Nigeria

My return to Benin was less about closure than reacquainting myself with the past all over again. As feared, there was an immediate fall out from the wedding – the next morning, Mother was at the door of the room I was sharing with the kid bro wanting to chat, and there could be no uncertainty about what her primary objective was. It was thus expedient to engineer a move away to the relatively low pressure of Aunt G’s back in Benin. I had an official reason for upping sticks and bailing - chasing up transcripts for the Welding Engineering PhD I may or may not require after all. The other unofficial reason was to catch up with Cousin E and her baby, Dara, the fifth and final member of the clan born since the last time I was out here. ...

A few weeks ago when I sat down to identify the five or six things that would make 2012 the perfect year, one of the things that eventually came to the fore was carrying over zero holidays in to next year. That by itself shouldn’t have been significant, but between hoarding my holidays for what I thought would be quarterly jaunts westward and my eventual withdrawal into my time honoured silo, I ended up needing a flurry of trips late in the year to claw back what was a huge holiday backlog. Even that was not enough, I ended up losing four days having carried over the maximum seven days into the new year. ...

Recovered from an old computer…. The joys of spring cleaning, I guess… Apologies for any one who finds the pidgin English excessively ‘conc’ Not too long ago I resumed at one of the much vilified companies in Nige… No complaints from me though, as long as them roger me my small thing at the end of the month and dem no kidnap me - No long thing.. I went to complete my in-processing a few weeks ago. Over serious naijaboy like me go organize better trouser and korrect shirt, come tuck-in with my glasses and fresh hair cut. Mehn.. Me sef trip na, as I look myself for mirror o.. Note to self – Next time take a photograph for posterity’s sake! ...

Nigeria turns 51, bloggers go on the charm offensive with 419 reasons to love the country. My moan from 2009 still stands regardless. The 216th Mersey side derby is ‘ruined by the referee’. The inevitable comments about ‘foreigners’ follow. More from The Good Men Project - traditional gender roles Amanda Knox walks free - justice or a travesty? For better, for worse, until two years doth us part? In her b(rea)st interest? The $1m dollar insured boobs Shell complicit in military excesses in the Niger Delta? What’s in a number? Nothing, says the Good men Project. How the discipline of blogging is a stepping stone to become a good writer. Giving women the visibility they deserve? Steve Jobs passes - TIME’s official obituary.

Being born on the campus of a Federal University in the ’80s, I grew up in what was a cultural multi-verse. On my street alone, one was as likely to run into a Pakistani anthropologist as a Cameroonian linguist, or a Scottish librarian for that matter. Over the course of growing up, these seemingly distinct cultures all bled into each other, till there was almost a multi-cultural sweet spot at the centre of it all. ...

Walking into the phone store in the bowels of the big sprawling mall that sits right next to the hell-hole I currently work at, my eyes are drawn to one of the lads at the till. My first impression is that he is Nigerian - what with his thick lips and his quick and easy smile. I am in-store to activate the 6 month’s free internet that should have come with the phone I bought. After much haranguing from my cousin about my being notoriously difficult to catch, I agreed to buy a blackberry - even though I am well aware of the madness being pinged at odd hours can cause. ...

I turned down another job offer, opting to stay with the safer option (yet again). The first time it was to a competitor in my city, this time it was back to Nigeria, and a return to UX5 where I cut my teeth and learned the bulk of everything I know. There were a number of issues - a few powerful interests stacked up against me courtesy of toes I’d stepped on in the past, and the fact that I’d seen all that and done that before. The key sticking point was that the pay on offer was ridiculous - clearly designed to price me out of accepting (plus rumour has it that on of the lead engineers on the project had a candidate).. ...

Got this in my email today.. Talk about inventive proselytising.. I am actually tempted to call the numbers on the car..

Based on data extracted from this Nairaland thread. I was bored at work so I took the liberty of trying to create an infographic from the pros and cons (for women) on the list. I shrunk the pros and cons into twenty one categories and gave each ethnicity a ‘+1’ where it was a pro, a ‘0’ where they were not assessed and a ‘-1’ where that category was marked as a con. The ‘pros’ have been condensed into a fraction measuring the potential returns on investing in a Nigerian woman, whilst the ‘cons’ have similarly been aggregated to give a measure of how ‘high maintenance’ a Nigerian woman can be. The size of the bubble is a measure of the chikability (how likely it is that a bloke’s toastings will gell). ...

Huddled around broken tables in the decrepit drawing office that served as a lecture theatre back in the day, a lesson in thinking on one’s feet was forced into our heads. At that time it was impossible to know the importance of that moment, or even remotely suspect that it could be a lifesaver in the distant future. There were no flashing light bulbs, no pressmen, no stenographers capturing the moment, no markers denoting the time and space where a life altering truth was uttered. ...