Gym Equipments in almost mint conditions are available for sale. We are wrapping up the business and looking for individuals and  companies who need any of the items listed below to contact:

Amara Blessing
Lifeplus Gym and Spa
Plot 70a Adeyemo Akapo street
Omole Estate Phase 1
Lagos
Mobile: 08033832503
Tel:+234-1-7616544
Email: lifepluscares@yahoo.com


Nordic track Treadmill (5hp)commercial……………………300000

Keys fitness treadmill(3.5hp)commercial…………………………150000

4station gym……………………150000

Bench press……………………, 150000

20KG Bar bell……………………10000

Exercise mats…………………, 10000

Recumbent bike………………, 100000

Elliptical bike………………………100000

Upright bikes……………………….30000

Commercial steppers…………………50000

Boxing station………………………50000

Inversion table for back bone (brand new)………………100000

Cardio glide…………………………20000

Step boards fr aerobics…………, 5000

Snooker table with balls and sticks……………………150000

Standing hair dryers…………………8000

Hair steamer……………………, 10000

6.5KVA Generator…………………, 90000

salon tables,chairs, and mirrors…………negotiable

Already made bar……………negotiable

Barbing salon table,mirror and chairs…………, negotiable

School desks……………………, negotiable

* All prices are negotiable!

They say, that woman is the salvation or the destruction of the family. That she carries its destiny in the folds of her mantle.

Same can also be said of a society, nation or state. The destiny of any society/culture or people can be seen when one looks at the soundness and health of the units [family] that makes it up. The family is the metaphor for every other part of a society. It is the nucleus of civilization.

To re-phrase the great sage Confucius, “to put the world right in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order, we must first produce the near-perfect woman; we must first have the best mothers before every other thing.

The inability of Nigeria, in fact one may even say the Black race to equal its brothers can be trace to the manner and ways that we have treated our womenfolk. We have shown consistently something akin to tolerance when we are dealing with our mothers, sisters and daughters. And look closely to every society that have done that and you will see a slow decline in almost every aspect of their life.

In some of these cultures, education of a female is seen most times as pure waste of resources. But how can you have liberated men if the mothers are ignorant? How can you have free men if the women are slaves? The aim of education is to enable individuals to continue their education; the object and reward of learning is continued capacity for growth. It is when people are capable of reasoning constructively that you can have growth; be it materially, emotionally, spiritually, philosophically or even physically.

We are paying a huge price for the degradation of our females. The deterioration of the family unit today in our society is the consequence of years of neglect on our women. That we have a society today that has no principle, no moral guideline or restraint, conscience, no history, no identity to the whole is the result of our action. Having bungled raising our children, there is nothing else in our system that we can get right. And it is the women that raise the children!

Home is the place where boys and girls first learn how to limit their wishes, abide by rules, and consider the rights and needs of others. Life’s principles, the appreciation of beauty, strength of character are stuffs that can only be build from the foundation. The family is the only unit that from cradle to grave shapes the individual. Character building begins in our infancy, and continues until death. And you can never have a good knife if it is made of bad steel. If a mother is an ignorant, spirit-broken woman who have no understanding of whom she is and the immense power within her bosom, whatever that she suckles will reflect her slavishness, stupidity and crudity.

The senseless rampant violence, the total disregard of human life and sanctity, the total disregard and breakdown of the rules and laws all can attributed to our failure to educate our women. The stifling fear and suspiciousness that pervades the atmosphere here stems from the collapse of the home institution. Prejudices, it is well known, are most difficult to eradicate from the heart whose soil has never been loosened or fertilized by education; they grow there, firm as weeds among rocks. Education makes a people easy to lead, but difficult to drive; easy to govern, but impossible to enslave.


We must turn our attention to correcting this fatal mistake in our live. We must find and create immediate corrective measures to redeem this. If we go about pretending that it doesn’t matter, we must also forego any possibility of future generations catching up with the rest of humanity. Each preceding generation plants a tree that gives the next its shade.

In some well developed societies, there are colleges dedicated solely to training and equipping the soon-to-be mothers with all they need to raise future generation with better promises. The sense of feminine pride, patriotism, identification with the very society and resiliency is inculcated into them; something they also pass along to their children.


Hope is not lost yet; for when men deprives women of the intellect, they have always resorted to the more powerful of the two: instinct. I sincerely wish that our women can see this as the only mission they have if our race must survive and thrive. Life on this planet is born of a woman. Its cycle, seasons; its creative and destructive elements are all guided by the feminine force. I believe that if the women can be offered even a small glimpse of their power, then we can truly begin to dream anew of the kind of society that we seek to build.


Every time we liberate a woman, we liberate a man.

Nigeria has lost its Soul! There is nothing here remotely alive!


It is said that every generalization is always wrong. However in this case, I think the reverse is true. Nigeria as a nation, state or country is presently only an empty shell of whatever its founders conceived or envisioned. A befitting analogy that fits accurately to any description you can give it is that of its President, Yar’Adua ; critically ill and on life support, incapable of any mental, spiritual or physical exertion. Nigeria is on life support and the vitals signs aren’t looking up!


Yet, the termites keep munching away on the remaining part of its foundation. The cancer have spread to every part of its body and all around it, the vultures are ripping the flesh off even as it gasp for its last breath. How long it has, I’m not sure! But what I surely know as a fact is that these pillars, [among them are the stubborn resiliency, the ignorance and easily forgiving spirit of its populace] will soon be unable to continue propping up what have already rotten to its core.


There is no government presence as one understands it in this place. There is nothing here except the menacing presence of the rich and mighty, Police and the Military who have given up long ago their traditional and sworn duty of protecting the weak and the vulnerable from the clutches of those that seeks to exploit their brethren and instead have become the protectors of the predators, the vultures and worms that have taken their own into slavery. Individuals who with their family should be hang on lamp-posts [which have fallen into disuse and gives no light whatever] from the traffic lights [which have suffered same fate as everything else in this country] in the roads and allow no-one to bring them forever. Individuals who their names and families should be blotted out forever in the annals of our history and made to become an example of what happens to those to feeds from the blood, tears and sufferings of their own kind.



There is no type of government here; it has become a failed state, a place where every man looks after only for his own and seeks to take away by force even the crumbs on the beggar,s lips. Where there is no common goal, effort or dream. This place has become a jungle where only the most brutal and greedy survives. Yet, even the jungle itself has invisible rules that govern it. Here, the rules, the laws have been dumped over-board and it is the shadows that have come out to play in the darkness [figuratively and literally speaking].



My heart breaks for this country! I’m speechless and words alone suffice not to express what any discerning sees in it. Death has become this nation! Every inch of every kilometer is fraught with danger, over-flowing with stench and decay and blocked by apathy. Ignorance and corruption have enthroned themselves as the patron Gods of this land. When you look at what is happening around you in Nigeria, you lose faith in humanity. We have lost our right, we have lost our claim; we have lost our portion in the community of humans. I really don’t know if we can redeem ourselves ever again.


It is not the standing still, the inability to grow that brings one to tears; it is that from every practical viewpoint, from every perspective, there seem to be an unstoppable march to regression. It seems that everybody is doing everything they can to hasten its demise by making sure through their actions, words and even the spoken thoughts that everything remains same. People here have given on any hope for growth; for any semblance to normality!


The nagging question on my mind is this: can we from the carcass of this terminally-ill nation build something else? Can we as a race organize ourselves in order to build a successful thriving society that can last? Is there anyway we can stoke a fire from its ashes and giving hope in the process to the hundred of millions in the Diaspora and to a continent that is marching towards an abyss?

Catholic bishop caught at the airport with child porn on his laptop , AND he was the one who brokered a $15-million settlement for victims of sexual abuse by priests. Wonder when this gonna blows in Nigeria!

http://www.reddit.com/tb/9q6rg

_{What has this got do do with Nigerians or Nigerian politics.}


Absolutely nothing and also everything! I strongly believe that a comprehensive and total understanding of who we are as either a race, nation or continent will only come about when we identify with others like us no matter where they might be. Until such day that the black man sees himself as part of a collective whole, we will remain vulnerable to the schemes of others.

It is similar to the problem we have in our educational, political system of our country. The obvious present failures can be attributed to the inability of those that constructed these edifice to see things from a 360 degree point of view. To build the pillars of these system from the foundation of the past. It means as in our education, the failure to include the studies of classical literatures and works. It means in the political front the inability to study and learn from the failures and successes of all kinds of political systems and to derive from them one that can work in our country.

The true nature of things can only be reveal by seeing,evaluating, comprehending and understanding them from a holistic point of view. To succeed as a race, we need to identify with all that the Black race no matter where they are, experiences.  It means giving them hope that we in the Mother Continent cares. Hope you can figure out why I posted this here. Thanks!

And Oh, does the name of the author ring a bell at all?

by Henry Louis Gates 



“Every day, in every way, we are getting meta and meta,” the philosopher John Wisdom used to say, venturing a cultural counterpart to Émile Coué’s famous mantra of self-improvement. So it makes sense that in the aftermath of the Simpson trial the focus of attention has been swiftly displaced from the verdict to the reaction to the verdict, and then to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict, and, finally, to the reaction to the reaction to the reaction to the verdict—which is to say, black indignation at white anger at black jubilation at Simpson’s acquittal. It’s a spiral made possible by the relay circuit of race. Only in America.


An American historian I know registers a widespread sense of bathos when he says, “Who would have imagined that the Simpson trial would be like the Kennedy assassination—that you’d remember where you were when the verdict was announced?” But everyone does, of course. The eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson was in the red-carpet lounge of a United Airlines terminal, the only black in a crowd of white travellers, and found himself as stunned and disturbed as they were. Wynton Marsalis, on tour with his band in California, recalls that “everybody was acting like they were above watching it, but then when it got to be ten o’clock—zoom, we said, ‘Put the verdict on!’ ” Spike Lee was with Jackie Robinson’s widow, Rachel, rummaging through a trunk filled with her husband’s belongings, in preparation for a bio-pic he’s making on the athlete. Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in her car in the parking lot of her local grocery store in Vermont, listening to the proceedings on National Public Radio, and she didn’t pull out until after they were over. I was teaching a literature seminar at Harvard from twelve to two, and watched the verdict with the class on a television set in the seminar room. That’s where I first saw the sort of racialized response that itself would fill television screens for the next few days: the white students looked aghast, and the black students cheered. “Maybe you should remind the students that this is a case about two people who were brutally slain, and not an occasion to celebrate,” my teaching assistant, a white woman, whispered to me.


The two weeks spanning the O. J. Simpson verdict and Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March on Washington were a good time for connoisseurs of racial paranoia. As blacks exulted at Simpson’s acquittal, horrified whites had a fleeting sense that this race thing was knottier than they’d ever supposed—that, when all the pieties were cleared away, blacks really were strangers in their midst. (The unspoken sentiment: And I thought I knew these people.) There was the faintest tincture of the Southern slaveowner’s disquiet in the aftermath of the bloody slave revolt led by Nat Turner—when the gentleman farmer was left to wonder which of his smiling, servile retainers would have slit his throat if the rebellion had spread as was intended, like fire on parched thatch. In the day or so following the verdict, young urban professionals took note of a slight froideur between themselves and their nannies and babysitters—the awkwardness of an unbroached subject. Rita Dove, who recently completed a term as the United States Poet Laureate, and who believes that Simpson was guilty, found it “appalling that white people were so outraged—more appalling than the decision as to whether he was guilty or not.” Of course, it’s possible to overstate the tensions. Marsalis invokes the example of team sports, saying, “You want your side to win, whatever the side is going to be. And the thing is, we’re still at a point in our national history where we look at each other as sides.”

   

The matter of side-taking cuts deep. An old cartoon depicts a woman who has taken her errant daughter to see a child psychiatrist. “And when we were watching ‘The Wizard of Oz,’ ” the distraught mother is explaining, “she was rooting for the wicked witch!” What many whites experienced was the bewildering sense that an entire population had been rooting for the wrong side. “This case is a classic example of what I call interstitial spaces,” says Judge A. Leon Higginbotham, who recently retired from the federal Court of Appeals, and who last month received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “The jury system is predicated on the idea that different people can view the same evidence and reach diametrically opposed conclusions.” But the observation brings little solace. If we disagree about something so basic, how can we find agreement about far thornier matters? For white observers, what’s even scarier than the idea that black Americans were plumping for the villain, which is a misprision of value, is the idea that black Americans didn’t recognize him as the villain, which is a misprision of fact. How can conversation begin when we disagree about reality? To put it at its harshest, for many whites a sincere belief in Simpson’s innocence looks less like the culture of protest than like the culture of psychosis.


Perhaps you didn’t know that Liz Claiborne appeared on “Oprah” not long ago and said that she didn’t design her clothes for black women—that their hips were too wide. Perhaps you didn’t know that the soft drink Tropical Fantasy is manufactured by the Ku Klux Klan and contains a special ingredient designed to sterilize black men. (A warning flyer distributed in Harlem a few years ago claimed that these findings were vouchsafed on the television program “20/20.”) Perhaps you didn’t know that the Ku Klux Klan has a similar arrangement with Church’s Fried Chicken—or is it Popeye’s?

Perhaps you didn’t know these things, but a good many black Americans think they do, and will discuss them with the same intentness they bring to speculations about the “shadowy figure” in a Brentwood driveway. Never mind that Liz Claiborne has never appeared on “Oprah,” that the beleaguered Brooklyn company that makes Tropical Fantasy has gone as far as to make available an F.D.A. assay of its ingredients, and that those fried-chicken franchises pose a threat mainly to black folks’ arteries. The folklorist Patricia A. Turner, who has collected dozens of such tales in an invaluable 1993 study of rumor in African-American culture, “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” points out the patterns to be found here: that these stories encode regnant anxieties, that they take root under particular conditions and play particular social roles, that the currency of rumor flourishes where “official” news has proved untrustworthy.


Certainly the Fuhrman tapes might have been scripted to confirm the old saw that paranoids, too, have enemies. If you wonder why blacks seem particularly susceptible to rumors and conspiracy theories, you might look at a history in which the official story was a poor guide to anything that mattered much, and in which rumor sometimes verged on the truth. Heard the one about the L.A. cop who hated interracial couples, fantasized about making a bonfire of black bodies, and boasted of planting evidence? How about the one about the federal government’s forty-year study of how untreated syphilis affects black men? For that matter, have you ever read through some of the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO files? (“There is but one way out for you,” an F.B.I. scribe wrote to Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1964, thoughtfully urging on him the advantages of suicide. “You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”)


People arrive at an understanding of themselves and the world through narratives—narratives purveyed by schoolteachers, newscasters, “authorities,” and all the other authors of our common sense. Counternarratives are, in turn, the means by which groups contest that dominant reality and the fretwork of assumptions that supports it. Sometimes delusion lies that way; sometimes not. There’s a sense in which much of black history is simply counternarrative that has been documented and legitimatized, by slow, hard-won scholarship. The “shadowy figures” of American history have long been our own ancestors, both free and enslaved. In any case, fealty to counternarratives is an index to alienation, not to skin color: witness Representative Helen Chenoweth, of Idaho, and her devoted constituents. With all the appositeness of allegory, the copies of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” sold by black venders in New York—who are supplied with them by Lushena Books, a black-nationalist book wholesaler—were published by the white supremacist Angriff Press, in Hollywood. Paranoia knows no color or coast.


Finally though, it’s misleading to view counternarrative as another pathology of disenfranchisement. If the M.I.A. myth, say, is rooted among a largely working-class constituency, there are many myths—one of them known as Reaganism—that hold considerable appeal among the privileged classes. “So many white brothers and sisters are living in a state of denial in terms of how deep white suprem-acy is seated in their culture and society,” the scholar and social critic Cornel West says. “Now we recognize that in a fundamental sense we really do live in different worlds.” In that respect, the reaction to the Simpson verdict has been something of an education. The novelist Ishmael Reed talks of “wealthy white male commentators who live in a world where the police don’t lie, don’t plant evidence—and drug dealers give you unlimited credit.” He adds, “Nicole, you know, also dated Mafia hit men.”


“I think he’s innocent, I really do,” West says. “I do think it was linked to some drug subculture of violence. It looks as if both O.J. and Nicole had some connection to drug activity. And the killings themselves were classic examples of that drug culture of violence. It could have to do with money owed—it could have to do with a number of things. And I think that O.J. was quite aware of and fearful of this.” On this theory, Simpson may have appeared at the crime scene as a witness. “I think that he had a sense that it was coming down, both on him and on her, and Brother Ron Goldman just happened to be there,” West conjectures. “But there’s a possibility also that O.J. could have been there, gone over and tried to see what was going on, saw that he couldn’t help, split, and just ran away. He might have said, ‘I can’t stop this thing, and they are coming at me to do the same thing.’ He may have actually run for his life.”


To believe that Simpson is innocent is to believe that a terrible injustice has been averted, and this is precisely what many black Americans, including many prominent ones, do believe. Thus the soprano Jessye Norman is angry over what she sees as the decision of the media to prejudge Simpson rather than “educate the public as to how we could possibly look at things a bit differently.” She says she wishes that the real culprit “would stand up and say, ‘I did this and I am sorry I caused so much trouble.’ ” And while she is sensitive to the issue of spousal abuse, she is skeptical about the way it was enlisted by the prosecution: “You have to stop getting into how they were at home, because there are not a lot of relationships that could be put on television that we would think, O.K., that’s a good one. I mean, just stop pretending that this is the case.” Then, too, she asks, “Isn’t it interesting to you that this Faye Resnick person was staying with Nicole Brown Simpson and that she happened to have left on the eighth of June? Does that tell you that maybe there’s some awful coincidence here?” The widespread theory about murderous drug dealers Norman finds “perfectly plausible, knowing what drugs do,” and she adds, “People are punished for being bad.”


There’s a sense in which all such accounts can be considered counternarratives, or fragments of them—subaltern knowledge, if you like. They dispute the tenets of official culture; they do not receive the imprimatur of editorialists or of network broadcasters; they are not seriously entertained on “MacNeil/Lehrer.” And when they do surface they are given consideration primarily for their ethnographic value. An official culture treats their claims as it does those of millenarian cultists in Texas, or Marxist deconstructionists in the academy: as things to be diagnosed, deciphered, given meaning—that is, another meaning. Black folk say they believe Simpson is innocent, and then the white gatekeepers of a media culture cajolingly explain what black folk really mean when they say it, offering the explanation from the highest of motives: because the alternative is a population that, by their lights, is not merely counter-normative but crazy. Black folk may mean anything at all; just not what they say they mean.


Yet you need nothing so grand as an epistemic rupture to explain why different people weigh the evidence of authority differently. In the words of the cunning Republican campaign slogan, “Who do you trust?” It’s a commonplace that white folks trust the police and black folks don’t. Whites recognize this in the abstract, but they’re continually surprised at the depth of black wariness. They shouldn’t be. Norman Podhoretz’s soul-searching 1963 essay, “My Negro Problem, and Ours”—one of the frankest accounts we have of liberalism and race resentment—tells of a Brooklyn boyhood spent under the shadow of carefree, cruel Negro assailants, and of the author’s residual unease when he passes groups of blacks in his Upper West Side neighborhood. And yet, he notes in a crucial passage, “I know now, as I did not know when I was a child, that power is on my side, that the police are working for me and not for them.” That ordinary, unremarkable comfort—the feeling that “the police are working for me”—continues to elude blacks, even many successful blacks. Thelma Golden, the curator of the Whitney’s “Black Male” show, points out that on the very day the verdict was announced a black man in Harlem was killed by the police under disputed circumstances. As older blacks like to repeat, “When white folks say ‘justice,’ they mean ‘just us.’ ”


Blacks—in particular, black men—swap their experiences of police encounters like war stories, and there are few who don’t have more than one story to tell. “These stories have a ring of cliché about them,” Erroll McDonald, Pantheon’s executive editor and one of the few prominent blacks in publishing, says, “but, as we all know about clichés, they’re almost always true.” McDonald tells of renting a Jaguar in New Orleans and being stopped by the police—simply “to show cause why I shouldn’t be deemed a problematic Negro in a possibly stolen car.” Wynton Marsalis says, “Shit, the police slapped me upside the head when I was in high school. I wasn’t Wynton Marsalis then. I was just another nigger standing out somewhere on the street whose head could be slapped and did get slapped.” The crime novelist Walter Mosley recalls, “When I was a kid in Los Angeles, they used to stop me all the time, beat on me, follow me around, tell me that I was stealing things.” Nor does William Julius Wilson—who has a son-in-law on the Chicago police force (“You couldn’t find a nicer, more dedicated guy”)—wonder why he was stopped near a small New England town by a policeman who wanted to know what he was doing in those parts. There’s a moving violation that many African-Americans know as D.W.B.: Driving While Black.


So we all have our stories. In 1968, when I was eighteen, a man who knew me was elected mayor of my West Virginia county, in an upset victory. A few weeks into his term, he passed on something he thought I should know: the county police had made a list of people to be arrested in the event of a serious civil disturbance, and my name was on it. Years of conditioning will tell. Wynton Marsalis says, “My worst fear is to have to go before the criminal-justice system.” Absurdly enough, it’s mine, too.


Another barrier to interracial comprehension is talk of the “race card”—a phrase that itself infuriates many blacks. Judge Higginbotham, who pronounces himself “not uncomfortable at all” with the verdict, is uncomfortable indeed with charges that Johnnie Cochran played the race card. “This whole point is one hundred per cent inaccurate,” Higginbotham says. “If you knew that the most important witness had a history of racism and hostility against black people, that should have been a relevant factor of inquiry even if the jury had been all white. If the defendant had been Jewish and the police officer had a long history of expressed anti-Semitism and having planted evidence against innocent persons who were Jewish, I can’t believe that anyone would have been saying that defense counsel was playing the anti-Semitism card.” Angela Davis finds the very metaphor to be a problem. “Race is not a card,” she says firmly. “The whole case was pervaded with issues of race.”


Those who share her view were especially outraged at Robert Shapiro’s famous post-trial rebuke to Cochran—for not only playing the race card but dealing it “from the bottom of the deck.” Ishmael Reed, who is writing a book about the case, regards Shapiro’s remarks as sheer opportunism: “He wants to keep his Beverly Hills clients—a perfectly commercial reason.” In Judge Higginbotham’s view, “Johnnie Cochran established that he was as effective as any lawyer in America, and though whites can tolerate black excellence in singing, dancing, and dunking, there’s always been a certain level of discomfort among many whites when you have a one-on-one challenge in terms of intellectual competition. If Edward Bennett Williams, who was one of the most able lawyers in the country, had raised the same issues, half of the complaints would not exist.”


By the same token, the display of black prowess in the courtroom was heartening for many black viewers. Cornel West says, “I think part of the problem is that Shapiro—and this is true of certain white brothers—has a profound fear of black-male charisma. And this is true not only in the law but across the professional world. You see, you have so many talented white brothers who deserve to be in the limelight. But one of the reasons they are not in the limelight is that they are not charismatic. And here comes a black person who’s highly talented but also charismatic and therefore able to command center stage. So you get a very real visceral kind of jealousy that has to do with sexual competition as well as professional competition.”


Erroll McDonald touches upon another aspect of sexual tension when he says, “The so-called race card has always been the joker. And the joker is the history of sexual racial politics in this country. People forget the singularity of this issue—people forget that less than a century ago black men were routinely lynched for merely glancing at white women or for having been thought to have glanced at a white woman.” He adds, with mordant irony, “Now we’ve come to a point in our history where a black man could, potentially, have murdered a white woman and thrown in a white man to boot—and got off. So the country has become far more complex in its discussion of race.” This is, as he appreciates, a less than perfectly consoling thought.


“But he’s coming for me,” a woman muses in Toni Morrison’s 1994 novel, “Jazz,” shortly before she is murdered by a jealous ex-lover. “Maybe tomorrow he’ll find me. Maybe tonight.” Morrison, it happens, is less interested in the grand passions of love and requital than she is in the curious texture of communal amnesty. In the event, the woman’s death goes unavenged; the man who killed her is forgiven even by her friends and relatives. Neighbors feel that the man fell victim to her wiles, that he didn’t understand “how she liked to push people, men.” Or, as one of them says of her, “live the life; pay the price.” Even the woman—who refuses to name the culprit as she bleeds to death—seems to accede to the view that she brought it on herself.

It’s an odd and disturbing theme, and one with something of a history in black popular culture. An R. & B. hit from 1960, “There’s Something on Your Mind,” relates the anguish of a man who is driven to kill by his lover’s infidelity. The chorus alternates with spoken narrative, which informs us that his first victim is the friend with whom she was unfaithful. But then:



Just as you make it up in your mind to forgive her, here come another one of your best friends through the door. This really makes you blow your top, and you go right ahead and shoot her. And realizing what you’ve done, you say: “Baby, please, speak to me. Forgive me. I’m sorry.”

“We are a forgiving people,” Anita Hill tells me, and she laughs, a little uneasily. We’re talking about the support for O. J. Simpson in the black community; at least, I think we are.


A black woman told the Times last week, “He has been punished enough.” But forgiveness is not all. There is also an element in this of outlaw culture: the tendency—which unites our lumpenproles with our postmodern ironists—to celebrate transgression for its own sake. Spike Lee, who was surprised but “wasn’t happy” at the verdict (“I would have bet money that he was going to the slammer”), reached a similar conclusion: “A lot of black folks said, ‘Man, O.J. is bad, you know. This is the first brother in the history of the world who got away with the murder of white folks, and a blond, blue-eyed woman at that.’ ”


But then there is the folk wisdom on the question of why Nicole Brown Simpson had to die—the theodicy of the streets. For nothing could be further from the outlaw ethic than the simple and widely shared certainty that, as Jessye Norman says, people are punished for doing wrong. And compounding the sentiment is Morrison’s subject—the culturally vexed status of the so-called crime of passion, or what some took to be one, anyway. You play, you pay: it’s an attitude that exists on the streets, but not only on the streets, and one that somehow attaches to Nicole, rather than to her ex-husband. Many counter-narratives revolve around her putative misbehavior. The black feminist Bell Hooks notes with dismay that what many people took to be a “narrative of a crime of passion” had as its victim “a woman that many people, white and black, felt was like a LovePeddler. Precisely by being a sexually promiscuous woman, by being a woman who used drugs, by being a white woman with a black man, she had already fallen from grace in many people’s eyes—there was no way to redeem her.” Ishmael Reed, for one, has no interest in redeeming her. “To paint O. J. Simpson as a beast, they had to depict her as a saint,” he complains. “Apparently, she had a violent temper. She slapped her Jamaican maid. I’m wondering, the feminists who are giving Simpson such a hard time—do they approve of white women slapping maids?”


Of course, the popular trial of Nicole Brown Simpson—one conducted off camera, in whispers—has further occluded anything recognizable as sexual politics. When Anita Hill heard that O. J. Simpson was going to be part of the Million Man March on Washington, she felt it was entirely in keeping with the occasion: a trial in which she believed that matters of gender had been “bracketed” was going to be succeeded by a march from which women were excluded. And, while Minister Louis Farrakhan had told black men that October 16th was to serve as a “day of atonement” for their sins, the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman was obviously not among the sins he had in mind. Bell Hooks argues, “Both O.J.’s case and the Million Man March confirm that, while white men are trying to be sensitive and pretending they’re the new man, black men are saying that patriarchy must be upheld at all costs, even if women must die.” She sees the march as a congenial arena for Simpson in symbolic terms: “I think he’d like to strut his stuff, as the patriarch. He is the dick that stayed hard longer.” (“The surprising thing is that you won’t see Clarence Thomas going on that march,” Anita Hill remarks of another icon of patriarchy.) Farrakhan himself prefers metaphors of military mobilization, but the exclusionary politics of the event has clearly distracted from its ostensible message of solidarity. “First of all, I wouldn’t go to no war and leave half the army home,” says Amiri Baraka, the radical poet and playwright who achieved international renown in the sixties as the leading spokesman for the Black Arts movement. “Logistically, that doesn’t make sense.” He notes that Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington was “much more inclusive,” and sees Farrakhan’s regression as “an absolute duplication of what’s happening in the country,” from Robert Bly on: the sacralization of masculinity.


Something like that dynamic is what many white feminists saw on display in the Simpson verdict; but it’s among women that the racial divide is especially salient. The black legal scholar and activist Patricia Williams says she was “stunned by the intensely personal resentment of some of my white women friends in particular.” Stunned but, on reflection, not mystified. “This is Greek drama,” she declares. “Two of the most hotly contended aspects of our lives are violence among human beings who happen to be police officers and violence among human beings who happen to be husbands, spouses, lovers.” Meanwhile, our attention has been fixated on the rhetorical violence between human beings who happen to disagree about the outcome of the O. J. Simpson trial.


It’s a cliché to speak of the Simpson trial as a soap opera—as entertainment, as theatre—but it’s also true, and in ways that are worth exploring further. For one thing, the trial provides a fitting rejoinder to those who claim that we live in an utterly fragmented culture, bereft of the common narratives that bind a people together. True, Parson Weems has given way to Dan Rather, but public narrative persists. Nor has it escaped notice that the biggest televised legal contests of the last half decade have involved race matters: Anita Hill and Rodney King. So there you have it: the Simpson trial—black entertainment television at its finest. Ralph Ellison’s hopeful insistence on the Negro’s centrality to American culture finds, at last, a certain tawdry confirmation.


“The media generated in people a feeling of being spectators at a show,” the novelist John Edgar Wideman says. “And at the end of a show you applaud. You are happy for the good guy. There is that sense of primal identification and closure.” Yet it’s a fallacy of “cultural literacy” to equate shared narratives with shared meanings. The fact that American TV shows are rebroadcast across the globe causes many people to wring their hands over the menace of cultural imperialism; seldom do they bother to inquire about the meanings that different people bring to and draw from these shows. When they do make inquiries, the results are often surprising. One researcher talked to Israeli Arabs who had just watched an episode of “Dallas”—an episode in which Sue Ellen takes her baby, leaves her husband, J.R., and moves in with her ex-lover and his father. The Arab viewers placed their own construction on the episode: they were all convinced that Sue Ellen had moved in with her own father—something that by their mores at least made sense.


A similar thing happened in America this year: the communal experience afforded by a public narrative (and what narrative more public?) was splintered by the politics of interpretation. As far as the writer Maya Angelou is concerned, the Simpson trial was an exercise in minstrelsy. “Minstrel shows caricatured every aspect of the black man’s life, beginning with his sexuality,” she says. “They portrayed the black man as devoid of all sensibilities and sensitivities. They minimized and diminished the possibility of familial love. And that is what the trial is about. Not just the prosecution but everybody seemed to want to show him as other than a normal human being. Nobody let us just see a man.” But there is, of course, little consensus about what genre would best accommodate the material. Walter Mosley says, “The story plays to large themes, so I’m sure somebody will write about it. But I don’t think it’s a mystery. I think it’s much more like a novel by Zola.” What a writer might make of the material is one thing; what the audience has made of it is another.


“Simpson is a B-movie star and people were watching this like a B movie,” Patricia Williams says. “And this is not the American B-movie ending.” Or was it? “From my perspective as an attorney, this trial was much more like a movie than a trial,” Kathleen Cleaver, who was once the Black Panthers’ Minister for Communication and is now a professor of law at Emory, says. “It had the budget of a movie, it had the casting of a movie, it had the tension of a movie, and the happy ending of a movie.” Spike Lee, speaking professionally, is dubious about the trial’s cinematic possibilities: “I don’t care who makes this movie, it is never going to equal what people have seen in their living rooms and houses for eight or nine months.” Or is it grand opera? Jessye Norman considers: “Well, it certainly has all the ingredients. I mean, somebody meets somebody and somebody gets angry with somebody and somebody dies.” She laughs. “It sounds like the ‘Ring’ cycle of Wagner—it really does.”


“This story has been told any number of times,” Angelou says. “The first thing I thought about was Eugene O’Neill’s ‘All God’s Chillun.’ ” Then she considers how the event might be retrieved by an African-American literary tradition. “I think a great writer would have to approach it,” she tells me pensively. “James Baldwin could have done it. And Toni Morrison could do it.”

“Maya Angelou could do it,” I say.

“I don’t like that kind of stuff,” she replies.


There are some for whom the question of adaptation is not entirely abstract. The performance artist and playwright Anna Deavere Smith has already worked on the 911 tape and F. Lee Bailey’s cross-examination of Mark Fuhrman in the drama classes she teaches at Stanford. Now, with a dramaturge’s eye, she identifies what she takes to be the climactic moment: “Just after the verdict was read I will always remember two sounds and one image. I heard Johnnie Cochran go ‘Ugh,’ and then I heard the weeping of Kim Goldman. And then I saw the image of O. J.’s son, with one hand going upward on one eye and one hand pointed down, shaking and sobbing. I couldn’t do the words right now; if I could find a collaborator, I would do something else. I feel that a choreographer ought to do that thing. Part of the tragedy was the fact of that ‘Ugh’ and that crying. Because that ‘Ugh’ wasn’t even a full sound of victory, really.” In “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” Wallace Stevens famously said he didn’t know whether he preferred “The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” American culture has spoken as with one voice: we like it just after.


Just after is when our choices and allegiances are made starkly apparent. Just after is when interpretation can be detached from the thing interpreted. Anita Hill, who saw her own presence at the Clarence Thomas hearings endlessly analyzed and allegorized, finds plenty of significance in the trial’s reception, but says the trial itself had none. Naturally, the notion that the trial was sui generis is alien to most commentators. Yet it did not arrive in the world already costumed as a racial drama; it had to be racialized. And those critics—angry whites, indignant blacks—who like to couple this verdict with the Rodney King verdict should consider an elementary circumstance: Rodney King was an unknown and undistinguished black man who was brutalized by the police; the only thing exceptional about that episode was the presence of a video camera. But, as Bell Hooks asks, “in what other case have we ever had a wealthy black man being tried for murder?” Rodney King was a black man to his captors before he was anything else; O. J. Simpson was, first and foremost, O. J. Simpson. Kathleen Cleaver observes, “A black superhero millionaire is not someone for whom mistreatment is an issue.” And Spike Lee acknowledges that the police “don’t really bother black people once they are a personality.” On this point, I’m reminded of something that Roland Gift, the lead singer of the pop group Fine Young Cannibals, once told a reporter: “I’m not black, I’m famous.”


Simpson, too, was famous rather than black; that is, until the African-American community took its lead from the cover of Time and, well, blackened him. Some intellectuals are reluctant to go along with the conceit. Angela Davis, whose early-seventies career as a fugitive and a political prisoner provides one model of how to be famous and black, speaks of the need to question the way “O. J. Simpson serves as the generic black man,” given that “he did not identify himself as black before then.” More bluntly, Baraka says, “To see him get all of this God-damned support from people he has historically and steadfastly eschewed just pissed me off. He eschewed black people all his life and then, like Clarence Thomas, the minute he gets jammed up he comes talking about ‘Hey, I’m black.’ ” And the matter of spousal abuse should remind us of another role-reversal entailed by Simpson’s iconic status in a culture of celebrity: Nicole Brown Simpson would have known that her famous-not-black husband commanded a certain deference from the L.A.P.D. which she, who was white but not yet famous, did not.


“It’s just amazing that we in the black community have bought into it,” Anita Hill says, with some asperity, and she sees the manufacture of black-male heroes as part of the syndrome. “We continue to create a superclass of individuals who are above the rules.” It bewilders her that Simpson “was being honored as someone who was being persecuted for his politics, when he had none,” she says. “Not only do we forget about the abuse of his wife but we also forget about the abuse of the community, his walking away from the community.” And so Simpson’s connection to a smitten black America can be construed as yet another romance, another troubled relationship, another case study in mutual exploitation.


Yet to accept the racial reduction (“WHITES V. BLACKS,” as last week’s Newsweek headline had it) is to miss the fact that the black community itself is riven, and in ways invisible to most whites. I myself was convinced of Simpson’s guilt, so convinced that in the middle of the night before the verdict was to be announced I found myself worrying about his prospective sojourn in prison: would he be brutalized, raped, assaulted? Yes, on sober reflection, such worries over a man’s condign punishment seemed senseless, a study in misplaced compassion; but there it was. When the verdict was announced, I was stunned—but, then again, wasn’t my own outrage mingled with an unaccountable sense of relief? Anna Deavere Smith says, “I am seeing more than that white people are pissed off and black people are ecstatic. I am seeing the difficulty of that; I am seeing people having difficulty talking about it.” And many are weary of what Ishmael Reed calls “zebra journalism, where everything is seen in black-and-white.” Davis says, “I have the feeling that the media are in part responsible for the creation of this so-called racial divide—putting all the white people on one side and all the black people on the other side.”


Many blacks as well as whites saw the trial’s outcome as a grim enactment of Richard Pryor’s comic rejoinder “Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?” “I think if he were innocent he wouldn’t have behaved that way,” Jamaica Kincaid says of Simpson, taking note of his refusal to testify on his own behalf. “If you are innocent,” she believes, “you might want to admit you have done every possible thing in the world—had sex with ten donkeys, twenty mules—but did not do this particular thing.” William Julius Wilson says mournfully, “There’s something wrong with a system where it’s better to be guilty and rich and have good lawyers than to be innocent and poor and have bad ones.”


The Simpson verdict was “the ultimate in affirmative action,” Amiri Baraka says. “I know the son of a bitch did it.” For his part, Baraka essentially agrees with Shapiro’s rebuke of Cochran: “Cochran is belittling folks. What he’s saying is ‘Well, the niggers can’t understand the question of perjury in the first place. The only thing they can understand is, ‘He called you a nigger.’ ” He alludes to Ebony’s fixation on “black firsts”—the magazine’s spotlight coverage of the first black to do this or that—and fantasizes the appropriate Ebony accolade. “They can feature him on the cover as ‘The first Negro to kill a white woman and get away with it,’ ” he offers acidly. Then he imagines Farrakhan introducing him with just that tribute at the Million Man March. Baraka has been writing a play called “Othello, Jr.,” so such themes have been on his mind. The play is still in progress, but he has just finished a short poem:


Free Mumia!
O.J. did it
And you know it.





“Trials don’t establish absolute truth; that’s a theological enterprise,” Patricia Williams says. So perhaps it is appropriate that a religious leader, Louis Farrakhan, convened a day of atonement; indeed, some worry that it is all too appropriate, coming at a time when the resurgent right has offered us a long list of sins for which black men must atone. But the crisis of race in America is real enough. And with respect to that crisis a mass mobilization is surely a better fit than a criminal trial. These days, the assignment of blame for black woes increasingly looks like an exercise in scholasticism; and calls for interracial union increasingly look like an exercise in inanity. (“Sorry for the Middle Passage, old chap. I don’t know what we were thinking.” “Hey, man, forget it—and here’s your wallet back. No, really, I want you to have it.”) The black economist Glenn Loury says, “If I could get a million black men together, I wouldn’t march them to Washington, I’d march them into the ghettos.”


But because the meanings of the march are so ambiguous, it has become itself a racial Rorschach—a vast ambulatory allegory waiting to happen. The actor and director Sidney Poitier says, “If we go on such a march to say to ourselves and to the rest of America that we want to be counted among America’s people, we would like our family structure to be nurtured and strengthened by ourselves and by the society, that’s a good point to make.” He sees the march as an occasion for the community to say, “Look, we are adrift. Not only is the nation adrift on the question of race—we, too, are adrift. We need to have a sense of purpose and a sense of direction.” Maya Angelou, who agreed to address the assembled men, views the event not as a display of male self-affirmation but as a ceremony of penitence: “It’s a chance for African-American males to say to African-American females, ‘I’m sorry. I am sorry for what I did, and I am sorry for what happened to both of us.’ ” But different observers will have different interpretations. Mass mobilizations launch a thousand narratives—especially among subscribers to what might be called the “great event” school of history. And yet Farrakhan’s recurrent calls for individual accountability consort oddly with the absolution, both juridical and populist, accorded O. J. Simpson. Simpson has been seen as a symbol for many things, but he is not yet a symbol for taking responsibility for one’s actions.


All the same, the task for black America is not to get its symbols in shape: symbolism is one of the few commodities we have in abundance. Meanwhile, Du Bois’s century-old question “How does it feel to be a problem?” grows in trenchancy with every new bulletin about crime and poverty. And the Simpson trial spurs us to question everything except the way that the discourse of crime and punishment has enveloped, and suffocated, the analysis of race and poverty in this country. For the debate over the rights and wrongs of the Simpson verdict has meshed all too well with the manner in which we have long talked about race and social justice. The defendant may be free, but we remain captive to a binary discourse of accusation and counter-accusation, of grievance and counter-grievance, of victims and victimizers. It is a discourse in which O. J. Simpson is a suitable remedy for Rodney King, and reductions in Medicaid are entertained as a suitable remedy for O. J. Simpson: a discourse in which everyone speaks of payback and nobody is paid. The result is that race politics becomes a court of the imagination wherein blacks seek to punish whites for their misdeeds and whites seek to punish blacks for theirs, and an infinite regress of score-settling ensues—yet another way in which we are daily becoming meta and meta. And so an empty vessel like O. J. Simpson becomes filled with meaning, and more meaning—more meaning than any of us can bear. No doubt it is a far easier thing to assign blame than to render justice. But if the imagery of the court continues to confine the conversation about race, it really will be a crime. ♦

PartI:

Of all the relics of our colonial past still present in its ever-growing monstrous and grotesque form is the habit of seeing or perceiving public servants as something akin to “Deities”. It is something you see from the Master of Ceremony in any event to the media itself. It is present in every sphere of our live even in the lowliest of places. And to be honest, it has done so much damage to our effort of nation building than any other thing. One common method the leaders use to cement their god-like status is to acquire lengthy titles and other symbols of honor; a practice that we have tolerated, ignored and have come to accept as proving that one matters in our society.


From our courts to the pulpits, you will witness something that sounds so archaic and troubling at same time that you will wonder what purpose it serves. Lawyers addressing the judges as “my Lord, “your Lordship”, when simple” your Honor, Sir or Honorable court” will suffice. Check Nigerian dailies  and all you will see titles like “His Excellency, Her Excellency for Governor’s wife for Pete’s sake, Honorable Minister, Chief, “Engineer” and all kinds of stupid, senseless, worthless craps that makes no sense whatever.



Even in the Christian world, it is the “Reverend, Most Reverend” and stuffs like that; a word that came from the Latin “revereri” meaning to regard with reverence mingled with awe or fear; to venerate; to reverence with great awe and devotion. I think that these are qualities we often attributes only to the Gods [either existing or non-existing] and now mere mortals among us have arrogate themselves to these titles. In Matthew 23:11 in the Christian Bible said “But the greatest among you shall be your servant”. One wonders why the so-called Pastors have taken it upon themselves to exhibit all kinds of excesses, indulging and wallowing in pride, often justifying their actions that Jesus advocated an extravagant life-style.




This attitude has made our leaders the most selfish, merciless, greedy, corrupt, power-hungry individuals on the face of this planet. Ideally, leaders should be caretakers or stewards who steer the people towards collective prosperity. But on attaining power, most African leaders become 'deities.' They seek to be worshiped by the people they lead because we encourage such behaviors. That they do these absurd things with far-reaching consequences is possible with our complicity.



Part II.

In present day Nigeria, to be addressed as a Mr., Mrs. or Ms. means you are a Nobody. To be a mover or shaker you need to be a chief - or to at least hold a doctorate. Everybody wants to acquire one chieftaincy title or any other title. The number of honorary PhDs we have in this country is symptomatic of a people who have failed in so many aspects of life.



In our communities, we see the successful young ones spending huge amounts of money which ought to use for educational purposes or community building efforts into acquisition of ceremonial titles. It costs a lot to acquire chieftaincy titles. I know that sometimes they spend up to $200,000 to $300,000.  It doesn’t matter who you are as long as you can shell out the money. This usually takes place amid crumbling community schools, erosion, bad roads and collapsed infrastructures. The Chiefs who have no other interest than lining their pockets will often seek out these boys in order to confer on them one title or another and while waiting on the Federal Government to come and deal with the problems which they can easily fix by just being a little less selfish. Do we really still need the traditional rulers in the 21st century?



Pride sullies the noblest character. Is it necessarily important that we must address our public servants with such high-sounding names?  Must we assume such caricatures in order to boost our ego?  When dealing with people, we must always remember that we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bustling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. We have continuously placed these individuals onto a pedestal and have proceeded to worship them, sometimes literally. And then turns around and complain of victimization, of abuse of power and trust, and of those who leads acting if they are above the law. Yes, they have acted that way and will continue acting that way until we change the way we perceive and acts towards the concept of leadership.



Certainly, respect must be given to whom it is due. But respect is something that is earned. And it goes in hand with a good reputation and doesn’t need to be trumpeted, advertise and proclaimed by high-sounding titles. A good name, like good will, must be well-earned by many actions. Take a look at the present crop of Nigerian leaders and the ones that precedes them, only few if at any, earned the right to be called “Honorable”. There is simply nothing honorable in their thoughts, words and deeds. This is something we took from the British with their class separation and privileges.  And if there is something every person with enough grain in their brain will attest to, it is that we have the ugly habit of abusing anything that comes our way. This one is no exception!



Abraham Lincoln once said that nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. The problem with us is that we have promoted knowingly or unknowingly the irresponsible and indulgent definition of power. We have created Frankenstein monsters who have in turn have made us their first victims.



There was a story about the South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu who one was walking by a construction site on a temporary sidewalk the width of one person. A white man appeared at the other end, recognized Tutu, and said, "I don't make way for gorillas." At which Tutu stepped aside, made a deep sweeping gesture, and said, "Ah, yes, but I do”. That is humility with class and distinction at its zenith. That is what a leader ought to be.



Is it not really high time we do away with these left-over we have borrowed from the British? Is it not time we treat our leaders as individuals answerable to our collective identity? Is it not time we strip especially our public servants these burdens that have successfully impeded their steps? Will it not be to our advantage if we can prohibit all usage of these out-dated empty sounding titles in our daily lives and devote more energy in trying to know who these individuals really are? There are lessons offered by our writers, thinkers and philosophers which ought to be taken more seriously. It is a privilege to be a leader, and leaders should put self-interest behind the agenda of the people who elect them. Any person who negates this cardinal rule is unworthy of holding any leadership position.

Negro-Ntn, that was an intelligent analysis and observation. Yes, you are right in most!

Lmao. . . dumb move!  Why not seek funding on the open market?  Why use prospects of the crude oil as equity in the deal?  That plays to the advantage and benefit of the foreign signatories.

Yes! The truth is that Nigeria is almost broke. Our total foreign reserve last week was $43.2 Billion [compared to $62 billion in October last year}  according to Fitch Rating. That means we may no longer be credit-worthy. Microsoft's Bill Gates can snap us up if our country is for sale. Without the capital to initiate our own part of the deal, foreign signatories will indeed have the top say in what goes on.




   

Let us assume that NNPC has a 50-50 deal with Sonatrach, then their 90% holding becomes a 45% equity each. So NNPC has 45%, Algeria has 45% and Niger has 10%.  This would mean that NNPC is holding a 45% interest against a 55% interest by foreigners on its crude oil resources.  Considering that Algeria and Niger are both francophone nations and unlike Britain, France still has a close alliance and partnership with its francophone members, then how does this deal play into the hands of France?


In Case,

Doesn't this increase the possibility of foreign military siege on our soil? 

[b]Another strategical implication of this favors the North and weigh heavily against the aspirations of the South especially those that are insisting on having a separate entity from what we presently calls "Nigeria". A pipeline that runs through the North from the South, into Republic of Niger { bear in mind that the Nigerien President have suspended the constitution and is ruling by decree; China have already started investing $5bn to develop oil production in Niger. His insistence on staying beyond his terms can only be justifiably explained by the discovery of oil in the eastern Niger and all these oil deals. If and when Nigeria comes apart, they will likely team up with their brothers in Niger. Billions have been spend prospecting for oil and gas in the Chad Basin and recently Bauchi and Gombe areas of the Benue Trough. The Chad Basin in northern Nigeria though with repeated prospecting has not yielded much}.

What this means for the South is that with Europe and Russia investing in the venture, the call for seperate country will be almost inaudible. These countries and the US will not stand by and watch their investment and life-line jeopardize in anyway. National interests always trumped democratic ideologies. For most of the Cold War, U.S. national interests always trumped democratic ideology. Ike preferred the Shah to the democratically elected Mohammad Mossadegh. Richard Nixon preferred Gen. Pinochet to the elected Salvador Allende. George W. Bush, who had pushed for Palestinian elections and insisted on Hamas’ inclusion, perhaps because he thought they would lose, did a somersault when Hamas won. Britain, the number one culprit in this regard have sold many treaties and agreement down the river to protect their selfish interest.

Asked the East Timorese about their experience. On 7 December 1975, the armed forces of Indonesia crossed the border of East Timor in strength, eventually proclaiming it ,  a full part of Indonesia proper. Timorese resistance to this claim was so widespread, and the violence required to impose it was so ruthless and generalized, that the figure of 100,000 deaths in the first wave - perhaps one-sixth of the entire population - is reckoned an understatement. The date of the Indonesian invasion - 7 December 1975 - is of importance and also of significance. On that date, President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, concluded an official visit to Jakarta and flew to Hawaii. They had come fresh from a meeting with Indonesia's military junta, United States was Indonesia's principal supplier of military hardware.

So gruesome were the subsequent reports of mass slaughter, rape, and deliberate use of starvation that such bluntness fell somewhat out of fashion. The killing of several Australian journalists who had witnessed Indonesia's atrocities, the devastation in the capital city of Dili, and the stubbornness of FRETILIN's hugely outgunned rural resistance did nothing to save them, until the discovery of huge reserve of natural gas. Suddenly the US/ Australia co-sponsored their independence from Jakarta and did everything that made it happen.

So if this deal comes to fruition, then bye-bye for a very long time to the Southerners quest for a country of their own. 
[/b]

A Weak, Ineffectual, Embarrassing And Dishonest President!  He have complained about the "Generator Cabal" hell-bent on frustrating his efforts to provide electricity to a lost nation, now he is "lamenting" the collapse of a major road serving as an artery to the nations economic heart. A President is elected to deal with issues, to use the power of his office to move mountains and achieve results.

The term "Power" comes from the Latin posse: to do, to be able, to change, to influence or effect. To have power is to possess the capacity to control or direct change.

Complaining and whining about challenges doesn't solve anything. Actions do! Who the hell  are these people? Yar'Adua is an obvious reminder and testament of all the accumulated failures of the Obasanjo's administration. Nothing will define and haunt his legacy more than what he hoisted on Nigerians!

How about that? How awesomely colorful and cool is this move? How about that for years he served as a Chief Executive Officer of a state and within that period, 75% of the state fund got diverted into private accounts?


How about that James Onanefe Ibori, ex- Governor of Delta State, an ex- convict - supermarket cashier in London became the Governor of Delta state and turned the treasury of Delta State to his own?


How about that he was indicted by a Court of Appeal, {Criminal Division} in Southwark Crown Court, London with an asset worth 17 Billion Naira?


How about that British prosecutors have gone ahead with the trial of three women who assisted James Ibori to launder monies looted from the treasury of Delta State. The women include his wife, Theresa Nkoyo, his former private assistant, Bimpe Pogoson, and his sister, Christie Ibie-Ibori?


The fourth woman, Mrs. Udoamaka Okoronkwo, has yet to return to the UK to be arraigned with the others since she was granted bail by a Federal High Court along with Ibori in February 2008.


How about the continued refusal of Nigeria's Attorney General, Aondoakaa, to sign off on the Mutual legal Agreement Treaty (MLATs) that could back most of the evidence to be used in the case? The prosecution at the Crown Court was presented with a letter written by Aondoakaa to the effect that the Metropolitan police was required to return all documents earlier provided to them by the EFCC.


How about that Ibori has used his influence with the Yar’Adua government to get two key witnesses and top EFCC police investigators Ibrahim Lamorde and Yahaya Bello removed from the EFCC? The former Head of the Governance Section of the EFCC and another potential witness, Ibrahim Magu, was arrested without being charged for any known offense.


How about the pregnant mothers dying for lack of basic hospital care, and the state you governed has no basic amenities, the youths jobless with no hope and desperate to leave even at the expense of their lives. How about the kids with no roof in their schools, tears in their eyes with no hope for one full meal in a day? It is said that the moral test of Government is how that Government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those who are in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.


How about that the government which ought to protect its citizenry from monsters like this crowning his achievements with a contract of 40 billion Naira? How about that the charges against you by the EFCC been dropped? http://www.assetrecovery.org/kc/node/b1815de4-26f2-11de-900c-81c63910293a.3



The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them. And Justice requires that to lawfully constituted Authority there be given that respect and obedience which is its due; that the laws which are made shall be in wise conformity with the common good; and that, as a matter of conscience all men shall render obedience to these laws. It is the constant and perpetual will to allot to every man his due.


Yes, we may have blurred or have managed to erase the difference between right and wrong; we may have lost all sense of decency and morality but the truth is that the person that have lost his conscience has nothing left worth keeping.


This is downright disgusting, abhorrent and in every way a blow to the hope, wishes and dreams of 150 million souls who have entrusted or have been forced to entrust their destiny into the hands of this merciless individuals. We have been hanging the petty thieves and appointing the great ones to public office. This need to stop!

Former governor of Delta State, James Ibori‘s company, Notore Chemical Industries, is set to emerge the top beneficiary of the Federal Government‘s N200billion agricultural interventionist scheme, SUNDAY PUNCH findings have shown.

Our correspondents found that Notore has been strategically positioned to supply N40bn worth of fertilizer under the Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme established jointly by the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources to boost President Umaru Yar‘Adua‘s seven-point agenda.

Ibori was largely believed to have substantially supported the president‘s bid two years ago, a suspicion which many believe was behind the goodwill being enjoyed by him in the Yar‘Adua‘s administration.
Many have equally accused the authorities of soft dealing with Ibori in his ongoing trial by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for corrupt practices.
Media aide to the minister of Agriculture and Water Resources, Olu Lipede, denied that Notore was being favoured under the scheme simply because the company belongs to Ibori, even as he submitted that the former governor had a right to win government contracts.

http://www.saharareporters.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3169:ibori-wins-fgs-n40bn-agric-contract-punch-lagos&catid=1:latest-news&Itemid=18

A woman of Southern Ethiopia’s Mursi tribe holds two instruments of modernity, an AK-47 and an iPod.

I am not really sure since it is all hush-hush. Typical Nigerian way! In fact the total sum involve is still cloak in mystery. But you might gleam some useful info. from below:

Initially NNPC and Sonatrach would hold a total 90% of shares, while Niger would hold 10%.

Under the joint venture deal, which followed the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) to establish an all encompassing Joint Venture company called “NIGAZ Energy Company Limited'', the two countries would operate on 50-50 ratio.

Facts showed that Nigeria's major oil majors, including Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria Limited (SPDC), ExxonMobil, Chevron Nigeria Limited (CNL), Total Group, and Nigerian Agip Oil Company (NAOC), have all had to resort to alternative funding arrangements involving billions of dollars in bridge financing to NNPC to plug funding gaps in their respective joint venture operations.

Gas, Not Money

To cater for its financial inadequacies, the NNPC, it was learnt, had worked out a plan that would give a certain amount of crude oil and gas to its partners in place of money.

This development is said to be behind the NNPC's insistence that in subsequent joint venture agreements, its foreign partners have to undertake the development of the basic operational infrastructure in the industry.

The company will be involved in the development of Nigeria's domestic gas exploration and production activities, processing, transportation, marketing, infrastructure development, pipeline construction, power sector development, training and capacity building, as well as exchange of personnel, among others.

Trans-Saharan Trade

Meanwhile, the NNPC and Algeria’s state-owned oil company, Sonatrach, is to control about 90 percent stake in the $10 billion Trans Sahara Gas Pipeline project.

This is even as Nigeria, Niger and Algeria are yet to reach an agreement on which foreign companies will build the pipeline expected to convey gas from Nigeria’s Niger Delta through Algeria and Niger to Europe.




In Case,

On the impact of the problem in the Niger Delta and possibilities of disruptions in gas supply from the country,  Algeria would supply gas if supplies from Nigeria were halted for any reason. Nigeria had given similar guarantees for gas supply to the project by setting aside a certain percentage of its gas reserves.

About a third of Nigeria's oil output is currently shut in as a result of militant attacks on oil facilities in the Niger Delta.

Algeria could pump the Nigerian gas onto Europe through expansion of existing pipelines or build new ones, adding that the pipeline would start operating in 2015-2016.

The project had been stuck on the drawing board for years. Issues that took time to resolve were how to develop gas fields in Nigeria for both domestic and international supply and what would happen if the pipeline were cut off.

Whatever you do in life; sleeping, eating, having a great time, do not forget these images below. They are your blood relatives. Until you understand that our race will not get it acts together nor the balck its rightful place in this planet; until we become one no matter where or what nation they created and lumps lump us together with, we cannot rise above these pains. We will either succeed together as one or fail as fools. The problem is with your thinking. They have succeeded amazingly well because they did manage and contnue to erect barriers between us. Encouraging hate and mistrust among brothers. Encouraging wars and conflicts. They understand that the day our race comes together as one both those in diaspora in all shades and locations  and those that inhabits the Mother continient, their hate will cease to have any effect. Until we give a sense of belonging to our brothers seized, sold and killed, things we continue to go awry.  Until they can come home and the souls of our ancestors appeased with our quest for unity, there will not be peace in our heart.












[img]http://niahd.wm.edu/attachments/33296.jpg[/img]

[img]http://www.peacebuttons.info/E-News/images/AfricanSlaveTradePoster.jpg[/img]

Actually it is $10 billion! Also think about the strategical importance and implication of this deal.

History

The idea of the trans-Saharan pipeline was first proposed in the 1970s. On 14 January 2002, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Algerian national oil and gas company Sonatrach signed the Memorandum of Understanding for preparations of the project. In June 2005, NNPC and Sonatrach signed a contract with Penspen Limited for a feasibility study of the project. On the meeting on 20 February 2009, companies agreed to proceed with the draft Memorandum of Understanding between three governments and the joint venture agreement. The intergovernmental agreement on the pipeline was signed by energy ministers of Nigeria, Niger and Algeria on 3 July 2009 in Abuja.

Route

The pipeline will start in the Warri region in Nigeria and run through Niger to Hassi R'Mel in Algeria. In Hassi R'Mel the pipeline would be connected with the Algerian export system to supply Europe from the existing gas transmission hubs at El Kala and Beni Saf on Algeria's Mediterranean coast via Trans-Mediterranean, Maghreb–Europe, Medgaz and Galsi pipelines. The length of the pipeline would be 4,128 kilometres (2,565 mi).[1] The Nigerian section would be 1,037 kilometres (644 mi) long, 841 kilometres (523 mi) of pipeline will be laid down in Niger and 2,310 kilometres (1,440 mi) in Algeria.[3]

Technical features

The annual capacity of the pipeline would be up to 30 billion cubic meters of natural gas. It would have a diameter of 48 to 56 inches (1,220 to 1,420 mm). The pipeline is expected to be operational in 2015–2017.The investment for the pipeline will be around US$10 billion and for gas gathering centers around $3 billion.

Operator

The pipeline is to be built and operated by the partnership between the NNPC and Sonatrach. The company would include also the Republic of Niger.[3] Initially NNPC and Sonatrach would hold a total 90% of shares, while Niger would hold 10%.[11]

Russian gas company Gazprom has negotiated with Nigeria about its possible participation in the project. Also Indian company GAIL, France's Total S.A., Italy's Eni SpA and Royal Dutch Shell have expressed interests for participating in the project.

Ancient Chinese Wisdom:

One of Confucius's disciples named Zisi noticed that King Wei had developed an unseemly strategy, but all his ministers condoned it. Zisi made these remarks at the royal court: “It is obvious that the ruler in the state of Wei does not conduct himself like a ruler, and neither do the ministers behave like ministers.”

Gongqiu Yizi asked what made Zisi say so, to which Zisi responded:

“When a king thinks he is perfect, no one dares to voice an opinion. Even though a ruler acts correctly, without listening to others' suggestions amounts to having rejected the advice of others. By the same token, the ministers will echo a false decision and favor a poor mindset.

“So instead of enabling the ruler to discern which is right or wrong, the ruler basks in the flattery of his subjects. Rather than evaluating if the ruler's decision is prudent, the ministers flatter him with outrageous praise. Consequently, ruling the nation from that vantage point makes the populace disgruntled and the nation will no longer be stable.”

Zisi addressed the King of Wei: “Your nation is doomed.”

The ruler asked, “Why is this so?”

Zisi replied, “Nothing happens in a vacuum or without reason. No minister under a king who thinks he is perfect, would dare to correct his errors. The king and his cadres live with the illusion that they act righteously, and even the servants echo these views because they benefit from empty praise and pointing out his flaws is considered a crime. How can that lead to a good outcome?”

Kings and courtiers or cadres are not the only ones who must be aware of these principles. It is desirable to strive for perfection and not rely on the help of others, but we often don't recognize our own mistakes. Only when we respectfully listen to another's viewpoint can we minimize our own flaws and thus avoid potentially serious mistakes.

According to a Chinese proverb, “An ocean is vast, assimilating the waters from streams and rivers.” Other people's opinions are like these waters. Anyone assuming he is perfect dams these waters. Then, no matter how large the ocean, without these streams and rivers flowing into it freely, it would soon dry up.

Anyone thinking he is perfect operates from a basis of ignorance and egocentricity. To counteract such thought processes, we must remember the traditional values and be glad others point out one's own shortcomings.

Artificial Intelligence
Waking Life
Home Alone
What the Bleep do we know?
The Devil wears Prada
Antz
Wall-E
Mullholland Drive
Tuesday with Morrie

There are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." Albert Einstein.

“Nigger” is an expressive word that reeks of racial hatred and bigotry. It connotes all the abuse, degradation and humiliation of our sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers that were sold and gave their lives so the “white Man” can live in splendor and abundance. It opens up the still fresh wounds of those that were taken from their families or anyone they know, traumatized and subjected to an untold cruelty. At present we are yet to confront this issue in a pragmatic meaningful way. If we don’t know the past, we cannot ordain the future nor understand the present.

“Nigger’ is a word directed against our race that supposedly has certain negative characteristics. It portrays black men as lazy, ignorant, and obsessively self-indulgent; traits historically represented by the word nigger. It depicts black men as angry, physically strong, animalistic, and prone to wanton violence.

In the not-too-distant past, [and even today] every major societal institution offered legitimacy to the racial hierarchy. Ministers preached that God had condemned blacks to be servants. Scientists measured black heads, brains, faces, and Instruments, seeking to prove that whites were genetically superior to blacks. White teachers, teaching only white students, taught that blacks were less evolved cognitively, psychologically, and socially. The entertainment media, from vaudeville to television, portrayed blacks as docile servants, happy-go-lucky idiots, and dangerous thugs. The criminal justice system sanctioned a double standard of justice, including its tacit approval of mob violence against blacks.

“A nigger’s clothing was either ragged and dirty or outlandishly gaudy. He is slow, have exaggerated gait suggesting laziness. He is a pauper, lacks ambition and the skills necessary for upward social mobility. He is a buffoon. When frightened, his eyes will bulge out and darted. His speech will become slurred, halted, and replete with malapropisms. His shrill, high-pitched voice made whites laugh. It dehumanized blacks, and served as a justification for social, economic, and political discrimination”. That was what a “nigger’” was, is and will continue to be in the minds of those that hate us.

The negative portrayals of blacks were both reflected in and shaped by everyday material objects: toys, postcards, ashtrays, detergent boxes, fishing lures, children's books. These items, and countless others, portrayed blacks with bulging, darting eyes, fire-red and over sized lips, jet black skin, and either naked or poorly clothed.

Thus it must be in the state of un-paralleled stupidity that those presently articulating the future, vision, hope and destiny of Nigeria decided to name the new firm set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations, formulated by an agreement that came about during the 4 day African tour by Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, “ Nigaz”. It not only shows lack of good taste but also the dearth of creativity in that country. It is just unbelievable! It is simply offensive and strongly calls in to question the mentality of our leaders.

It is both appropriate and imperatively obligatory that this be reviewed at once. We have so much baggage to throw over-board, adding more in the form of this moniker to our already floundering sinking ship is sheer insanity. Even in an individual, there is a link between a child’s name and their achievement. This phenomenon is known as sound symbolism, where the sound of a word conveys meanings. Specifically, brand names are composed of individual sounds called phonemes. A research conducted recently demonstrated that consumers use information they gather from phonemes in brand names to infer product attributes and to evaluate brands. It also demonstrates that the manner in which phonetic effects of brand names manifest is automatic in as much as it is uncontrollable, outside awareness and effortless. Stated simply, sound symbolism affects attribute perceptions.



Let’s for once conduct ourselves with some dignity and stop giving to those that in their prejudice seeks to prove our supposedly “hereditary inferiority” the tools to hurts us more than they already have. We have been maligned and distorted enough in every conceivable way. Every news, article, views and opinions that you see, hears and read in the Western and Asian media serves to portray us in negative light and perpetuate the stereotype. Since we have not device nor find it necessary to present or create a more helpful version of our Fate, leaving it to others to do for us, we must desist from making a caricature of ourselves.



Beyond the “bitches, niggers, and ho’s”, [words that not only degrades our women but reflects the negativity and ignorance that other races have come to associate us with] there lurks in its shadow the frightening monster of what one may call “the split of our collective psyche”. It is something that occurred centuries ago, with the invasion, pillage, rape of both our consciousness and land. It is a separation from the instinctual knowledge of ourselves which plunges us into conflict with our understanding of both the world around and within us. And it has never healed! We are still walking around with a wounded psyche. Not until we have come in terms with our identity by reflecting on the past, taking and applying the lessons thereof into our present while embracing with all eagerness the future can we exorcise the demons of self-unworthiness. Countless have been and are the bearers of this timeless message of redemption and hope yet; we are still locked in a certain paralysis, unable to extricate ourselves from the chains of the past.

Sweet Baby Jeez! You hit the nail on the head! Pretty cool article and well written! At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols. When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow. The high degree of ignorance and stupidity in over-whelming majority of Nigerians is and can rightly be link to the guidnace of this illiterate greedy psychopathic half-baked religious leaders.

Even our media have stopped any kind of incisive news reporting and have become the mouth piece of all sort of religious non-sense. I just don't understand why they cannot give them a seperate TV spectrum to vent their spiteful and archaic concepts of Life. We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another.

Honestly I don't see why they cannot take those churches and mosque and convert them to schools since huge amounts are spend trying to build these things to an absent God who doesn't even care a fig about them while our sacred Temples of Learning have all rumbled, begging for the slightest attention.  [b]The fact that a believer [Nigerians] is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one. The happiness of credulity is a cheap and dangerous quality- George Bernard Shaw. Anyway, the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus by the Supreme Being in the womb of a virgin, or Mohammad as the last Prophet will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.

I do not feel obligated to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reasons, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. For all our religious piety, we have regressed backwards more than anytime else in our history. We remain one of the most corrupt countries in the planet.
He who will not reason is a bigot; he who cannot is a fool; and he who dares not is a slave. We need to restore Reason to her throne in that country and stop this madness that have taken control of our kinfolks.

Yet, this is the symptoms of the disease that have blighted the country. When the Sate abdicates its responsibility to its citezens, every sort of virus comes in to fill the vacuum.

A. Marriage shall consist of a union between one man and one or more women. (Gen29:17-28; II Sam 3:2-5)

B. Marriage shall not impede a man's right to take concubines, in addition to his wife or wives. (II Sam5:13; I Kings 11:3; II Chron 11:21)

C. A marriage shall be considered valid only if the wife is a virgin. If the wife is not a virgin, she shall be executed. (Deut 22:13-21)

D. Marriage of a believer and a non-believer shall be forbidden. (Gen24:3; Num 25:1-9; Ezra 9:12; Neh10:30)

E. Since marriage is for life, neither this Constitution nor the constitution of any State, nor any state or federal law, shall be construed to permit divorce. (Deut 22:19; Mark 10:9)

F. If a married man dies without children, his brother shall marry the widow. If he refuses to marry his brother's widow or deliberately does not give her children, he shall pay a fine of one shoe. (Gen.38:6-10; Deut 25:5-10)

Crazies, Dumb and Dumber!

There are only two things that are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I am not sure about the former." Albert Einstein.

“Nigger” is an expressive word that reeks of racial hatred and bigotry. It connotes all the abuse, degradation and humiliation of our sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers that were sold and gave their lives so the “white Man” can live in splendor and abundance. It opens up the still fresh wounds of those that were taken from their families or anyone they know, traumatized and subjected to an untold cruelty. At present we are yet to confront this issue in a pragmatic meaningful way. If we don’t know the past, we cannot ordain the future nor understand the present.

“Nigger’ is a word directed against our race that supposedly has certain negative characteristics. It portrays black men as lazy, ignorant, and obsessively self-indulgent; traits historically represented by the word nigger. It depicts black men as angry, physically strong, animalistic, and prone to wanton violence.

In the not-too-distant past, [and even today] every major societal institution offered legitimacy to the racial hierarchy. Ministers preached that God had condemned blacks to be servants. Scientists measured black heads, brains, faces, and Instruments, seeking to prove that whites were genetically superior to blacks. White teachers, teaching only white students, taught that blacks were less evolved cognitively, psychologically, and socially. The entertainment media, from vaudeville to television, portrayed blacks as docile servants, happy-go-lucky idiots, and dangerous thugs. The criminal justice system sanctioned a double standard of justice, including its tacit approval of mob violence against blacks.

“A nigger’s clothing was either ragged and dirty or outlandishly gaudy. He is slow, have exaggerated gait suggesting laziness. He is a pauper, lacks ambition and the skills necessary for upward social mobility. He is a buffoon. When frightened, his eyes will bulge out and darted. His speech will become slurred, halted, and replete with malapropisms. His shrill, high-pitched voice made whites laugh. It dehumanized blacks, and served as a justification for social, economic, and political discrimination”. That was what a “nigger’” was, is and will continue to be in the minds of those that hate us.

The negative portrayals of blacks were both reflected in and shaped by everyday material objects: toys, postcards, ashtrays, detergent boxes, fishing lures, children's books. These items, and countless others, portrayed blacks with bulging, darting eyes, fire-red and over sized lips, jet black skin, and either naked or poorly clothed.

Thus it must be in the state of un-paralleled stupidity that those presently articulating the future, vision, hope and destiny of Nigeria decided to name the new firm set to build refineries, pipelines and gas power stations, formulated by an agreement that came about during the 4 day African tour by Russian President, Dmitry Medvedev, “ Nigaz”. It not only shows lack of good taste but also the dearth of creativity in that country. It is just unbelievable! It is simply offensive and strongly calls in to question the mentality of our leaders.

It is both appropriate and imperatively obligatory that this be reviewed at once. We have so much baggage to throw over-board, adding more in the form of this moniker to our already floundering sinking ship is sheer insanity. Even in an individual, there is a link between a child’s name and their achievement. This phenomenon is known as sound symbolism, where the sound of a word conveys meanings. Specifically, brand names are composed of individual sounds called phonemes. A research conducted recently demonstrated that consumers use information they gather from phonemes in brand names to infer product attributes and to evaluate brands. It also demonstrates that the manner in which phonetic effects of brand names manifest is automatic in as much as it is uncontrollable, outside awareness and effortless. Stated simply, sound symbolism affects attribute perceptions.



Let’s for once conduct ourselves with some dignity and stop giving to those that in their prejudice seeks to prove our supposedly “hereditary inferiority” the tools to hurts us more than they already have. We have been maligned and distorted enough in every conceivable way. Every news, article, views and opinions that you see, hears and read in the Western and Asian media serves to portray us in negative light and perpetuate the stereotype. Since we have not device nor find it necessary to present or create a more helpful version of our Fate, leaving it to others to do for us, we must desist from making a caricature of ourselves.



Beyond the “bitches, niggers, and ho’s”, [words that not only degrades our women but reflects the negativity and ignorance that other races have come to associate us with] there lurks in its shadow the frightening monster of what one may call “the split of our collective psyche”. It is something that occurred centuries ago, with the invasion, pillage, rape of both our consciousness and land. It is a separation from the instinctual knowledge of ourselves which plunges us into conflict with our understanding of both the world around and within us. And it has never healed! We are still walking around with a wounded psyche. Not until we have come in terms with our identity by reflecting on the past, taking and applying the lessons thereof into our present while embracing with all eagerness the future can we exorcise the demons of self-unworthiness. Countless have been and are the bearers of this timeless message of redemption and hope yet; we are still locked in a certain paralysis, unable to extricate ourselves from the chains of the past. Let’s rise up and build!

My apologizes! Wish I can delete it but can't see any Edit or Delete button. Thanks for the correction!