[Auspicious]

Originally Posted by I Love Nigeria

Auspicious, I beg your pardon!

Yeah you read me alright!

I'm personally tired of your incessant panderings to issues - your exegerration of everything you purport to champion. Just like your Obasanjo-mongering days, you have started again. This time, it is your obsession with "western propaganda/hegemony" while practically ignoring FAR, FAR, WORSE cases of internal and external hegemony/propaganda that remain alive unchecked or unrestrained in the cocoons of state oppression across the world.

Never do we ever read or hear you address any of those aforementioned cases that dot the surface of the earth, from Belarus to Burkina Fasso. But here we have you going chukwumerije on us again in search of another landing perch in Aunty Dora's Pet Project, campaigning (to be noticed and perhaps hired?) to help burnish the image of a government inspired and nurtured by the vices of deciet and manipulation! I mean, who doesn't know that a Chicken can NEVER give birth to a Pepeye? Please!

I didn't have to read too far to be turned-off by your "anything goes with my love for Nigeria" opata. The words "belligerent, bellicose and offense" speaks to your mischievious attack of a system and society that gave you a better lease of life than your own fatherland could ever afford you, thanks to the arrogance and opportunism of the very people (OBJ and all) that you spent your recent history promoting here and elsewhere. It is this same system and society (despite all its flaws and exploitation by an arrogant and greedy few) that remains the fairest that this world has so far come to know.

Yet, in the same breath, you eat out of its palms and condemn it - you hold on desperately tight to the benefits and privileges of this same system/society and all else it affords you with all your might and soul (even throughout the 'Good Obasanjo Days' when milk and honey flowed and saturated your actual homeland) while exhorting and defending other governments and systems that would NEVER grant you an inch of the kind of privileges that you currently enjoy or take for granted in your New Yorker comforts.

This is NOT to say that it is impossible to for one to criticize his or her 'benefactor' (for lack of a better words, pardon me) while the 'benefaction' remains in place, it is, rather, to highlight your disingenuity in this matter. For example, nowhere have I read you criticize the activities of our beloved Nigerian Television Authority whose programming makes BBC or CNN's propaganda look like Jesus' Own Truthism - whatever that means. But here you are, carrying on about propaganda as if its a new word in your lexicon. Who doesn't know that those outfits are FAR more credible than the state-run ones in Nigeria or Iran - or, excuze-me-laff, ZimBOBwe?

But I needn't even bother telling you all these, for I know that you know the truth. Yours is not a case of not knowing; yours is a case of deliberate, calculated, targeted attempt to get a foot in the door to butter your bread somehow. That is why you are taking up Aunty Dora's latest mantra now, just like you did during the Obasanjo Era of Omi ati Waara (milk and honey, literarily). Now, this is different from others', whose passion is real and misguided. Yours? Nah, nah, nah; it inspired and nurtured by a self-serving agenda on your part.

And by the way, one can promote one's country without decieving oneself; re-branding Nigeria does not have start with going about baying endlessly to a hungry and perenially cheated people about how great the nation and her people are while putting down others and labelling them as propaganda lords. Re-branding as launched and promoted by Dora Akunyili and her rag-tag army of hosannah singers fits the description of shameless, foolish propaganda than anything that CNN or BBC will do. It reminds one of a coarse-voiced Obasanjo bleating on a grubby Nigerian tourism advert on CNN, ugly banana fruits in the background and all, saying "Welcum to Naijeeriaaaa!"

Olofo buruku ni gbo yin pata-pata..Olofo.

Auspicious.