And Four Other Things...
If Nollywood produced a movie depicting a junior secondary school student trying to poison a mate because of first position in class, it would appear unreal. But that is what just played out at the Lekki British International School, Lagos, where a 12-year-old JSS1 student reportedly sneaked into the school lab and stole sulphuric acid and ethanol, which he poured into the water bottle of an 11-year-old girl who had displaced him from the first position. Is the boy under intense pressure from his parents to always place first? Are Nigerian schools still grading students by positions in this age and time? Is the school security so lax that students can gain access to deadly chemicals? Scary.
There are certain things in life that I battle to understand, and the case of Mr. Danbaba Danfulani Suntai, former governor of Taraba state who died on Wednesday, is one. When someone survives a deadly accident, you would ordinarily think the worst is over. But he never really recovered from the air crash of October 25, 2012 when he piloted an ill-fated flight. The neurological injury turned him virtually a vegetable, making his recovery process agonisingly slow. And he still died, two days to his 56th birthday. So I am wondering if the five years of vegetation was worth it at all. These are the hard things of life. Mystifying.
A lot has been said about President Muhammadu Buhari’s Eid el Fitri message broadcast on BBC Hausa service. Having been away for so long, with nobody hearing anything from him or seeing his picture, Buhari could have done better than that. The president is already carrying the baggage of being perceived as a northern property and it would appear he is doing everything to prove his critics right. It is also significant that the presidential media team that is well endowed in issuing clarifications and rebuttals could not put any spin to this PR disaster. Whoever advised Buhari to do an Eid message in Hausa did him a great disservice. QED.
You couldn’t make this up. A 19-year-old American woman, Monalisa Perez, and her boyfriend, Pedro Ruiz, decided to perform a stunt on Facebook Live. In the presence of their three-year-old child, she fired a shot at Pedro, who was holding a book on his chest which they thought would stop the bullet. It didn’t. Pedro died. Ruiz’s aunt quoted Pedro as having said they wanted to pull a stunt “because we want more viewers, we want to get famous”. Exactly the world we now live in — where people do and say unthinkable things on social media “to get famous”. I have no doubt that the world will rise up, one day, to tame this digital monster. Crazy.