The European teams are finding out the game has come a long way. Keep underestimating the other continents at your peril. To the football classists turning up their noses at the increase in non European teams for this tournament, eat your humble pie.
The lesson from this World Cup so far is nice and simple. Donโt play scared. If you have the advantage, keep going. The football gods appreciate courage.
The diaspora is not treating investment like charity. It is literally replacing the state. That $100 billion is not going to consumption out of a lack of financial vision. It is keeping families alive because African governments have abdicated every responsibility they were supposed to carry. School fees, hospital bills, housing, food: the diaspora is subsidising what governance failed to provide, mostly while barely surviving themselves in expensive cities abroad.
"I laughed over the Ycee 'Olodo Uprising' topic, not because I found it funny, but because he was identifying something in his time. However, he was seeing the latter stage of something that started in my own generation when I was probably his age.
I spoke about weaponized ignorance for the first time in 1994 when I wrote a piece on it. He is identifying the same phenomenon. The 'Olodo Uprising' was fathered by weaponized ignorance."
โ Dele Farotimi
@raybamgbala Iโm not even talking about style of play, Iโm talking personnel. Plus, the reason they canโt play Samba is because the skill set isnโt there. Brazil started a World Cup with Igor Thiago at 9 and Paqueta at 10. The drop off in personnel quality is huge.
We brought back baggy jeans, Polaroid cameras, and vinyl records. Can we bring back basic human empathy too? The way itโs become so rare is concerning.
Lagos. A sophisticated slum. Bottom barrelled elites do not understand the fundamentals matter.
You want to host F1 and mimic MET Gala but you do not have numbered streets or pipe borne water.
Quick to line up PJs bought with our common wealth, but a grand total of 0 cities have an integrated public transport system.
If Nigerians themselves weren't somehow many, loud and and uniquely dogged, we do not rank above Liberia.
But hey.. What's all the fuss about, after all someone was able to capture a street in Japan that was flooded with what was cleaner than Lekki borehole water. And it lasted for all of 5 mins.
Nigeria can disgust me at times. I regret so many times that I care too much about the place of my fore bearers.