NigeriansTalk

Cross-posted here.

Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab is a 23 year old man from a com­fort­able home in North­ern Nige­ria who attends a uni­ver­sity in the United King­dom. He’s now noto­ri­ous for try­ing to deno­tate an explo­sive device on a plane. I have tried not to talk about him before now, but who am I kid­ding? It’s in the news on every sta­tion and the word “Nige­ria” pops up every time. Even on twit­ter, the words “Nige­ria” and “Nige­ri­ans” are now trend­ing top­ics. By now we know that his father is a Niger­ian banker who had warned the US about three weeks ago about his son’s sus­pi­cious affil­i­a­tions. Well, three weeks ago, the US was busy debat­ing the Tiger Woods story to pay atten­tion to an errant Nigerian…

On a more seri­ous note, that idiot from Katsina state has given the rest of us a bad name, as if we didn’t have enough trou­bles of our own already. Think of how many peo­ple are now sub­ject to more restric­tions because of a fool­ish act by one unthink­ing idiot. I’m happy that I am not trav­el­ling to any­where soon, but I don’t envy those who are, and who are from Nige­ria. I’m dis­gusted enough with hav­ing to remove my shoes, jacket, sweater, and even belt every time I try to board a plane. Now, they’d prob­a­bly want to search my anus as well for fire­crack­ers since I’m from a coun­try whose name is now pop­ping up now and then beside the word “ter­ror­ism”. For many Amer­i­cans, it must be hard to see us in any other light now, except the peo­ple from whose coun­try the ter­ror­ist came from. On the bright side, this takes the shine of “Niger­ian Inter­net Scam”, if only for a minute. Heck, it even takes the shine off the death of South Africa’s anti-apatheid writer, Den­nis Bru­tus, who died on the 26th Decem­ber. Very sad indeed. (Update: another Niger­ian pas­sen­ger was arrested today Sun­day the 27th because he spent one hour in the air­plane bath­room on a sim­i­lar flight, and was “ver­bally dis­rup­tive” — read Niger­ian “uppity” — when ques­tioned.)

Since the story broke, I’ve been try­ing to look on the bright side, try­ing to find the laugh­able side to it. Yes­ter­day, I started look­ing for verses in Nostradamus’s pre­dic­tions that men­tioned “Niger­ian”, “Christ­mas” and “ter­ror­ism” in the same sen­tence. No luck. I hope that soon, my search engine will come up with some­thing I could use. For now, my hope is that if or when the sus­pected “Niger­ian ter­ror­ist” is even­tu­ally con­victed, he will be taken straight to Guan­tanamo to have a taste of the Amer­i­can coun­try­side he so des­per­ately desires. He can do with him­self over there what­ever he wants. Only for his sake, I will be peti­tion­ing the Pres­i­dent Obama to keep open that deten­tion facil­ity indef­i­nitely. We do not want the fool in any prison in Illi­nois like the pres­i­dent is plan­ning for other Guan­tanamo inmates, and I’m pretty sure that they do not want him in Nige­ria any time soon as well. Don’t take my word for it, check out this Face­book Group that has been set up pri­mar­ily to throw the dis­grace­ful Umar Farouk Abdul­mu­tal­lab under the bus, vir­tu­ally, since — the hor­ror of hor­rors — we are not able to do it physically.

At age 23, I was strug­gling to get a Uni­ver­sity degree rather than of play­ing around with explo­sive fire­crack­ers. At age 23, I’d never even been on a plane before. Well, there’s a lot you can do if you’re a spoilt kid with a priv­i­leged back­ground. Who cares for com­mon sense when you can eas­ily and effort­lessly dis­grace your fam­ily and coun­try with one thought­less act of jack­assery in a for­eign country?