The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Humpty Dumpty

  • Black Friday: A festival of dark and shoddy deals?

    Black Friday: A festival of dark and shoddy deals?

    By Moses Emorinken

    The recent frenzy that permeated and circulated every space – from social, terrestrial and print media is simply amazing…all in the name of Black Friday.

    Online buyers impulsively cherry-pick items such as home appliances, groceries, electronics, phones and laptops, and other similar appurtenances; they do so with the hope of getting the best deals in prices for the year.

    However, their already wide and bright grins sagged as their expectations were dashed to the ground in an epic humpty dumpty style.

    According to research in Consumer Psychology, humans are known to be the most impulsive creatures in this massive terraqueous globe we call earth.

    Our excessive desire to satisfy our insatiable wants have become a major preoccupation making us hustle and toil day and night or even borrow money that we do not have, to purchase things we do not need, in order to impress people who really do not care about us.

    What a wasteful expedition!

    In Nigeria, e-commerce sites like Jumia, Konga, DealDey etc., are amongst some of the major players in the Black Friday saga.

    Black Friday have wrapped its thick dark sheets around us just like the heavens wrap the horizons of the sky with “black” clouds before sending down the rain; the rain in our case is the purported discount promised us by a lot of these sites.

    Little wonder it is called Black Friday because of the surreptitious hoax deployed to legitimately defraud customers of their hard-earned mazuma without them knowing.

    Customers have been wooed and lured to believe they would have a blast and slash in the prices of their favourite items. However, just like the majority of gullible teenage girls who get deflowered before they clock 18, Nigerian customers have had their hearts broken, hopes dashed, and expectations dulled and lulled by the failed promissory love notes from these Casanovas called e-commerce stores. This is reminiscent to “daylight” rape and robbery.

    How do you explain the rationale behind a product being sold during the discount period, which is more expensive than it was a few weeks ago?

    They even have the effrontery to paste a former price against a discounted price and percentage off – we should be grateful…shey!?

    This is the case of Sharon: A customer who found a product on one of our popular e-commerce website. She identified the product, saw the price and took note of it; only to wait till black Friday to find that the product which she saw barely 2 weeks ago at N3,000 is now N4,000 at a “supposed” discounted price. This is absurd!

    Sometimes, what is most personal is most general; it’s almost certain that Sharon’s pitiable Black Friday story is the same narrative for so many Nigerian customers.

    Please, somebody help me…why call it ‘Black Friday’ when the promo lasts from a certain date to end on another date very distant from the start date; why call it Black Friday, why not Black Weekend?

    How do you call a bonanza period which lasts for days “Black Friday”? Meaning it was designed to start and end on that day (Friday) – not a second more. What we find today is a twisted narrated and semantics for a day of the week to be equivalent to the entire week or even more.

    Is someone trying to play on our intelligence?

    Haven’t we suffered enough from sleazy and corrupt politicians and government officials whose job description is to loot our collective patrimony all in the name of giving us the dividends of democracy?

    I think the new narrative should be that they (politicians) have promised to give us a Black Friday (instead of dividends of democracy) because Black Friday in Nigeria is reminiscent to exploitation.

    No wonder my friend’s grandmother never liked the idea of Black Friday (not because she is old-school), because regardless of the many good that comes with the day as practiced internationally, here in Nigerian, it is merely a show and a bauble.

    Locally, especially in the Yoruba parlance, one can literally translate it to – “Oja Ale”; meaning night market.

    A well-grounded and cultural person knows that nothing good really comes from Oja Ale.

    For those that are already primed to mould and throw balls of accusations at the writer, did you know that e-commerce websites in Nigeria usually rake in billions of Naira in turnover this period than they normally would in a quarter (three months) of their business year?

    It is certainly a festival of dark, black and shoddy transactions at the expense of the majority of the Nigerian people.

    It is high time the Consumer Protection Council ( CPC ) stepped up its game and live up to its mandate of protecting the people from heartless and unscrupulous bourgeoisies who are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

    Dear Nigerians, please think twice before picking those items from your favourite e-commerce stores; it is sometimes advisable to walk into a physical store to price and pick the items of your choice that you need and not being manipulated online to impulsively pick items that you don’t need, at a very exploitative price.

    Be wise!

  • PDP: Humpty-Dumpty finally had a great fall

    Heavens heaved a sigh Earth shifted a notch And the world held her breath

    What manner of race is this?

    The heavens heaved…

    Could an earthquake pass so quietly without tremors, would a tsunami happen without a big splash? Has Humpty Dumpty which was long suspended in a state of falling, finally hit the ground unceremoniously? Well, maybe just as well; why would a lumbering, rotund fellow sit on our wall for so long anyway? What on earth was the listless, over-sized egg doing desecrating our wall for all of 16 years? Perhaps it couldn’t even get off the wall by itself so we have done it the favour by giving it a shove. And we say hurray, Humpty Dumpty has finally had a great fall and all the straw men around it could not put it together again.

    When Alhaji Abubakar Kawu Baraje led a chunk of members to stage a walkout from a PDP convention and formed a parallel party in November 2013, I had noted that Humpty-Dumpty was having a great fall. Though one was thrilled then by the suspended animation of a falling cartoon character, one never really conjectured PDP as a fallen edifice; crashed and crushed.

    Yes, though it became apparent a long time ago that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was an unviable proposition doomed to fail, one never imagined it would come so suddenly and with such apathetic thud. But PDP’s Humpty-Dumpty finally had a great fall last weekend as Nigerians gave it a final nudge at the presidential polls. Vacuous members had boasted that their party would rule Nigeria for 60 years but they could only get 16 years.

    It was on such confounding hollowness they had forged the party over these years. There was neither philosophy nor principle; neither reticence nor edifice. Yes, in 16 years, their permanent abode remains an ugly, uncompleted monolith desecrating the Abuja skylines. Yes, PDP is so derelict it could not manage to make for itself, a befitting home all these years. It is actually a misnomer to tag it a political party. It was only a raucous amalgam of bootleggers and fortune-hunters. Nation-building must have been the last item on their agenda if ever it featured.

    Yes, it was a child of circumstance having emerged from the foundries of a testy military era. But the early fathers were men of some substance, some integrity and some nationalistic fervour. You would never dismiss an Alex Ekwueme at his prime or Sunday Awoniyi, Solomon Lar, Adamu Ciroma and Audu Ogbe, to name only some of them. But they were less lucky, or shall we say, not circumspect in picking their pioneer presidential candidate in 1999. General Olusegun Obasanjo (retired) who was fresh from prison was foisted on the fledgling party and it started its decline right then.

    Obasanjo garrisoned the party, conquered it and had it in his rein for eight years. A soldier with a tendency for megalomania he could never cotton to the fact that a political party was an organic part of democratic governance. In fact he never understood the true essence of democracy. All he wanted was power; almost absolute power and its appurtenances. He therefore whipped PDP into his own peculiar shape; he molded it in his own ugly image and pressed it into his own selfish purposes. At the end of the first eight years, PDP was more a bohemian gambling club than a political party. It could hardly manage its affairs how much more guiding a new democracy to a worthy future. But who cared anyway? The founding fathers who had an inkling as to the spirit behind the body had been worsted and dispersed by Obasanjo. The common chord which therefore held the new PDP together was our national treasury. Thus for 16 years, all PDP did was to manage to hold on to power by hook or by crook and then binge on the treasury. They were like pirates upon an eternal booty, they were feasting endlessly. There was no rhyme or reason to their actions. The people pined away and the country became imperiled and tottered. Yet like the brigands they are, they carried on as if all was well; they boasted about the biggest party in the Black world that would rule for 60 years.

    But PDP’s folly has been debunked by its own contradictions and providence has rescued Nigeria from its vice grip. Now that PDP is suddenly an opposition party one hopes it would sober up and begin to regroup and rebuild in the mold of a proper party. It is also hoped that the All Progressives Congress (APC), the new party in power would endeavor to organize itself in the manner of a proper political party that would engender positive democracy.

    It is hoped that we are on to a truly new beginning now that the people have managed to regain their voice and shooed out President Goodluck Jonathan, the last of the PDP mojo. But he manages to steal victory even in his loss and capitulation. Did you notice how a jittery world rallied to gingerly remove the hand of the baboon from our soup pot lest he spills the soup, as Ndigbo would say? They carefully nudge Humpty from the wall so that he does not bring down the wall with him. Let’s call it our moment of grace.

    But Professor Attahiru Jega, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), is the x-factor in this new, unfolding, paradigm while General Muhammadu Buhari may well be the last soldier standing. Can he change the game?

  • Dumping the Humpty Dumpty

    Dumping the Humpty Dumpty

    Five PDP governors’ defection to APC calls for celebration, but …

    At last, the expected implosion in the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) began on November 26, when five of the party’s governors (G5) decamped to the All Progressives Congress (APC). The five governors: Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers), Musa Kwankwaso (Kano), Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto), Abdulfatah Ahmed (Kwara) and Murtala Nyako (Adamawa), alongside members of the Abubakar Baraje faction of the PDP, defected to the APC on Tuesday. More are expected to follow suit. But it was an implosion foretold; the only surprise, if any, was that the party was able to hold itself together this far. For the better part of the PDP years, it had been a marriage of convenience or, at best, a coalition of strange bedfellows.

    Only a compound fool would not have seen what happened coming. It was obvious, as I noted a few months back, that reconciliation was almost impossible when a crisis has degenerated to the level the PDP crisis was, even then. There cannot be genuine reconciliation after the gladiators have thoroughly abused themselves in the media, or after washing some of their dirty linen in public.

    One of the things the implosion tells us is that the PDP is not a good manager. Its leaders have never demonstrated that they have the capacity to manage. And we should not be surprised because the party has not succeeded in managing success, legit or otherwise, that it has claimed at the polls over the years. If it had, Tuesday’s event would have been averted. Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the party’s chairman, has remained what I called him in one of my write-ups a few months back: a ‘village headmaster’ who thinks his duty is to whip people, including governors, into line; to shape up or ship out.

    Without doubt the governors’ defection is good for democracy; it is good for Nigerians. There is no way any party can defeat the PDP as formerly constituted; not necessarily because it is a good political party or that it has done so much for Nigerians, but because it has a superb rigging machinery that it has been deploying in some states without serious challenge. That machinery must have been badly eroded now. Nigerians must therefore be ready to take the gauntlet, come 2015. I have said times without number that the 2015 elections would be a completely different ball game. That was long before the G5 left the party. I stand by that prediction. But where we as a people have to be vigilant is that by now, we should be able to predict the way the Jonathan presidency will react to the situation.

    Like a bad football player whose team is losing on the field, the ruling party has been abandoning the ball and going for the legs, instead, at the polls. It will do more of that now; it will soon start behaving like the wounded lion that it is. I said it just last week that the way this country is run, there cannot be any free and fair election, as long as the PDP is in power, irrespective of who heads the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). If the overall boss is incorruptible, desperate politicians, especially those with the backing of the ruling party will simply look for the incorrigible cheats in the commission to do their hatchet job. I guess that was what happened in the November 16 governorship election in Anambra State that made the commission declare the election inconclusive. We should expect more of such in the coming elections. The PDP will be more ruthless and more daring: People that were saints when they remained in the party will become sinners overnight for having the temerity to dump the Humpty Dumpty.

    Perhaps unknown to it, the PDP is full of itself, and that is why it continues to have the erroneous impression that no one can quit the party. In one breath, the party initially said it was not perturbed by the defection of the five governors. In another, its chairman, said to be on a visit to China, was blowing hot and cold simultaneously. First he was quoted as saying: “We cannot ask anyone not to leave the party if he so decided. After all, soldiers go, soldiers come. If anyone leaves the PDP, many more people will join. It happens every time”. In the same news report he said that “What we are saying is; let us come together as a party to promote the transformation agenda of President Goodluck Jonathan who we elected to lead us in Nigeria. Let us put behind us crises and bickering so that the President and leaders of the party could concentrate on governance and delivery of the dividends of democracy to all.” Pray, what dividends of democracy have Nigerians benefitted for the 14 years that the party has remained the ‘largest ruling party in Africa’?

    Tukur’s recurring mistake is that he keeps living in the past, or in self denial, or both; thinking that the PDP has such an alluring and irresistible appeal. Nigerians should pray he does not retrace his steps in this delusion of grandeur and that God should continue to harden his heart until he has performed the noble role of the ruling party’s undertaker.

    All over the democratic world, performance is a major determinant of whether a political party remains in power or is voted out. What has the PDP delivered in its over 14 years of ruling Nigeria? We are in deficit in virtually all sectors – education, health, economy, infrastructure development, transportation, etc. We cannot even sleep with our two eyes closed. To crown it all, we see and feel corruption around us daily, with the government forever helpless as if corruption is now the in-thing or is about going out of fashion. And nothing demonstrates this more vividly than the purchase of two-bullet-proof cars just to keep one minister safe.

    Meanwhile, there is no money to kit the security agencies to protect the rest of us. Isn’t it curious that the same President Jonathan that could not even wait for the file of the former President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Justice Ayo Salami, to get to his desk before suspending him has not been able to act on the file of Ms Stella Oduah, the embattled minister of aviation, who is at the centre of the purchase of the controversial bullet-proof cars for a staggering N255million? The President admitted that the file on the recommendation of his committee on the scandal got to his desk more than a week ago. So, what is he waiting for?

    It is only people who want to continue to live in fool’s paradise that won’t see that the ruling party is adrift and lost, and is about sinking, not necessarily under the burden of its incompetence but under the yoke of corruption. It is therefore only proper that those with foresight, especially people that have not been feeling too comfortable with the way things are done in the party and the country at large will vote with their legs. That was simply what the five governors have done.

    This is however not to suggest that everyone in the PDP is bad or that everyone in the APC is good. Of course there are cases of some progressive elements who found themselves in the PDP not necessarily out of choice but due to irreconcilable differences over one issue or the other. The point must also be made that among every 12 disciples; there will always be a Judas. The APC should take cognisance of this. If the scales could fall from the eyes of the romantic lovers that once got wedded in the ruling PDP, there is nothing to suggest that the scales won’t fall from the eyes of those now joining the APC sooner or later. However, the important thing for now is that Papa has deceived pikin too long for pikin to notice.

    Above all, the APC must know that it is easier to marry than it is to stay married; the consummation of the historic defection of November 26 for the betterment of the country is what should be paramount, not defection for the sake of it. A word is enough for the wise.

  • Trapped in an affectionate ditch

    IT was a raining day, and everything and everywhere was in a mess. Shivering in the rain, Bose tried to find her way back home. It was a very sad day because she just broke up with her finance. You can imagine how she was feeling in the cold. Empty and almost with no sense of direction, she just could not imagine how she was going to move on with life without Henry. In that state of confusion, her mind travels far away and then like Humpty Dumpty she falls into the ditch.

    Blackout! “For about three minutes I just couldn’t find my way out, my eyes, mouth and nose was covered with filth. Finally I found my way out drenched in filth and I burst into tears. I cried all the way home. It took me hours trying to get clean but the stench took longer to clear away.”

    Was this going to be the end for this broken and battered heart? Certainly not! It took her a couple of months to come back to reality. Her dear Prince Charming was gone and as she x-rayed the episode (s) that led to the final disintegration of the relationship, she realised that her heart had been in the ditch for so long.

    “Everything came clear to me and I discovered that I was the one who had been fooling myself all along. It was a matter of time but I did not want to accept the bitter truth. By the time he took off, I was devastated.”

    What a sad loss! She saw it coming but was helplessly in love. Most times, a lot of people chase shadows instead of understanding the personality they are having a relationship with. “After the first five weeks together, I realised that Henry was a very selfish and self-centred personality. He was also arrogant and highly temperamental. However, I was ready to accept him because he fit perfectly into the physical image that I had always wanted in a man. He was very handsome and was quite charming,” she confessed.

    Like Bose, Marietta had been through hell and back on the emotional landscape.

    Recently, he came out to tell me about his escapades when a lady in the office tried to blackmail him. He was in a deep shit and somehow he needed my support to survive from this lady. The revelations were devastating for me, but somehow I just had to forgive him because I was helplessly in love with the dude. The only fears that I have at the moment is whether he has changed totally or was likely to go back to all this later.

    Interestingly, some men in this category have confessed to engaging in ‘respectful infidelity’, which involves keeping certain things off-limits, like cheating with women at different stages of their relationship.

    The qualities that sustain a loving and healthy relationship aren’t the expensive gifts or romantic treats that you dole out to the one you love from time to time. Interestingly, love is sustained by the small, repeated show of kindness that costs little in money or time. The big question that you are likely to ask at this point is how can you achieve this kind of attitude as well as sustain it.

    “When I started my last relationship there were signs that things may go bad considering the personality that I had fallen in love with. Even though I saw the threats, I made up my mind to make it work and I started filling the emotional gaps. Some of my friends actually laughed at me, saying that it wasn’t going to work. They advised me to look elsewhere because it seemed that I was fetching my emotional water into a leaking basket. Two years into the relationship, it still looked very bleak but somehow I had made a significant impact in his heart. He made a U-turn and today we have become a reference point for many.”

    It is obvious that successful relationships thrive on sacrifice. You must be there to give what the other person cannot give. By lending a helping, emotional hand here and there, you are certainly going to soar higher and higher. Apart from this, you also need to be thoughtful about the things that would captivate the one you adore as well as make him or her shed tears of affection and joy. You can also achieve this by doing everything that you have always imagined about your dream partner to the one that you finally find yourself entangled with for life. All you need to do is an ’emotional transfusion’. This is a situation where you do everything on your affectionate list to the other person without holding anything back.

    Just give and give as much as you can and somehow you would discover that you are going to derive joy doing this too. By making someone happy you are investing happiness for yourself too, and before you know it, it would be time to reap this emotional seeds in thousands. It is important to do this as often as you can and you can be sure of a great transformation in your relationship.

  • Humpty Dumpty falls at last

    Humpty Dumpty falls at last

    ‘New PDP’: Old things have passed away? I’m afraid, not necessarily 

    Wikipedia defines an umbrella as “a canopy designed to protect against rain or sunlight”. So, when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chose an umbrella as its symbol, the expectation is that come rain, come shine, Nigerians will be covered. And, with the emergence of the party as the ruling party in 1999, there were great expectations of an all-round protection from the party. Unfortunately, what Nigerians have been reaping is a bundle of disappointments. The optimism that greeted the return to civil rule on May 29, 1999 has given way to general discontentment. Things have been that bad; and there is no doubt that it can only get worse if Nigeria is left in the hands of the PDP beyond the expiration of President Goodluck Jonathan’s term in 2015.

    That was why Nigerians leapt for joy when on August 31, the party broke into two. It was an implosion foretold. On that day at its special convention in Abuja, some prominent members of the party pulled out of the Bamanga Tukur-led PDP to form what they called ‘New PDP.’

    Alhaji Abubakar Kawo Baraje, a former acting national chairman of the party is now the national chairman of the ‘new PDP’.  Chief Olagunsoye Oyinlola, a former national secretary of the party was named as its national secretary and Dr Sam Sam Jaja as deputy national chairman.

    Other leaders of the ‘New PDP’ are former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, Governors Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso (Kano), Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers), Sule Lamido (Jigawa), and Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto). Others are Murtala Nyako (Adamawa), Babangida Aliyu (Niger) and Abdulfatai Ahmed (Kwara). Before the break-up, many of the members had been complaining about Alhaji Tukur’s leadership style, but President Goodluck Jonathan seemed not ready to do away with him. It was therefore imminent that a division was inevitable.If, therefore, there was any surprise about the party, it was that it could trudge this long before collapsing.

    For 14 years, there is nothing the PDP can point at as its achievement. It met Nigerians in darkness; it has not taken them out of it. All we hear is about the Federal Executive Council awarding contracts for this or that project; Nigerians are yet to feel the impact of such massive award of projects. Early last week, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, cried aloud about the worsening unemployment situation in the country.

    If President Jonathan did not know before August 31 that his presidency was standing on shifting sand, and if he is yet to acknowledge that fact even now, then he must be naïve indeed. It was clear that the way he is running his presidency; it is only a matter of time for the party to implode. His handling of the Rivers State crisis, where even ‘Oga madam’ wanted to drive a democratically elected governor out of town, was a thing that could only have been any other ‘politics’ in the queer ‘family’ called the PDP.

    I may be wrong; but something tells me that the break-up became inevitable partly because those behind it have read the handwriting on the wall and have seen that more Nigerians are disenchanted with the party. The implication is that there would be less pork to share after 2015; so, why not jump ship before it is too late? Unfortunately, Alhaji Tukur, with whom the president appeared to have covenanted not to separate, has not been helping matters. He appears not to understand the gravity of what has hit the party under his chairmanship. He is still threatening the arrow-heads of the ‘new PDP’, a thing which tells me that he is in no way about shedding his village headmaster toga.

    Yes, I am opposed to zoning; but no top shot of the PDP can say the same thing because they all know (if they want to be honest with themselves) that zoning is very much alive in their party. But former President Olusegun Obasanjo unilaterally ‘killed’ zoning just to satisfy one ambition: install Jonathan as president. The PDP had engaged in such dishonesties in the past without being bothered, in so far as it was convenient for the party. To the ruling party, everything is ‘politics’. Or, to use their catchphrase, it is a ‘family affair’. So much water had passed under this bridge of ‘family affair’ that the party, and by extension, many Nigerians, no longer know the difference between good and bad.

    Even when one of the party’s elders, former President Obasanjo went to the homes of the party’s top shots and ate pounded yam and egusi soup, or when he danced with them today only to get them removed from office the next day, we all see it as ‘politics’ because our psyche has been so conditioned.

    All these actions worsen the plight of a people who only about 14 years ago were freed from the jackboots. The many lessons that they were supposed to have learnt from the transition to civil rule were never learnt; as a matter of fact, they were never taught because the ruling party that is supposed to teach those lessons itself lacked the capacity. The party cannot give what it does not have.

    But only the enemies of Nigeria would weep for the PDP. What has happened is that the party has merely paid itself back in its own coin. It was a question of what goes around, comes around. The party led the way to balkanisation of some other structures by creating parallel ones. We have the PDP Governors Forum which it encouraged to spite the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) and reduce the influence of its chairman, Gov Amaechi. When this did not achieve the desired result, the party (presidency and all) infiltrated the NGF and attempted to break its ranks by sponsoring Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State to run against Amaechi for the NGF chair. In spite of the federal might, Amaechi defeated Jang by 19 votes to 16. It was obvious the Jonah faction characteristically slept off during the election, as it eventually claimed to have won after waking up from its deep slumber. It is instructive to remind Nigerians that the Presidency gave the loser a winner’s welcome!

    Honestly, I do not know how far the party’s elders can go now, when things appear to have been damaged irredeemably. If the elders had cautioned Alhaji Tukur before and he did not listen, then, they should leave him and his boss to their fate because that is what you do to a child that is behaving like a dog that wants to get lost. But if the elders kept quiet all through, either because of the spoils they are getting from the government or for whatever reason, then, we have to question their kind of elders.

    The point however is, even if the breakaway faction reunites with the old tomorrow, it can never be the same again. The camaraderie is gone with the winds because, as we say in Yorubaland, two people can no longer be friends after taking themselves to court. What has happened in and to the PDP is worse than people going to court. An umbrella is supposed to provide cover for people in rain or sunshine. This is a big irony with the PDP because the umbrella, its symbol, has exposed Nigerians to everything that it is supposed to protect them against. This is the disconnect between dreams and deeds; the tragedy of the big-for-nothing ‘largest party in Africa’. But nothing I have said here should be misconstrued as a celebration of the ‘new PDP’, as old things may not yet have passed away. However, the way the opposition parties react to this great fall will determine, to a large extent, how much of the spoils from the PDP crash they will get in the coming elections.