WATCH: Chilling Livestream from CAC Church in Eruku Town in Kwara State Captures Final Moments Before Gun-Wielding Terrorists Struck During a Church Service
i just heard the phrase, “if you wouldn’t trust their advice, don’t trust their criticism” for the first time and i don’t think i’ve ever needed to hear anything more
This same thing happened to my uncle whom we buried last Saturday in Port Harcourt.
He was admitted with complications from diabetes. They initially charged us ₦600k, then said amputating his leg would cost an additional ₦1 million.
On the day of the scheduled surgery (Wednesday), the doctor who also owns the hospital wasn’t available. He later called to cancel and rescheduled it for Saturday of the same week.
Come Saturday, that same doctor was nowhere to be found. He was apparently at his second hospital. My uncle’s condition worsened; the diabetes and pain became unbearable. Hours later, the nurses did a blood transfusion. With the doctor still absent, my uncle was put on oxygen. A few hours after that, he passed away.
When the nurses informed the doctor of my uncle’s death (they were talking to him all through on phone), the very first thing he said was: “Go and turn off the oxygen so it doesn’t waste, then prepare the remaining bill for them.”
While my cousins were crying profusely, one of the nurses told them, “Why are you making so much noise? Even me my papa don die,” and walked away.
45mins later, with my uncle’s body lying cold in the room, the nurses brought a bill for ₦2 million.
His second son is a bodybuilder. You needed to see the beating that followed, he beat up everyone wearing white in that hospital. They had to call the police to restrain him.
Thanks to the police intervention, we were able to take my uncle’s body to the mortuary without paying a single kobo.
Remember when Mbappe threw a tantrum and stopped running forward because Vitina decided to pass the ball to Messi instead of him?
This is what Messi had to deal with at PSG.
The key identifier of an "elite" class is not merely their bank account balance but their ability and willingness to use their economic and political heft to shape the society around them.
That's why a hereditary landowner and member of the UK House of Lords is considered an elite, while your average Premier League footballer (who may have more money than the HoL member) is not. The difference is in the willingness and ability to wield that power meaningfully.
The reason I keep on saying 'Nigeria has no elites' is that I was born and raised among the subset of Nigerians who erroneously consider themselves to be elite, and I am very familiar with their thought process. It is the exact same thought process that you would get from a sugarcane seller in Mile 12 market if overnight he was given a house in Maitama, a Lexus SUV, a beautiful yarinya and N150m in the bank.
The nouveau-riche sugarcane seller would not be concerned with higher thoughts like how to use his newfound fortune to transform the economic reality of Mile 12 market while positioning to benefit from the transformation. Nope. He would only be concerned with ensuring that he keeps hold of what he has, so that he never has to sleep in a wheelbarrow on a side street off Ikosi Road again.
That's exactly what the privileged Nigerian is upstairs - a sugarcane seller who happens to live in Ikoyi. No matter how many decades they have spent in Ikoyi, their reality is still defined by the desperate quest to escape or avoid poverty. Every Nigerian millionaire or billionaire that you know feels financially insecure. Doesn't matter whether they are worth $1m or $25bn - they are all viscerally terrified of sinking into poverty, and the sum of their decision making is a series of short term deals and compromises to avoid poverty, without any kind of higher, long-term guiding principle.
I know this especially well because I was raised in a house where everybody who is somebody in Lagos stopped by once in a while to work on a real estate deal with my old man, and I would regularly overhear everybody from bank CEOs to retired military generals and air vice marshalls saying things "Our leaders are [insert whiny complaint]." And I would wonder - who are the "leaders" that these extremely privileged people sound so oppressed and intimidated by? Is it not their friends and coursemates from Jaji?
Later on it made sense when I realised that once you are in power in Nigeria, you become God, and even your family changes its rules for you. I've seen families override their olori-ebi because one 50 year-old uncle became somebody in Abuja. Conversely, as soon as you leave power in Nigeria, you sink into total irrelevance and people treat you like your body has a smell. The entire Nigerian sense of value and self-worth is welded to money and power. Once you don't have these 2 things, you might as well be wearing Harry Potter's invisibility cloak - even your family and contemporaries stop treating you with respect.
The effect this has on elite formation is that unlike in other societies where elites gravitate toward different ideas shared by different camps, and then fight for the right to imprint those ideas on their society (Democrat vs Republican; Maoist vs Dengist; Tory vs Labour etc), privileged Nigerians ONLY gravitate toward one thing - economic power. They have no elite sense of identity outside of money in the bank, a 4-wheeled status signaller on the road, and an overpriced house in a neighbourhood that has a constant bad odour and potholes.
That is also why Nigeria's political actors do this thing called "decamping" where they switch affiliation to whatever political party is in power. Their entire conception of the world is built around access to the levers of economic power so that they can avoid ending up in a wheelbarrow in Mile 12 market.
That's literally all there is to Nigeria.
200 million sugarcane sellers.
“This is, with the greatest respect, the worst Supreme Court that I have seen in 45 years of practice.” — Olisa Agbakoba, SAN.
Olisa is truly a brilliant man, I give him that!
He said a lot, he broke down the problems holding Nigeria back, from the Constitution to INEC, the Legal System, to the Apex Supreme Court. He gave Recommendations on how Nigeria can indeed move forward!
I hope the handlers of Bola had their pen & paper? I hope they wrote down everything? And they can play & replay all he said! Leave whatever you are doing, & listen to him. 👏
The biggest audacity is Peter Obi contesting against Atiku & Tinubu, & defeating both hands down. It took the combined efforts of State Sponsored bigotry, State backed thugs, INEC & the judiciary to deny Obi his hard won victory. Obi’s balls are made of steel, I give him that. 👏
| Bring them home |
It is YOUR responsibility to bring your kids home. Those so called „European Investments“ or „Lagos brought ups“ deserve to know their roots. The only one making them a „lost generation“ is unintentional parents!
See how happy they are - a son that knows his father knows his house 🏠
Happy Sunday!
If you wonder why I detest the social class I was born into so much, consider the following 2 scenarios:
It's 1987, and my dad is sitting in on a meeting involving Mike Akhigbe, MKO Abiola, and a few other big names of the time. MKO needs to speak to someone urgently, so he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a mobile phone.
My dad's eyes widen because apart from the satellite phones that he has occasionally seen military officers use, he has never laid eyes on a mobile phone in the hands of a civilian in real life before. After the call, MKO notices my dad's silent amazement and chuckles, "This thing is not for the masses." He and Akhigbe share a laugh as he stuffs it back into his pocket. "Kunle, you bloody civilian."
Fast forward 11 years to 1998, and mobile phones are still not "for the masses" in Nigeria. My sister is studying at Queen Mary & Westfield College in London, and she visits home for Christmas. All 6 of us crowd around her Nokia 3210, cooing in amazement. Of course, there is no mobile network in Nigeria, and we can't do anything with it, but that is where we first learn how to play 'Snake.'
Fast forward 3 years to 2001, and mobile phones are STILL not "for the masses" in Nigeria. My brother and sister come visiting from the University of Ghana, and I find myself playing Space Impact on my sister's Nokia 3330 and Tetris on my brother's Ericsson T28. They are coming from Ghana, where at the time, GSM mobile phones were already common and unspectacular enough for students to have them.
And it was STILL "not for the masses" in Nigeria.
In fact, were it not for Obasanjo's relative economic literacy, which motivated the drive to liberalise Nigeria's telephony space, mobile phones by now would probably still be available only to a select few in Nigeria. There would be a NITEL 2G network available in maybe 5 cities, and it is a few of us that would have SIMs. Most of you wouldn't have even heard of Twitter because where do you want to see internet?
That. That is why I despise the class I come from.
Of course, to many of you reading this, what I've just recounted isn't a horror story from the Dark Ages, but a memoir from the good ole days when I was better than my neighbour. Because despite the abolition of slavery over 120 years ago, nothing still captures the imagination of a Nigerian human being like being marginally better off than the slave next to them.
My dear wife and I have now cast our votes for a New Nigeria at 11:42am in Agulu. It was a smooth process in my polling unit. However, I have received reports of delays in delivery of voting materials nationwide.
Good morning Nigeria. The ObiDient Movement has been at the forefront of my Presidential Campaign from inception. Today they'll be Marching again; as they did in May 2022, for the Final push. We must Finish Strong.