Anthea and Chris

The Meeting

2^nd July, 2012. They had spoken twice before then. Anthea was looking for a flat to rent in Abuja and Chris happened to be the real estate agent.

Her version

During the house hunt, we chatted and laughed through the house inspections and the drive. It was like we had known each other for a long time. I am normally quite reserved so I even surprised myself on meeting this ‘stranger’.  

A week later, he called me to inspect some place which I liked and I currently live at. He was very helpful as he always checked on the progress of the work being done in preparation for my moving and assisted where necessary. He asked a number of times to have drinks but I would never avail myself. I was single and not searching after the experiences of my previous relationship.

Cherish! She was my neighbour and a little friend of ours, " OMG, where is Cherish! I need to thank that girl!" This is what Chris says to me every now and then (lol) as he believes Cherish helped in getting me to pay attention to him.  She would always ask me "Aunty Lola (Anthea) is uncle Chris coming today? Aunty Lola I want to see Uncle Chris, Aunty Lola can I speak to Uncle Chris with your phone?" Those were her questions, and for the first time I put a call through to him, he was surprised/happy but when he answered, it was Cherish (lol).

Up and About Nigeria - rejoinder

From my last post, I got a very detailed reply via e-mail from a friend. Waking up to that was such an amazing thing, that I decided to write a follow up post with his comments. 

I say a very big thank you to all of you who follow my blog and come here to read whatever it is I have to write. Please keep the comments coming, they make it all worthwhile :-)

That was a very great piece by Ene and I thought I should lend my thoughts to some points she raised. Yes, Nigeria just reached her centenary year as an entity and quite frankly, many aspects of her nationhood leaves a lot to be desired. However, there are many contributing factors to this and I feel obliged to respond to two main issues: History and the state of historical artefacts. I would not mention much about the economic aspect as that can be an article on its own. What I may want to clear up is that Nigeria was not referred to as a ‘giant of Africa’ because we had actually attained that status. It was in recognition of its enormous POTENTIAL in terms of population and material resources that gave us the moniker. We were just ‘work-in-progress’.

Up and About Nigeria

Have you ever travelled around Nigeria with the motive of appreciating the diversity in the different cultures, ethnicities and complexities that make up the country? These are things worth celebrating.

Nigeria has so much that is yet to be tapped, Nigeria has so much potential, Jim O'Neil's MINT theory states that the concerned countries economies have the potential to grow rapidly in the next three decades. This has been said about Nigeria over and over though. Nigeria has been called the giant of Africa, it is the most populous black nation. But does a country not need to appreciate what it has and its past to move forward?

Nigeria celebrated the centenary of its amalgamation this year, but I have to say that there was no real impact on Nigeria despite the series of events that were held for certain people in Abuja. I would have thought that this would be a time to dwell on the things that haven't worked, and what makes Nigeria the country it is, then come up with ideas to make the nation stronger.