Nigeria is simply ‘iconic’…
(be warned: This is only a beginning !!!)
Nigeria is the country of hyperboles, of superlativism – NOT relativism ! Everything is great, huge, big, enormous, iconic, epochal. And that not only population-, oil- and gas-wise, but also when it comes to music, film-making and even literature: ours is always the greatest,no: the greatetest !!!
It gives you the feeling as if the entire nation is constantly drunk ! And that in the middle of … ‘among others’ as those so-called journalists always write… in the middle of: no petrol for days on end, no gas, no ‘tricity’, hour-long go-slows, exploding pipelines and munition depots, a moribund health system, an education system in the same state of near-death, and mass poverty. But then we compensate this with verbal inflation…
And then we have never-ending mammoth events celebrating this or that writer, with MCs and guests of honour who – most probably, the probability being 100 %! – have never ever read a single line by that very same writer !
And in some cases that may be ‘even better so’, since those same writers suffer from bouts of immodesty that DO constitute ‘a danger to your health’ – mental for sure.
In fact, some of those writers seem to have gone ‘mental’, as the expression goes… No sense of shame, after having produced one or two minor volumes at age 18 or so, or even after 50 years ! No names mentioned, since I simply cannot afford lawyers’ fees if they sue me for diffamation...
Okay, okay, we are the ones who opened the floodgates to this verbal (verbose) tsunami, since we went to ‘Nigeria’s Premier University’, U.I. in the early sixties, where ‘star people were drinking Star Beer’… but otherwise we were in fact modest people !!! Champions of Modesty, so to speak… as my name indicates:
Gerd le Meilleur – or the best one.
II didn’t coin that one: my colleagues at Radio Mali did, by simply pronouncing my German name their French way…
PS: my page-makeress originally put 'Nigeria IRONIC' I begged her to change back into the intended ICONIC since most of those writers do not even know what IRONY is !!!
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