Alai ni ronu's aka "shitty" people......

ThisDay newspapers held their annual awards ceremony recently. They handed out awards in all sorts of categories from "Governor of the Year" to "IPO of the year". Predictably, Nigerians turned out in all their finery, to partake in what, in my opinion, can best be described as a farce. And a mind-boggling farce at that. First off, on what basis is ThisDay qualified to hand out awards to anybody? Secondly, how, pray tell do they come up with their categories?! Some of them are just too inane to believe - Banker of the year ? Transaction of the year??? IPO of the year???? As in............ How do they decide what qualifies as the transaction of the year? Based on what criteria? And the categories change from year to year. It's all a huge joke. Which would be fine, except that people seem to take it so seriously. And people who should know better!! They turn up to receive the awards, hand out the awards and generally legitimize the whole charade.

In a couple of months or so, City People will also host their own "awards for excellence" or whatever they call it and so-called eminent Nigerians will again show up in droves. City People???!! I'm sorry but what does City People know about excellence, or integrity or character? It is a publication that specializes in sleaze, junk and scandalous nonsense. It would be better if they owned up to what they are, but no they want to posture like they are about something worthwhile. That irritates me to no end! (in the interest of full disclosure, let me state here that I do read City People, but I take it for what it is- nothing more, nothing less). That said, I return to my point which is that they are not qualified to hand out awards to anybody, except perhaps philanderers and their mistresses.

To be fair to these publications, it's their prerogative to organize any kind of awards ceremony they like. After all, this is still a free country so they have the right to gather people together for any purpose they see fit as long as it's legal. It's the people that turn up to accept these awards that I judge. Governors, ministers and other erstwhile serious-minded individuals will abandon all the important work they have to do for the purpose of collecting an award from City People or ThisDay?! What kind of people are we and what kind of country do we live in? In Yoruba language, we refer to such people as "alai ni ronu's". In other words, people who lack introspection.

And that seems to be the main problem we have in Nigeria: we are apparently not given to any kind of introspection. Put differently, we are not deep at all, in fact we are a very, very shallow society (of course, I am generalizing here). We are content to act only on surface levels and we are more concerned with appearances than substance. Governors and other politicians fancy themselves as celebrities, rather than public servants and thus feel duty-bound to appear at every event, party or gathering. Prancing around like circus clowns and congratulating each other on their non-achievements, meanwhile the whole country is falling apart. It defies any sort of logic. This is why concepts like "excellence" and "integrity" are pretty much meaningless around these parts. In most sane societies, only an alainironu of a governor (and/or one who is on a mission to commit career suicide) would accept an award from a publication like City People, but I guess we march to the beat of a different drummer in this here country.

The more I think about these things, the more my blood pressure escalates, so for the sake of my health I will rest this post here. But you can be sure that I'm not done with the subject. I will be back when my blood pressure levels have returned to their resting rate. Lolll