Izuu's Turn

Diet is everything They say, "You are what you eat." And I agree I sent someone very close to me  What I ate for dinner last night And the response I got was: "Is that food? It looks just like snack." Of course, I understand the import of that question and statement... We are used to heavy eating When it is carrots. We make sure that the weight of the Hausa man's barrow of "karros" is considerably reduced before we let him go. We don't normally deal with broccoli.  But judging by what we do to other vegetables  I am sure a piece of broccoli in a plate of food Served my grand parents, for instance, Might cataylse catastrophic altercations And pasta? We can take a whole packet, depending... But that place of curry stew With diced, well-cooked salmon, I tell you... is yummy My topic directly refers to another meal Actually, dessert that we had somewhere else Someone was going to tell another person... Note: none of t...

The success or otherwise of a nation is predicated on the value it places on the lives of its citizens. It then follows that a leader's acceptability is dependent on how the death of just one citizen affects his or her decision. Regrettably, in my country, our lives are worth nothing above are meddlesome horde of cockroaches whose lives need be snuffed out by a spray of insecticide. Scores of innocent, law-abiding citizens died in the first Nyanya bombing. Their leader visited the scene promptly and shed tears for the camera. Moments later, he was in Kano dancing to re-election songs. Those potential voters who died that morning have suddenly ceased to matter. But a week later, his deputy's brother died and a whole Federal Exco Council meeting was shelved in his honour. And you are telling me these people care about me? Isn't it obvious that the only thing they care about is their purses and themselves?

I have this friend that I am very fond of He is a Nigerian; a good one at that! One day, recently, he told me that the reason Insurgency is thriving in his part of the country, Is because there is still sympathy for the rebels. He told me about his mother And her sympathy for what is going on But he ascribed her predilection to her lack of Western education! I laughed and quickly told him something... Something I haven't thought about till I said it . My heart goes out to these innocent girls Who have been forcefully abducted for what we don 't know! My heart goes out also to the innumerable innocent Citizens of this land who have died from bombs, Bullets, assassinations, decapitations, etc As I reminisce on these unpleasan t thoughts I am also forced to remember countles s Nigerians Especially, people of Igbo extraction Who have been variously targe t ed and killed In different parts of northern Nigeria in times past Every...

I congratulate the entire Roman Catholic faithfuls, friends and country people on the "emergence" of two brand new saints: St. John Paul II and St. John XXIII. E no easy! Already, they are being bombarded with prayer requests from all over the world! But... not "but" because it looks as if I am going to say something blasphemous against this highly auspicious religious moment for over one billion Catholic faithfuls worldwide. I can't trivialise the faith, belief and confidence of fellow believers. I am just surprised that people are quick to embrace new saints, yet they don't strive to live their own lives in saintly pattern. You want a saint to pray for you, but you quickly forget that if saints had lived the way you are now living, there will be no saint to pray for anyone. Sainthood is good. It's received by living Godly life. I am one of those that believe that there are more saints dead and alive than the church has recognised. ...

Culled from The Punch April 21, 2014 by Tolu Ogunlesi Two weeks ago, a young Nigerian, Yusuf Onimisi, vanished from Twitter, days after posting photos he took, with his phone, of soldiers mobilised in the wake of the attempted jailbreak at the Directorate of State Security headquarters in Abuja. Expectedly, the news filtered online in no time. A group of social-media-savvy persons started a loud campaign alleging that the DSS was responsible for his disappearance. There were rumours he had been beaten and possibly even killed. The DSS, thinking this was still 1994, at first refused to comment on the matter. Eventually, in the face of immense local and international pressure – mostly driven online – released him. While it is difficult to justify the wisdom of live-tweeting a military operation like that (especially when your access is made possible only by the fact that you work very close to the highly-sensitive Presidential Villa grounds), it is even more diff...

Copied from the Facebook wall of Professor Pius Adesanmi We must repeat this point: there can be no possible excuse or justification for stupidity on the part of those who have read the big books and whose minds have been humanized by the best thinkers in the Humanities. Such people in our public life cannot expect to be assessed like Evans Bipi or Ayodele Fayose. That is why I devoted two column installments to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi's "shiki shiki ma mi owo de" philosophy in the exercise of his duties as CBN governor. Now, take your time and read this profile of another mind that has read the proper books and is now behaving extremely stupidly: ============================================ Kayode Fayemi is a former Director of the Centre for Democracy & Development, a research and training institution dedicated to the study and promotion of democratic development, peace-building and human security in Africa. Prior to his establishment of the Centre, h...

When you see people walking on the street, cruising in exquisite cars, driving in and out of posh residences, it looks as if they will live forever! When you see them in mire, under Lagos bridges (in those days, I guess), jumping off and on to molue , existing in naked squalour, it appears they have failed in life. The rich looks like they have inherited the earth for keeps, And the poor merely existing alongside, to remind the rich of how successful they are. But in reality, both the rich and the poor die! And what is their lot: a rectangular space in the red earth, not even up to the size of some of the beds we so comfortably sleep on! All the make-up, costumes, body-enhancing surgeries, tattoos, body piercings, and whatever adornment we have so lavishly indulged in, would cease to matter to your new neighbours - the termites, the rodents, the tiny beings that you never noticed on earth! I write this, teary-eyed: my neighbour lost his dad to th...