Apology 001

Village rag of ruse

This morning, I came upon a malicious false accusation that was made against a friend on Twitter to the effect that he was allegedly recorded on video assaulting a woman and swearing at her.

On observing the video, it was clear that neither the man assaulting the woman nor the voice of the perpetrator was my friend, the accent was American, his is British-Nigerian. That this video appeared on one of the more odious vehicles of invective and the worst of Nigerian journalistic standards was at first instructive, the text dripped with malice, it could not be overlooked.

As it transpired, Nigeria being a country in the rat race of keeping and settling scores, someone decided to publish this malign atrocity and then continued with commentary that excoriated my friend in the most uncharitable terms before proceeding to church.

Malicious and atrocious

Meanwhile, anyone who had any idea of who my friend was had already seen this hatchet job for what it was, the antecedents of the village rag masquerading as an online newspaper indicated that the act was deliberate to cause injury and harm to the name and reputation of my friend.

Whilst, engagement on Twitter can both be robust and virulent, there are times when even my friend might have exceeded the bounds of decency. In the snake pit of Nigerian commentary, the search for gentlemen can be futile as to be impossible. However, that should not excuse the abuse of platforms and expression to denigrate anyone, that applies to both my friend and anyone else.

Address the issue at hand

I am not here to keep the record of longstanding conflicts between personalities on Social Media, however, I can as occasion allows when I am observing my timeline on Twitter engage in the discourse or the debate as the opportunity comes. This morning presented such an opportunity and for that particular act, I walked in with the clear intention of defending my friend from that particular smear and address all who colluded in propagating the odium.

For some people, they might seek moral equivalences to justify that atrocity, it does not excuse this particular one I decided to address and the forum is open for others to address grievances they might have with other issues they feel so strongly about. The idea that one should help them fly their own flags, whilst understandable is neither a duty nor an obligation.

I have on many occasions called out friend, acquaintance, stranger and worse on general issues, I am nobody’s surrogate, I work as an independent mind on the matters I choose to address and never as a policeman seeking to impute offence at every possible opportunity.

It was a hatchet job

The backlash was fierce and unrelenting, with that came a conditionally grudging apology which some considered a full-hearted apology, I was having none of it. Eventually, the village rag pulled down that rotten hatchet job, which it was and appeared to apologise. The apologies were an apology of an apology in and of themselves.

I say it was a rotten hatchet job, because if it wasn’t, the story would have been edited to address the matter of Violence Against Women, which one of the protagonists tried to use to deflect the opprobrium for his perfidy. It got to a point that I found myself having to write an Idiot’s Guide to Apology and I labelled it Apology 001 because to have given it Apology 101 would have made it impossible for some to understand as a very advanced course in appropriate restitution.

The Idiot’s Guide: Apology 001

The Idiot’s Guide appears below and I have really not seen anything that resembles an apology on the matter. Just because you dislike a person does not mean you cannot stand for right in support of that person, that is what constitutes having a value system and principles. It is left to us to decide if past hurt is an excuse for allowing injustice and worse to thrive in our midst.

Apology 001: A regretful acknowledgement of an offence or failure.

Apology 001: An apology requires first an expression of regret; that expression cannot be conditional.

Apology 001: An expression of regret cannot be prefaced with the conditional if, because that invalidates the acknowledgement of error.

Apology 001: An apology must stand on its own, it must be full, unreserved, sincere, honest and final.

Apology 001: An apology must fully repudiate all the errors and claims that caused offence. For example; I am sorry for falsely accusing ...

Apology 001: If an apology is not grudging and deemed honest, it will be obvious to all and the offended will receive it gracefully.

Apology 001: Until we grasp the fundamentals of giving a good apology, we cannot advance to the Apology 101 course. :)

The Big Short on my life and those of others

The patterns I see

When it comes to financial matters, I have always said my father is a brilliant accountant, but it did not come down through the genes. Successful as he was in his profession which he still practices on behalf of the Anglican diocese in which he resides, only one of my siblings took a career path that had any financial component.

However, I somehow have an affinity for noticing patterns, things that align and things that seem to be out of place, unfortunately, I have never exploited that knowledge to the full as over time I have watched things that were once an inkling become an industry where if I had been more driven by my deepest premonitions, I would have been one of the pioneers. No regrets.

In March 2000, I travelled to Munich for an interview with the now defunct Compaq Inc., I decided to spend a week there and during my visit I met with a futures trader who was heavily leveraged in dot.com stocks. My reading of the situation then was things were about to collapse, simply because I noticed a pattern.

My advice to him was to reduce his exposure, he looked at me with incredulity, within weeks the dot.com bubble burst and the rest is history.

As it touched me

I have a more personal story about how I was affected by the markets, just less than a decade later. I bought my apartment in Amsterdam 2001, having given my estate agent 6 weeks to complete the deal to pick up my keys on the 1^st of November 2001.

It was a 105m², 7th-floor apartment with large windows overlooking two old Amsterdam harbours, a wonderful place by any standards. My mortgage was at inception the same as paid for rent in another part of Amsterdam for about 18 months.

The trajectory as it then was, whilst the housing market seemed overheated, the interest rates were going down, and this happened progressively every two years until about 45% was shaved off my mortgage in 6 years.

That other marker

Meanwhile, there was an underlying current that should have sent alarm bells ringing that I ignored until it was too late. My mortgage was undergirded by a life insurance policy that I paid a hefty sum to every year and in the mortgage term of 25 years, it was supposed to have accumulated enough to pay off my mortgage.

Each year, accounting for administration costs and much else, nothing was being compounded into the policy, rather, I was seeing less of what I put in that I had to ask for a review of the conditions of my mortgage to ensure I had not been defrauded.

Everyone who had worked on my mortgage had already walked away with their commissions as the signs of a financial crisis appeared on the horizon with the sub-prime mortgage defaults in the United States.

The tsunami I could not outrun

I could not ignore what was happening, yet I felt like there was an earthquake somewhere far away and the water was receding from the beach in anticipation of a tsunami I could not escape, it was scary.

As so I wrote in August 2007:

Blog - Dishonest lending clue to market tremors

Then casually in October 2007:

Blog - Local situations in global straits

The tsunami had already come in and swept me away from my apparent comfort zone, a revision of my biennial fixed term mortgage saw a rise of 50 basis points, some consequent outgoings of about €550 a month in addition to what I was already paying.

No particular fault of ours, only the banks shoring up their books having messed up and gotten bailed out, with none of the people in charge of this debacle going to jail for anything, if any even got to be questioned for their atrocity.

Swept away

By then, it had become a case of Fixing Capitalist Errors with Socialist Favours which I wrote in December 2007.

Within two years of that, I was diagnosed with cancer, got treated, recovered, but the markets had dealt a blow to our livelihoods, the job markets also began to introduce unfavourable filters to eliminate foreigners from consideration where we once freely had access.

In the end, I sold my apartment at a loss after 10 and a half wonderful years, though barely covered by the insurance and eventually returned home to the UK to rebuild my life.

The Big Short

Earlier today, I went to watch The Big Short which is described as a biographical comedy-drama, and whilst I will agree it is biographical and it is a drama, it was no comedy when we look at the disaster it caused in millions of lives whilst those who found out what was wrong with the system walked away laughing to the bank.

At worst, the banks have been fined billions by the regulatory bodies, but there have been no major indictments, the legislative framework that was to help avoid a similar collapse of the banking system has been watered down and the banks have more or less returned to their brand of casino banking with new banksters slinging guns of dubious provenance as products of the highest quality.

We’re back on that merry-go-round of atrocity for which the generality of the populace has been made to pay dearly for in austerity and worse, whilst the politicians and the banks waltz away in illicit copulation.

Yet, in understanding this rotten and corrupt enterprise a bit more, history is probably going to repeat itself worse than before and the criminals will once again walk free.

Woe betide them.

Opinion: Watching the tombstones of integrity long dead

A great disappointment

A simple definition of integrity as offered by Google is the quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.

Where we find leadership wanting in honesty, trustworthiness and truth, we lose our confidence in the people to the point that their leadership becomes untenable.

A damaged relationship

In a democracy, those who lead have responsibilities that derive from the consent of their electors, there is trust reposed in the elected to act in the best interest of all with fairness, truth, justice and principle.

We damage this dynamic irreparably if in the face of manifest wrongdoing, those we expect to know different acquiesce, condone, tolerate and excuse the reprehensible without shame or embarrassment.

An embarrassment of atrocities

A leadership unable to react with contrition and take reparative steps out of embarrassing actions of their cohort have taken licence to act with impunity.

They have become wayward, lascivious and debauched, reprobates beyond redemption whose end like history told many times before is utter destruction because the instruments of accountability that could have checked their excesses is too compromised to moderate anything they do.

What gives?

This is the story of many lands to which we owe allegiance, and if we are to rid ourselves of the unconscionable grip of the kakistocracy that holds sway like a swarm of locusts over our fields of grain, we must give voice to the need for truth, probity and justice.

Many events we have read in the news recently point to the moral bankruptcy of those we trust; we can only wonder what to do to rescue this atrocious set of circumstances.

We have to think about what this means for us as country, as a people and for the future.

CNN Exclusive: The creaks (sic) of Niger Delta

Fleshing a barebones news story

Sometimes correspondents do get a bit above their game in the quest for a story, that they plot and playback for our viewing rather than just report the news as is.

When Channel 4 in the UK used to broadcast Drop the Dead Donkey, many viewers would have thought no respectable journalist would file a war-zone report with a reality scene that would turn out to be the local community centre’s unkempt football pitch – if only our skepticism had caught up with our disbelief of make-belief, we might be smarter about the stuff we get fed to us as news, today.

Sometimes, the news might only be in the first 10 words of 15 minute broadcast and the only facts you will have are time and place, the event is dumped in the hands of armchair analysts with expertise in everything under that sun, so what we is get is opinions and suggestions presented as fact and event; by the time the penny drops, the event has been overtaken by other audience grabbing entertainment.

I have the feeling that some news editors now believe we are not interested in the news anymore, they believe we just want to be titillated with tidbits and have our voyeuristic tendencies exploited to the point of needing radical therapy.

It is definitely a given that one cannot just rely on just one news source, in hemispheric terms, one needs all perspectives and just because Western media can put people on the ground with sophisticated equipment to record an unfolding drama does not mean we have the truth.

Prismatic views of the Niger Delta

This is in the light of a report on CNN filed by Jeff Koinange an African-based correspondent under Big Guns, Big Oil Collide in Nigeria, there is no doubt we need multiple perspectives of issue to do with the Niger Delta, its people, its environment and the effects oil exploration on that diverse community.

There are many propagandists with vested interests in the matter, that getting to the truth is very much like sinking another hole prospecting for oil with greater uncertainty for success.

The people obviously are the most affected and nothing depicts that situation better than my February 2007 print edition of the National Geographic Magazine with the title Curse of the Black Gold - Please visit the online Photo Gallery.

A typical Niger Delta Settlement - © National Geographic Online

The oil companies as they rake in profits have to massage the public view of their corporate responsibility by all sorts of green initiatives and platitudes but the pictures persist and the news does not budge.

The Nigerian Government is an apology of governance, social justice and leadership, much can have been done to address the plight of the people of the Niger Delta but whilst we gain debt relief the largest oil-producing nation in Africa is ashamedly remiss and culpable in the rape of our resources and the livelihoods and well-being of the people.

The militants who because of the injustices of first, the impunity of the second and dereliction of duty and responsibility of the third have become a global phenomena, with attacks on oil infrastructure, the kidnapping of personnel and other destabilizing activities that can raise the price of oil, have the international markets in jitters, make insurance premiums for life and property approach that of contractors in Iraq, and basically give the government and companies a bad name and bad press whilst not achieving much.

The CNN Exclusive

So, we are all generally aware of what supposedly goes on in the Niger Delta, however, to bring this reality to the viewers of CNN, it would be difficult to happen upon the secretive activities of the militants if a deadline is to be met to deliver that news piece as part of pre-planned topics of interest for February.

It would appear Jeff Koinange with the generally accepted knowledge we have, wrote a screenplay and sought his dramatis personae first from main militant group called with the acronym MEND and when they could not make his scheduling, he engaged a number of brigands to enact typical MEND activities and relayed that to us as an exclusive.

Publish and be challenged

What is interesting is the strident ferocity of MEND’s rebuttal of that exclusive, the people featured do not belong to the MEND organisation and have no affiliation to them beyond which MEND has threatened to reveal all email correspondence between themselves and Jeff Koinange – now that would be an exclusive, which might be resolved with hush money.

The Nigerian Government, taking a cue from that rebuttal has called the report subversive and demanded an apology. Errr! Wait a minute before apologies start to fly.

The annoyingly photogenic Minister of Information and Communications (read propaganda) in the person of Mr. Frank Nweke Jr. remonstrated with a statement, an excerpt of which appears below.

“The report which, also featured some Filipino workers purportedly being held by members of MEND, has been run several times in the past 24 hours by the CNN, to wrongfully denigrate Nigeria and her peoples, send the wrong signals to the international community about the state of affairs in the country, create unnecessary panic, foster the feeling of insecurity, advance an out-dated thesis of neglect of the Niger Delta and portray Nigeria as a country in perpetual crises”.

Yes, up to the point where it appears the good name of great Nigeria is being besmirched, the minister is generally right, however, this - advance an out-dated thesis of neglect of the Niger Delta – I do wish it was out-dated and a thesis of somebody’s imagination, the inability for the government to address this in fairness leads to portraying - Nigeria as a country in perpetual crises – are we talking of the Niger Delta, the Presidential tiff with his vice-President, the efficacy of the EFCC, the political, health, social, security, economic or infrastructure situation of Nigeria here? Almost like Admiral Lord Nelson's oft misquoted "I see no ships" , Mr. Nweke Jr. sees no crises, so there are none.

News today

Sadly Mr. Koinange allegedly took a seriously newsworthy situation, dramatized it and presented it as reality; and I say, without prejudice, that, can be viewed as seriously unhelpful to the cause of the people and blatantly dishonest.

Mr. Nweke, not forgetting the Junior postscript, probably and really does have a grievance which should be aired, we should not have dramas that allow crimes to take place like the abduction of the Filipinos in that exclusive and then relay that as contemporaneous, but he is disingenuous to assert that those pictures in the National Geographic are an outdated thesis of neglect – that is a breathtakingly brazen barefaced terminological inexactitude and being seriously economical with the actualité.

The CNN Report - Thanks to Lady1

References

The Niger Delta

Nigeria and Oil

A Whole range of views on the Niger Delta Crises

Oil Companies Complicit in Nigerian Abuses - Human Rights Watch 1999

Nigeria: Corruption and Misuse Rob Nigerians of Rights - Human Rights Watch 2007