Published in Data Dive
Turn by turn, every 60 minutes, 24 times in the day, the people of all lands within each 15-degree longitude of the earth’s globe will celebrate the coming of a new year together.
January 15th, 2024
9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1,
Beep.
Happy New Year!!!
Turn by turn, every 60 minutes, 24 times in the day, the people of all lands within each 15-degree longitude of the earth’s globe will celebrate the coming of a new year together.
The pleasantness of Christmas peaks at 0000 hours on January 1st and many expect pain to plateau, too. But such positive thinking never works. Otherwise, the world would be full of pleasures and free of pain by now.
Hope is human. Collective daydreaming isn’t.
What works is to expect pleasure to decrease and for pain to increase – that food crops will decrease naturally unless they are cultivated again, against all the odds of an infertile and insecure land. And to be assured that thorns will increase naturally unless they are hindered.
The resolve to work against these natural negative expectations forms the background to every vocation of man.
Welcome to 2024. No illusions.
The President never mentioned the December 23-25 wanton bloodletting in Bokkos, Barkin Ladi, Mangu and Wase Local Government Areas of Plateau State in his speech.
That worries many.
At best, the president’s public relations team can plead that this presidency does not work in real-time.
They simply write their good wishes for the new year and go to sleep. And while Nigeria’s shepherds slept at noon, angels of death came to update President Tinubu and his team that a little child was crying frantically at the back of his slain mother.
Nigeria is not good at census. Yet when they say over 195 people – children, teenagers, adults and the aged – were hacked to death and buried in collective graves, believe it is not less than that number.
“The New Year speech as delivered by the president clearly shows that he was not adequately informed of the current realities. A lot of burning national issues were not addressed in his speech – issues of the military error committed in Tudun Biri (that wiped out over 120 innocent people in Kaduna), the kidnapped youth corps members, and so many other serious security issues, which he failed to address,” Adamu Umar Zakari wrote on Daily Trust.
Gore and pain will never cease in Plateau State until an irresponsible General is summarily dismissed and replaced with a Colonel who can get the job done. Insecurity and pain will never plateau anywhere in Nigeria until an entitled Inspector General is fired and replaced with a serious-minded, humane Inspector.
Neither prayers nor positive thinking will work in Nigeria this year. No such things work anywhere. Right actions exalt a country, but wrong actions bring reproach to the psyche and bodies of the people of any country.
Sorry to hurt the feel-good faith. It’s the only way to halt a painful fate.
Statements like “I’m an unrepentant believer in a national carrier flying the Nigerian flag” smack of positive thinking about the country and can be praised for their patriotic, or even prophetic, tang.
The thing is, statements like these are not backed up by knowledge of any serious plan and effort to realise the goal. And clutching to them brings nothing but disappointment and depression or a stronger delusion that this dream would materialise somehow.
The empty belief in Nigeria Air has proven to be a fantasy. Five years since that statement, Nigeria Air has been suspended, re-funded, unveiled, launched, flown, and disappeared right before our eyes.
Such is the fate of anyone who believes that the entity called Nigeria would be fine this year anyhow.
There is evidence that Nigeria’s rulers at the local, state, and federal levels would bring the country and its citizens closer to a ruinous end in 2024 if they continue to mouth sweet nothings into the ears of the citizens without changing their profligate ways.
Though empty fantasy brings pleasure and relieves emotional pain in the short run, it certainly results in failure coupled with symptoms of depression in the long run.
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Turn by turn, every 60 minutes, 24 times in the day, the people of all lands within each 15-degree longitude of the earth’s globe will celebrate the coming of a new year together.
