When we see the Earth from space, we see ourselves as a whole. We see the unity, and not the divisions. It is such a simple image with a compelling message; one planet, one human race. 🌍❤️💡
When people post videos of rock pythons or ball pythons and ask what to do when you see them in your home, this is exactly what I've been telling you guys. It's as simple as this.
I’m 61, and not yet in active retirement.
3 years from now, my last child will depart for college.
At that juncture, the inimitable Iyom Electrik (aka “Fine Girl”, “Odogwu nwanyi”), and I will have a choice to make; and it will be a binary choice.
1) Return to our Estate in Anam and build the largest fish farm in Igboland. Farming and writing philosophical treatises.
But this choice carries a contingency; a dramatic improvement in security. If this fails to materialize, we will deed the Estate over to the Catholic Church to repurpose as a high school.
2) Buy a Villa or Finca in Andalusia or Porto, somewhere along the Duoro River. Immersing ourselves in the culture and farming and writing philosophical treatises.
One seeks a life of humble obscurity. Nature, music, poetry, lyricism and knowledge in contradistinction to monumentality, and power. For indeed, “Felix, qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas," ("Happy is the one who has been able to understand the causes of things").
Many friends and colleagues, amongst them plausibly the nation’s best and brightest, called it quits years ago. Seeking freedom from the oppression of a sunken place. Camus was right. A life so close to the wall is a dog’s life.
Their surrogates are the politicians and the purblind “elite” or moneyed peasants; encrustations of barnacle and weed upon the underbelly of the Leviathan, the Nigerian State. The lower forms of life, long seized control of a benighted people. A genus that turns the suffering of the average Nigerian into spectacle.
The people themselves chained in a dark, underground Plato’s cave and looking straight ahead at a blank stone wall and nourished on an infernal diet of tribalism and religion, are caught between passivity and complicity. They are no bargain. Their suffering is not redemptive.
And the intellectuals? The enablers. “Everywhere belle face”.
Time they say, is a precious thing. And I have always liked the dictum: “Time is a fugitive”*
So you see dear Nigerians, I am a candidate in this election. Vote wisely.
* (Literal, the Latin, “Tempus fugit”)
Let me tell you how it happened. Nigeria’s ginger export hit zero from N26 billion within 3 years.
The official story blames fungal blight.
But here is what actually happened. When Nigerian farmers lost their indigenous seed supply, grant-aided interventions arrived with replacement seeds.
An associate professor at Lagos Business School flagged publicly that some of those interventions involved GMO organisms that weakened indigenous crops and compromised soil health.
That is not a conspiracy theory because it is a documented academic concern.
Now that Nigeria spoke got destroyed by the GMO seedlings….what is not the result?
Nigeria was forced to import ginger from China to fill domestic demand. Chinese ginger has none of the pungency, oleoresin content, or quality that made Nigerian ginger a global premium product. And the ginger now sitting in Nigerian markets tastes like wood because it essentially is wood.
The two indigenous varieties that built Nigeria’s global ginger reputation, the Tafin Giwa and Yatsun Biri, had decades of soil relationship and quality built into them.
Once the soil was degraded and those seed varieties were displaced, the product that returned was a pale imitation. Nigeria did not just lose a market. It lost a seed. And without a National Ginger Seed Bank, which nobody has built, it may never fully get it back.
The back of a Namibian laborer covered in scar tissue from years of whipping by a German farmer named Ludwig Cramer, (1912–1913).
Taken by the Rhenish missionary Johann Jakob Irle.
Home, again! Mission complete. I hope we glorified God, humanity, our families and our terrific teams a @NASA and @csa_asc. Time to share the good news!
perhaps, it’s fate. perhaps, not!
a thing i give no thought. for here i am, i can guide mine - forging destiny anew.
that in the end, it’s all my doing!