“Firstly, merry Christmas! Tuesday is Christmas Day. Hopefully, you didn’t need me to tell you that. Anyhow, it isn’t every year I get this opportunity to wish AIRTIMERS a Merry Christmas. So, whatever you do, especially on Tuesday, try to be merry. And it doesn’t matter if you have to put some real effort into this. I don’t always get into the talk about Christmas until it has passed. It is not that easy to talk about Christmas, you know. Now, it has got even harder. How do you force on the Yuletide cheer when the bitter reality stares right back? In fact, with the present reality, the challenge is deciding what to talk about and what to leave out. My plan for the holidays is always to bring laughter and more laughter; even though I’m a little short of that right now. With everything going on right now, what kind of Christmas will you have? Still, you have (to try) to be merry. Merry Christmas, my people.”
The above is an excerpt from the December 24, 2017, edition of this column titled: ‘Do you know it’s Christmas?’ I decided to look through the past editions when I was thinking of what to write. At this time of the year, with about eight days to go, people usually prefer to take stock of the year but I have always tried to bring cheer during festive periods. Of course, that’s proving more difficult each day.
I mean, the big news from last week were the various depressing statistics, debt-servicing getting more money in the proposed budget than capital expenditure, unemployment at an all-time high, etc. Not that anyone needed to be told, to be honest. Except perhaps people who may have just dropped in from space. Even if we don’t know the actual figures, we all feel some pressure. At the very least, you know someone or have family members not doing so good. What’s eerie is the fact that my planned introduction for this week was a mirror of what I wrote last year which I’d forgotten about.
Anyhow, Christmas is still days away. I’ll try to lighten up, hopefully next week. I’ll try to make you laugh, even if it’s the ‘you gotta cry to laugh’ variety à la Peter Enahoro. Happy Yuletide celebrations. Go, and be merry by yourself.
What are you listening to?
Once in a while, I complain about music, usually about the x-rated nature of the musical videos on TV. While not much appears to have changed on that front, I’m giving it a rest, for now. But my attention was drawn to a conversation about the lyrics of some songs”.
This again was the opening to an article of the same title in this column of December 17, 2017. It just so happened that something similar happened when my attention was drawn to another conversation about another song’s lyrics on Twitter by Feyi Fawehinmi (doubleEph). The song? The very catchy and motivational, Able God by Chinko Ekun, Zlatan and Lil Kesh. The chorus sounds very positive and I wouldn’t be very surprised if it makes its way into churches’ praise and worship, especially this Yuletide.
However, it’s the third verse sung by Zlatan that has the problematic lines which are allegedly references to the online scam called ‘yahoo-yahoo’ or ‘419’. Those lines include, “Buy laptop”, “quickly connect”, “quickly collect” and “buy house in Lekki”.
Speaking of songs, one of these days, I’ll talk about Kizz Daniel and Davido’s One Ticket and other tracks that propagate the misconception of women being perennial gold-diggers.
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