Keeping hope alive – the Aproko tale

Staying hopeful is such hard work, it is just a wonder that anyone tries to do it. On the other hand though is that hopelessness is so much more harder to keep up and a lot more depressing than being hopeful. How? By refusing to acknowledge anything good around and inside of you sort of. *shrugs* That is really some had work. So we work at keeping hope alive in the midst of several choking circumstances around. Living in a country such as Nigeria requires almost an extreme hoping upon hope to just keep it barely alive.

Having a chat with my cousin yesterday and she looked at me and made a very shocking and profound statement ‘I don’t know how people can keep believing Nigeria can be better’. I was flabbergasted. Not by the words, but by whose mouth it had come forth from. She’s a final year student, somewhere at the start of her twenties (the very beginning) and from at least a middle income, putting it modestly, family. She’s been to most of the countries that most of her contemporaries only dream off and I don’t know of a single lack she suffers from. Yet this remarkable, more like unremarkable statement. Needless to say I was mummified for a moment in time.

Not some heart lifting tale? I agree. But somewhere somehow, the hope still keeps burning. Even though it burns low, flickers and almost goes out, the embers seem to set ablaze another soul that keeps hope alive. And the story of another young person I have the privilege of knowing for a little more than a decade. What’s remarkable about this twenty-fourish year old? Asides the fact that he’s keeping a funny looking afro? *laughs* Well, maybe not much, but for the fact that he is finding a way to keep hope alive.

Just about a year or so ago he started this Web series( comedy) that is sort of taking the world by storm. Using meagre resources at his disposal, he’s been able to do something that has began to get the attention of quite a number of organisations and individuals in high places.

Let’s save all the talking, here are links to two of the episodes on one of Nigeria’s most popular blogs. @lindaikeji: Aproko 101,The funniest web series on http://t.co/RML0SE06x7 http://t.co/14kWnS8nzX

Have fun watching and keep hope alive.

The Broken Refuge

He couldn’t sleep. He wasn’t sure if it was insomnia or the evil that he was seeing all around, that was depriving him of his sleep. After the day had its fill of depleting energies, the expected result was sleep. In his case it was not forth coming.

He shrugs it away and the turns on his left side.

He wasn’t home. He was on one of those mercy seeking mission to the God in heaven, some say he dwells inside man, to ask Him to bless him and make his way prosperous. He was way too tired for sleep not to come. Or maybe he was only tired in the body and his mind was still in overdrive?

‘Geez’ he hissed almost loud enough to wake up the elderly couple in the next room. He was squatting with them so that he would have an early start to that place where the God in heaven was promised to come and receive every telegram of prayer. They were nice, this couple. They had encouraged him to wait on the Lord, that’s the nice way they had put depriving yourself of food and water or anything that might nourish the body. And he had tried. He wasn’t hungry now. He was used to the hunger strike. A few days in the recent past he had gone on a no food diet. He chuckled to himself. No one knew about what went on in his house. That was his business and he liked his privacy. But things were going to get better, he somehow believed that. But that’s not even what kept him awake.

What kept him awake was a lot more disturbing than all these put together. He was sure now, and this was his sleep’s undoing, that the boss at the top was going MAD!

The symptoms were obvious – he was celebrating in the midst of sorrow, he rode his bike on a one way street in the opposite direction, he had a penchant for mis-talking, he praised his psychophants and sent to the gallows anyone who dared to rise objections to his arbitrariness, his dogs were lions with which he locked up perceived threats, real or not!

He could go on and on. But what would that help? Everyone who had any sense whatsoever could see, but yet they all waited for someone to take the first ‘fall’. They waited for anyone to break the coconut with the head, for such had become of the state of his place of ‘refuge’.

The aged had lost ability to hold their audience captive, they had lost the power to use their rethorics to build a compelling dream, their philosophy was dying with them and that faraway look in their eyes, like they were already out of their bodies, was a ‘dead’ giveaway.

The elders loved their comfort zone, they wanted to live out their retirement in peace. They take cruises when they can and when they can’t, either visit their ‘old peoples’ club and have a drink or two deliberating on the many issues that plagued his place of ‘refuge’ or they busied themselves turning up at party after party in the latest expensive aso-ebi and skontolo geles.

The middle aged were, well, too busy getting ready for retirement. Stories they heard of those gone before them left little time to do anything else. Some worked themselves to death, literally. The boss was their contemporary, maybe that was why they were too ‘cuddly’ with him rather than engaging him fire for fire. He was like them in many ways, reaching also for diamonds to store up for retirement. Only thing was the rumour he wasn’t going to retire!

The youth? His lips were sealed. Where they really has hopeless, clueless and useless as the others thought? With their frenzied chase for material things? Their lust for sex? Disregard for authority? Well maybe they had point for that last one. Hmmmm! Only they weren’t doing it for the right reasons. Really they were just their fathers children. Apples never fall far from the tree that bears it.

‘Phew!’ He sighed. What a waste of emotions all these turning of brain-wheels. What he needed was sleep. ‘Sleep, were art thou’ he cried through clenched teeth.

He hoped that the children would offer some hope for his place of ‘refuge’. These children that they were offering as sacrifice to their gods. These children that were now the pawns on their chess board. These children, whose angels he heard had the God in heavens ear, seem to be the ones left to bring respite to his place of ‘refuge’

Was the God of heavens aware of what they had done? Or was he away at that time and was only just coming back to the territory later today when he comes to receive the many telegrams of prayer?

‘Hhhaaa’ small breaths of air escaped his mouth in a yawn. His eyes, heavy with sleep now, drop a tear. He was so lost in his drama to care. He turns on his right hand side, and curls up in a foetal state.

It is morning already as he drifts off to a land of torturous rest, hoping that his meeting with this God of heaven was going to be fruitful.

The Nigerian Dream: a farce?

It is a great day to be alive. I believe!

Sometimes it is hard to believe in anything, much less in The Nigerian Dream. The question of ‘whose dream is it by the way?’ surfaces every now and then and you are hard beat to explain who really owns the dream. One of such times was two nights ago.

I sat back doing some multi-tasking things, and also watching the news, which was really not a common occurrence for me. And there was this man talking about how ‘we commit our children to you and …’ he trails of and without warning bursts into tears. That, for me, was shocking. African men are not known for showing any sign of weakness. They are stoic with a capital ‘S’. Of course when it comes to throwing tantrums and chairs or whatever objects they lay their hands upon within the hallowed chambers of their respective ‘parliaments’ is story for another day.

Eventually I got to find out that he is the National president of the Parents Teachers Association of Nigeria, and he was crying because his children and the children of several other Nigerians had been forced to stay ‘idle’ because of ASUU and the Federal Government’s uncompromising stand on whatever it was either side had brought to the table. So the children had spent FIVE months, of the NINE months of a full academic year, mostly dulling themselves. A question I would like to ask ‘what nation punishes its future leaders and then expects them to have the right frame of mind when they get to be leaders?’ #justasking

I have no intention whatsoever of trying to understand why it took both parties FIVE months to come to an agreement – that is almost ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY DAYS. Wow! Does it take as long to decide to quench an inferno? Or is this a much less danger? Time shall tell.

Or maybe time is telling. Just a day later, on radio, a presenter asked a caller-in the full meaning of ASUU and the young man could not. That was sad, very very sad. For whether he was a recent graduate, still in school or an alumni of any school for donkey years, not being able to do that, is quite unfortunate.

It is awkward that the only way to resolve a problem around here is to call a strike! The numbers of hours the tools are downed count for nothing. We only come back from those wasted days and soon we forget the lessons, hmmmm maybe there really is no lesson, and we go back to pushing the same wheel that lands us in the same mess. We don’t learn much from our mistakes as a people do we?

But I believe in The Nigerian Dream and one day we will celebrate the Nigeria we dream of.

What is your Nigerian Dream?