic decency” . So where do you bury the devil, and where will they bury you? The poetic examples below are all dressed up in what the devil wants us to believe as incontestable and irrefutable statistics , since there's much that we don't know about the misuses of so called statistics. We don't even know by which criteria the measurements were conducted. # “Nigeria now leads the world from the bottom in almost everything. For the first time in Nigeria’s history, we now have the unenviable notoriety of being the poverty capital of the world.” # “Nigeria’s police service is now the absolute last in the entire world.” # “his government was ranked the second worst in the world in “government integrity” in 2018 by the US-based Heritage Foundation. It is only better than Venezuela’s government. “ # “In Oxfam’s and Development Finance International (DFI)’s 2018 global ranking of “Commitment to Reducing Inequality Index,” Nigeria was ranked 157 out of 157 countries. “ # “Nigeria has consistently regressed in Transparency International’s corruption perception index since Buhari became president. We are currently ranked 148 out of 180 countries. “ # “according the BBC of July 25, 2017, “Nigeria has largest number of children out-of-school in the world.” # “that nearly 8 million people lost their jobs between January 2016 and September 30, 2017, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, which is a federal government agency.  Youth unemployment also more than doubled during Buhari’s presidency. According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics, when Buhari ascended to the presidency in May 2015, youth unemployment was 13.7 percent. By July 2017, it climbed to 33.1 percent. “ Sadhguru on How To Never Get Angry or Bothered By People ReplyForward