The road to nowhere…….Desert Storm Pt2.

My morning routine is very simple. Wake up. Do abolutions. Pray. Kids off to school. Watch Sky News. Settle down to work. I find this the easiest way to fend off insanity in Nigeria. Luckily I mostly work from home so I do not have to face any of the madness outside the gates…..traffic, noise pollution, aggression, fighting, death etc. No. At home I am sheltered in cosy comfort from the “Real World Lagos” – that never ending reality series – although one must not forget the lunatics called house help who do their best to bring the outside world in.

Typical exchange:
Guard – Oga diesel has finished
Me- finished finished or just finished?
Mallam – finished finish
Me- why didn’t you tell me it was finishing
Mallam- because I was waiting for it to finish and now it has finished finish. Walahi.

The other thing I also manage to avoid by hiding away at home is the newspapers and their various headlines. Unfortunately today I had an appointment which meant going out. Oh the gnashing of teeth, the sweaty palms, choking back of tears (and this was just my driver as I had decided to take the wheel. These incidents never end in a good way but a post on that later). After spending over 30minutes sitting very still on Admiralty Way (the traffic was so bad that people were actually coming out of their cars and sitting on the bonnet – as I understand often happens on the mainland and other deprived areas….. just a joke now. Cool down.)

And so it was that I had the misfortune to be trapped with nothing to do and hence fall easy prey to the newspaper boys. The headline in one read Ambassador : Doctors barring people from seeing Yar Adua. Ministerial team finally departs. Now see what is happening here. Read it again. To translate for you basically what this paper and several others are saying is that another team of Ministers will be spending your hard earned (cough) tax money to travel to Saudi Arabia not to see the ailing Presido - The Yard himself. As in no chance in Turai that they will get within a mile of the man. Not one jot. No way. No how. On this basis some smarter people than me, that can speak Latin and such, would say that this was therefore a travel in futility. Ipso Facto (that’s all the Latin I know) a waste of time and money. A road to nowhere. A journey into the known.

But you smarty pants are not as smart as these Ministers because it turns out that their tax payer funded shopping trip is not actually for the purpose of seeing Yardy at all. No, it is to go and say thank you to the King of Saudi for looking after him so well (I am therefore assuming the Saudis will be writing off the multi million dollar tab for his long stay hence the need for gratitude?) since his unfortunate illness. So there. Oh you people and your negative thinking. Get over yourselves. As if we did not know that we couldn't see Yardy. Of course we know that. We are going to see the King. Soon and very soon. Far be it for me to mention that we could have probably built a world class modern hospital with the amount of money spent shuttling back and forth to see a ghost.

How long this farce will continue God only knows. I mean this is not the first or second set of appointed delegates to make the journey out into the Saudi desert and come back with nothing but gold trinkets, lace and other banned goods. I suspect though that this is just the beginning. I envisage a day when all Nigerian citizens will be required to go out to Saudi Arabia to see for themselves (after all the Ministers and other despots obviously) the way things are going. We might even have to break into the hospital, force our way in past security, protocol and the most sophisticated defense mechanism we have ever seen –Turai the Tiger. It will be a case of Desert Storm 2. After all if Yardy won’t come to AIT then…….