Childhood: The railroad back to my roots

The railroad back to my roots

One train journey remains vivid in my memory and it was one I took some 35 years ago. We lived in the Rayfield suburb of Jos in the then Benue-Plateau State of Nigeria.

My parents wanted us to spend the summer holidays back with extended family in the South where I had one paternal great grandmother, three of my grandparents, now all departed, lots of cousins and the potential for new friends.

There was still the residue of colonial efficiency in matters Nigerian and things still seemed to run as they should, we had tickets and clear reservations that no one was going to bump us off.

No falls from on high

We had one half of the cabin for 4 of us, my mother, my sister, my kid brother who was still being nursed and I.

We could sit 4-abreast and at night the back rest folded out into an upper bunk bed where I slept with my sister. In fact, I am amazed that I could sleep on such as high platform because not too many years before, I was called a coconut because I just naturally fell off the bed at night.

The railroad cities

The notable places we travelled through were Kaduna Junction where the railway split for directions far north or to the East of the country. These were haunts my mother was familiar with, she grew up in the North and could pass for a Northerner from her looks and her command of the language.

At Kafanchan, we shopped for refreshments we never had from home, as my mother told us stories of when she was a child and how her reminiscences of her guardians brought waves of gratitude and revulsion of outrageous child abuse that these people got away with, with impunity.

The crossing of the River Niger at Jebba could have happened in 1940s sepia, the experience was as eerie as it was memorable, the bridge went on and on as it we were never going to ever complete the crossing and soon after the crossing there was a long break before the journey continued.

At this stop we tried the pounded yam warps with stew, it was never boring nor without event and after 2 and a half days we arrived in Ibadan where my mother’s brother in law married to her big sister was on hand to pick us up in his trusty Peugeot 403 and take us to Ijesha-Ijebu where the welcome party continued until when I could no more keep my eyes open anymore.

I still love trains

I never had the pleasure of another long train journey like that again, in fact, as I started secondary school and had to travel from Kaduna to Lagos, where my schoolmates from the North were put on trains without chaperones, I was put on a flight with all the trappings of privilege that no more exists.

But, I have not lost my fascination for long train journeys, they are no more like that, now, you get on a train, find a comfortable seat and just as you recline into much needed motion-induced slumber the purser comes round offering you a drink; the mixed emotion of gratitude for succour and anger for disturbance gets assuaged with a can of Perrier.

In two hours, you are in Antwerp, in three you are in Brussels or Cologne, in four you are in Hannover, Paris or Frankfurt, in six you are in Berlin, for longer you can get further on continental Europe and travelling 1^st Class does not have to cost you an arm and a leg - they even have wireless connectivity on the trains now, no fear of being off the grid.

Looking out of the window as we cruise passed the meadows and green fields interspersed with stations of renown, I would not be buying diamonds as I approach that city that has a pillow on which ones head would lay.

Technical tinkerers are the worst

Taking calls for old jobs

Late last week, having left a project in which my contribution was critical, I got a call from the project manager about some issues that they had encountered and were having problems resolving.

I agreed to take calls from the technical people and see what I could do to help. When the call finally came through and I was told what they had encountered my intuition and experience just felt it was a non-problem that had been complicated by unnecessary tinkering on the one end and a basic inability to understand abstraction with technologies.

A template is a template is a template

The environment we built provides for the ability to document the settings on one environment using a portable format and wizard assisted method in an export process and the using the same wizard to import the settings into another environment.

This follows a basic template format which allows for common elements to be transferred but requires that some unique elements be edited to reflect the new environment. All those elements had been documented.

One of those elements deals with recording the status of the environment, but the references are not updated and hence technicians cannot check the state of the environment for operational effectiveness – the simple solution is to delete the foreign references and select the local references.

Tinkerers are the worst technical people

Now, I know technicians like to see what goes on under the bonnet; I have no problems with that. I like to know how a television works because I studied electronic engineering but I don’t at a whim go poking a screw-driver in the back of my television just because it is fun, I could be electrocuted, quite easily, even if I knew exactly what I was doing.

I sometimes give deference to the simple notice – No user serviceable parts – I wonder if that appears on modern equipment nowadays, I suppose the warning is more the risk of losing your warranty if you try to tinker with the innards of your equipment.

After the conversation ended, I just knew the smart guy had tinkered with the template directly and wrecked the environment and was now looking for assurances that if he continued that dastardly act the functionality of the environment could be guaranteed.

The absence of logic and reason

Since I was away from home, I could not simulate the conditions he was describing, in fact, I should have asked at the beginning what symptoms had been presented to them before the tinkering started.

The problem with many technicians and engineers today is that they lack analytical skills, they’ll rather tinker and test unsound assumptions with trial and error – they might eventually solve the problem but you can never get them to walk you through the problem discovery to problem resolution because the critical ingredient for analysis is logic and reasoning and that is usually missing.

I fear something in the educational system has deprived many technical personnel of the ability to just stand back, review the situation, work out scenarios, dry run possible resolutions and test assumptions against sound logic. They can see what but never seem to know how or why.

They have to be seen doing something and thinking is not part of doing something, it is scary, I can assure you it is – because what ends up happening is every single issue requires a complete rebuild once they hit a bottleneck - that is time and money.

Doing it right the first time

From my wealth of experience, I have rarely had to rebuild anything I have built myself because of the time taken to understand what I am doing in the first place. However, in many cases I have had to rebuild what others have done because it becomes evident that certain omissions in the construction process are critical to the operation or performance of that environment and that omission cannot be corrected in live systems.

I am sometimes left completely exasperated by the lack of meticulous application of technical expertise in some of these places, I take my time because my philosophy is what is worth doing at all is worth doing well - the first time.

Yes, he did

Anyway, I was called by the project manager again today to arrange another meeting with the technical people and somehow they had tried to call me a couple of times during the day, well, the reason why I had not gotten the call was because the tinkerer had transcribed my number wrongly.

So, we chatted and I had to get the first bit of information out of him, indeed, he had edited the template directly – I simply said, I cannot believe that you edited the XML file, anyone should know that an automatically generated file is not there for tinkering.

Basically, even if you can identify the elements that need changing, there is no telling what other related elements are linked by coded or encrypted values, but in true cowboy fashion, he had edited the file and corrupted the environment.

Now, there is no way how I could then engage in a conversation with this tinkerer on the level of an experienced and learned technician with the expertise to distinguish himself properly.

And indeed, the conversation did get to a point where he remonstrated that he had not just started working with these environments and I was getting irritated with what was turning out to be an abject waste of my time.

The impossible question

By the time we got to the end of the conversation, he wanted to know if he could trust the environment he had built, well, I trust the environment I built, I trust the use of templates to transfer settings and I trust my ability to leave black boxes alone if I decide to use wizards to perform otherwise time-consuming activities.

I could not vouch for his skills or expertise and in the end, he decided I was not helpful at all, I am glad it ended that way because I would be an idiot to vouch for the kind of stuff he had been doing.

I called the project manager and gave him a piece of my mind asking that next time I would rather converse with others with constrained cowboy tendencies whilst intimating him of the fact that my time had really been wasted almost unforgivably.

Some so-called administrators should never be let near critical infrastructure for the sanity of the bigger world.

My parents are worried

Off the hinge with shingles

Just about 4 weeks ago I saw blisters appear on my upper left arm and over a day of so, it spread up my arm over the left side of my chest, it amazingly travelled across the entire upper back to parts of the upper right arm.

Now shingles, theoretically should not cross the mid-section of the body, I probably carelessly spread it to the right side not seeing that rubbing my back was bursting the blisters and spreading the virus.

The worst of that phase is over but we are now in what is called the post-herpetic neuralgia stage where the pain radiates just behind the skin where the blisters and then the rashes appeared and dried up – all those places temporarily discoloured and bearable to sight.

The business with mum

As I gained my strength, I phoned mother, I call her Iya, which is mum in Yoruba; to see if she had some home-grown remedy which she seems to always have for any malady.

The conversation we had was too business-like for my liking I was really taken aback, but on reflection, I felt she must have been busy on some important thing that required minimal disturbance.

Me: Hello Iya, it’s Akin

Iya: Hello, How are you? What do you need to tell me.

Me: I’ve been very ill with shingles.

Iya: Is that all I need to know, now?

Me: Yes, that is all.

Iya: You will be well in Jesus Name, bye.

Me: Amen.

Dad, I had it as a kid

So, there I was wondering and considering my mother already had a premonition I was unwell and already had an expectation I would call – later that day, she tried to contact me and even the next morning, we finally chatted again where I explained exactly what shingles was, how I was feeling and got a few ideas for remedy.

Meanwhile, having not chatted to daddy for a while, I called him too and told him I had been ill, he had never heard of shingles and did not think I had chicken-pox as a kid – well, I am glad I had chicken-pox as a kid because the pox on adults is just not good.

So, I explained to him that one usually has chicken pox as a child and its reappearance in adults is indicated by shingles.

They are worried

However, these benign pieces of information shared with my parents had gotten them extremely worried even though their approaches to the same problem were diametrically opposed with me caught in the middle as usual.

My father also used the situation to advance once again the need for companionship, well, my neighbours have been extremely neighbourly and helpful during the more difficult times, single people find ways to adapt and survive – companionship is not a compulsory essence of life even though it can be useful.

Iya’s view had a spiritual dimension to it which one should not discount out of hand, I listened again as she offered more useful advice and remedies.

When I spoke to my father again, he was concerned about the differences between home remedies and Western medicine and wondered if I could get West African remedies consisting of herbs and the possible ritual – well, I don’t think the ritual part would have been to my liking, but London offers an interesting eclectic mix of the Nigerian ghetto in Europe with the possibility of rat tails, cat heads and every scary concoction out of this world.

Viral becomes venereal

Meanwhile, I was being driven to complete distraction at night with severe itching on my back and sometimes down my arms; I had cut my nails and tried to ease the itch with rubbing gently or passing a towel over the affected areas latitudinally back and forth.

Another call from my father included the advice to call a doctor relation of ours who I had chatted to a few weeks ago. The doctor had explained to my dad what shingles was, saying it was a viral infection and what it entails.

By the time my father was on the phone to me, viral had become venereal, I was not going to correct him or explore the ideas between viral infections and venereal infections.

You suddenly realise that of all you will like to discuss with your parents, your sexual proclivities do not rank anywhere in the exchanges, I was glad the conversation was over though worried about what he might have thought I was up to when I really had not been up to anything untoward.

In all, one takes from the situation a sense of how worried the man and lady were, and the link between us so happens to be their parenthood – the healing effect of realising that people so dearly care for you is without peer and I am glad for that.

Ghana: No antibodies for this virus - Obama's speech

Not the miracle speech

Commentary has been flowing online and on the airwaves about President Barack Obama’s speech to the Ghanaian parliament.

I attentively listened to what he had to say and then read through the transcript of his speech just to corroborate what I heard with what was said.

I was almost annoyed with the bellyaching that has come from some who seemed to be expecting this speech to end all speeches, a work of oratory to make Pluto a planet again, words that would change Africa like Jesus said “Rise up and walk”.

Indeed, there were so many looking to be impressed and bowled over that they might just have lost the significance of the visit to Ghana and the speech itself.

Ghana was really second in Africa

Africa has 53 countries and in the run up to President Obama’s visit to Ghana we had all been made aware of the reason why Ghana was chosen as the second African country not as the first African country to be visited by him, that was Egypt – we sometimes forget that Arabian North Africa is very much part of Africa, the Middle East is geo-political moniker, not a continent.

It is clear that President Obama was persuaded of strong democratic institutions and reforms that engender development and opportunity. It would also appear that he had only had two countries to mind that met that basic qualification for validation in those terms and he mentioned them in his speech as Ghana and Botswana.

No antibodies for this virus

However, what must not be lost as the significance of this visit to Ghana must be the fact that President Obama in his status, stature and progeny represents by analogy for the first time ever a virus against which the pachydermatous and megalomaniacal leaders of Africa have no antibodies.

One glaring fact is exemplified in this statement made in his speech, “the West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy over the last decade”. Imagine the deluge of condemnation and contempt that would have swept over him from the Grand Despot of Africa if this statement had been made by any other leader.

In other words, President Obama was laying down the ground rules for constructive engagement with a changing world, but most importantly declaring the fact that the responsibility for change in Africa is squarely in the hands of Africans themselves. The fallback excuse of the legacy of colonialism can no more hold water just as neither the Japanese nor the Germans can blame anything in their countries today on the losses they suffered in the Second World War and occupation by the victors of that war.

Changing focus of aid

However, I have digressed, what I take from this speech is the radical change in the way aid is distributed and used in Africa – rather than having aid bolster businesses and bureaucracies of the donor countries, it would be geared to helping build capacity in recipient countries by engaging local resources and expertise allowed for a greater percentage of the aid to reach its intended purpose.

This I think would appeal to the Dead Aid bandwagon that have argued that the aid industry itself absorbs most of the aid reducing the amount of aid that is supposed to reach the intended causes for which aid has been raised.

Democracy and the opposition

Meanwhile, President Obama has not redefined democracy but he has clearly indicated that it is definitely more than the sprinkling of elections, there is a governance, accountability and responsibility to being in government by the consent of the people and for the good of all the people for the duration of the term for which that government has been elected.

However, more tellingly about the state of affairs in Ghana is the way the President of the United States of America was greeted by both the government and members of the opposition. The end of brinkmanship politics based on difference, rancour, power and abuse needs to be in sight for things to progress throughout Africa.

Speaking to a greater multitude

President Obama might have been speaking to the Ghanaian parliament yesterday but he was finger-pointing at a good deal of leaders not only in Africa but all around the world which includes those who “change constitutions to stay in power” as in Venezuela, Niger, Ecuador, Peru, the botched attempt in Nigeria and the failed attempt in Honduras – your books are marked.

I was not expecting the speech to be the beatitudes or the Hippocratic Oath of democracy, rather, the speech struck the right balance as an introduction to what is expected of those in leadership and those who seem to be in power but not in office – for some listeners however, it was the Riot Act and it probably would have smelt like tear gas to them.

Attachment

Obama in Ghana file, PDF with pictures and transcript of speech available from http://www.america.gov