Pages

Saturday, February 27, 2016

Hollywood's Whitewashing & Blackballing


I recently saw this funny commentary done on the Last Week Tonight Show with John Oliver. Smart way of questioning controversies in a comical manner, if you ask me.

A white dude playing a blackman - Uugh!
If you never saw it watch the video below, its very expository and eye-opening!


Wow...I guess there's really a lot more than meets the eye. Even the news didn't seem to say it this much!

Friday, February 26, 2016

The Rise of the Dollar and the Price of Akara


They said the value of the naira is falling.

I ignored it and refused to worry myself over it. I’m usually good at that – ignoring issues that would give other people sleepless nights and high blood pressure - after all, life must go on...unless you have a death wish. God knows I don’t!

So, I wasn’t buggered about the naira devaluation for a while until the morning I went to buy me some Akara for breakfast.

Akara – that traditional fried bean cake that’s a darling to the appetite of every Nigerian, the one true snack or meal that brings Nigerians of all classes together. When you happen upon an Akara joint which in many cases is just a woman sitting at some street corner frying and selling Akara, you get to see customers from all these different categories. Akara has this strong uncontestable and distinct aroma that even puff-puff (another Nigerian favourite) cannot rival. If you ever buy it and want to hide it from colleagues at work, the sweet smell will snitch on you; everyone will notice Akara is in the house.

Okay, so before I wander too far, I was talking about naira falling…what has this got to do with Akara?

Well, there’s this buoyant Akara Joint not far from my office where I work and its owned by this Calabar or Igbo woman and her friend or sister. They sell both Akara and Pap of which some people eat right there (there were benches and tables for that purpose) while others buy take-away to their offices.

Akara and Puff puff sharing the same tray. Akara is the bigger one.


The Akara was usually sold 10 naira per piece. This meant that with 50 naira, you could buy 5 pieces; enough to eat with bread or with any other accompanying food item that goes well with Akara. So people were shocked when they got there one morning to hear that Akara was now 3 for 50 naira.

Why?

Because dollar now costs more.

We (the customers) all began to question how on earth the dollar is affecting Akara, one of the cheapest things anybody could buy and eat. It became a fact-finding discussion and we learnt that it was the groundnut oil being used to fry that had gone up in cost.

I was baffled. Groundnut oil? Are we still importing groundnut oil? Don’t we make that here in Naija?

So we threw up another suggestion – why not use palm oil then? Isn’t that made in Nigeria?
The suggestion lingered in the air like a rhetoric as no one answered it.

Later on I got wind of another info that made me fall flat - that we import beans and that the cost of beans had gone up. For real? I thought we grew beans? As at the time of writing this I cannot yet confirm the truth of this info though.

Meanwhile, there’s another Akara joint nearer to my office which is the off-shoot of a small Moimoi specialist restaurant called No Left Overs which suddenly changed their own price of 10 naira per piece of Akara to 50 naira per 3 pieces last year before the dollar issue arose. They had been having high patronage but for some reason they decided to hike the price and reduce the size of the Akara. This made me and many other customers shift to patronizing the Calabar woman whose Akara was way bigger and sold for 10 naira per piece.

Now the naira has fallen and she has switched the price too.

Anyway, the Calabar woman is still preferable because she managed to make the Akara slightly bigger since its now 50 naira per 3 piece. I’m now wondering what No Left Overs will end up doing about its Akara, now that dollar has gone up. Will they start selling it 20 naira per piece?

As for me, I’m still baffled…I still don’t get how Akara is affected by the dollar.




Friday, February 19, 2016

Seven Types of Women to Beware Of in Ministry

I came across this interesting article by Pastor Joe McKeever. I think anybody who is just starting  or is already in a ministry should read it.


For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and smoother than oil is her speech.” (Proverbs 4:3)

Before there was a folk singer by that name, James Taylor was a professor of preaching. This veteran teacher of preachers held forth in classrooms at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary for many years. One day, in a room filled with young preacher boys, Dr. Taylor cautioned us about the temptations we would be facing.

“The day will come when a woman will sit in your office and proposition you. She will make herself available to you sexually. If your marriage is in trouble or if you are not up-to-date in your relationship with your Lord, you could get in big trouble fast.”

I raised my hand. “Dr. Taylor,” I said, “do you really believe that every one of us in this room will face this?” My mind was incapable of imagining a scenario in which a woman–any woman–would sit in a pastor’s office and try to seduce him.

“Yes, I do,” he said. “Even you, McKeever.”

That got a laugh.

I lived to see that day. (Fifteen years after she sat in my office making herself available to the young preacher, while preaching in another state, I spotted that woman and her husband–the same husband whose antics had given her cause to seek my counsel originally–in the congregation. I was thankful I had gotten this thing right in my office that day.)

The writer of Proverbs tried to do the same thing Dr. Taylor did for us in seminary that day: prepare the young lad for what he would be facing down the road.

“My son, give attention to my wisdom, incline your ear to my understanding;

That you may observe discretion, and your lips may reserve knowledge.

For the lips of an adulteress drip honey, and smoother than oil is her speech; But in the end she is bitter as wormwood, sharp as a two-edged sword.

Her feet go down to death, her steps lay hold of Sheol. She does not ponder the path of life; her ways are unstable, she does not know it.” (Proverbs 4:1-6)

Many pastors have paid the ultimate price for sexual sins.
If temptation would tell the truth, no minister would ever succumb to its enticements. If the allurement to commit adultery would adhere to a “truth in advertising” code, the “full disclosure” would read something like this:

“Subject needs to understand that by crossing this line and entering into a sexual relationship with this person, the minister will be despising His Lord, delighting the enemy, violating his marriage vows, disappointing everyone who ever believed in him from his youth until now, destroying his family, and ending his ministry..”

No one would ever commit adultery if he was required to sign that!

The devil, however, has no intention of ever revealing a list of side effects. Listen to him and you would think to disobey God is the way to fulfillment and happiness.

The sinning minister fools himself into believing all kinds of lies, most of them originating with the one Jesus called “the father of lies” (John 8:44). He convinces himself that “I deserve this, no one will ever know, I can have all the wonderful things in my life and this forbidden fruit also,” and then, there is the clincher–“This feels so good, it can’t be wrong.”

Too late does he find out the truth of the old adage, that sin will take you farther than you wanted to go, keep you longer than you wanted to stay, and cost far more than you ever intended to pay.

Here are 7 women, pastor should watch out for in your ministry.

1) The woman who wants to be your wife.
She is unhappily married. Her husband has disappointed her in a hundred ways. Sitting in church week after week, it occurs to her that you are everything she has ever wanted in a husband. You are kind and gracious, thoughtful and spiritual. You love the Lord and are devoted to your family. You earn a good living and you do not drink or smoke or hang out in bars. So, she fixates on you.

Now, if she were rational, she would know that by seducing you–or winning you, however she would put it–all of those wonderful qualities she admires would suddenly go away: your ministry, your family, your income, the respect with which you are held in the town, your joy in life even.

In most cases, she thinks clearly enough not to actually try to break up your marriage (although that has happened often enough). She merely feels a strong attraction to you and puts herself in a position for you to pick up on it. Consciously or unconsciously, she becomes a trap for the unsuspecting minister.

2) The woman who wants to be your mother.
She will smother you with attention, inundate you with goodies she cooked “just because I knew you liked these,” and make life miserable for you. If you never suffered from claustrophobia before, you do now.

It’s not so much that she poses a sexual danger to you as that by allowing and encouraging this attention from her, you will give occasion to gossips to ply their trade. Avoiding “the appearance of evil” is always a good principle (I Thessalonians 5:22).

3) The woman who wants to be your lover.
This one has a particular allurement to the minister whose relationship with his wife has grown  stale. This really is the woman the Proverb-writer describes. And, in case one wonders, I seriously doubt that Solomon wrote this. The man with 1,000 girlfriends is in no position to offer such advice as we find in Proverbs 4! (Although he surely knew the truth of it!)

Such a woman seems to be amoral, without a sense of wrongness about anything she does. She justifies making herself available to the minister by statements such as: “You deserve this,” “God wants all of us to be happy, don’t you agree?” and “No one ever has to know; I certainly won’t tell.”

The thing to keep in mind, pastor, is that this woman making herself so available to you with no strings attached–that’s what she says, although we know better!–does not look like a Jezebel, painted and padded and bejeweled. You will not know her by her adornments.

She may be the pretty wife of  a deacon, the friend of your wife, or a church member who came to you for counsel. No one would ever pick her out of a crowd as a party-girl. But she is your biggest enemy.

4) The woman who wants to be your best friend.
She wants to confide in you as to who is doing what with whom in the church. She is a gossip.

She wants you to (ahem) “feel free to come to me anytime you need to talk to someone.” She wants to be your counselor.

In order to pull that off, her primary tactic involves a) spending a lot of time around you, perhaps volunteering in the office but more likely volunteering as your personal assistant, b) telling you intimate things about her own life, and c) asking you to unburden yourself with her.

If she cannot worm her way into your life any other way, look for her to befriend your wife and begin showing up in your home on a regular basis. Unless your wife is on your team, nothing about this is good from that moment on.

5) The woman you want.
There she is, the girl of your dreams. Maybe not the most beautiful woman in the world, but all things considered–her looks, her personality, her laughter, her spirituality, and a few other qualities that defy description–she is everything you ever wanted in a woman.

You get all swimmy-headed around her. You wonder if she does not pick up on all the vibrations your body is sending out.

There are a few problems, of course. You’re married and she’s married, for starters. And so you wisely tell yourself this can never be, that regardless of how wonderful she is, she is off-limits to you.

The problem is you keep being drawn to her and thrown with her (committees, work projects, etc). Because proximity fosters intimacy, unless you do something quickly, you are a goner.

In most cases, you cannot tell your wife this. You need a mentor who will be tough with you. If you have none, find yourself one now! Confide in him before you make the mistake of your life.

6) The woman who doesn’t know what she wants.
In most cases, this mixed up lady has come to you for counsel, asking you to tell her what to do. You listen to her whole complex life story.

Nothing about her is your ideal. You have never fantasized about her or anyone like her.

So, how does she become a problem to you? By her repeated visits to your office.

It’s a matter of focus. In sketching perhaps a hundred thousand people over these many years, I’ve found that everyone has a certain beauty and attractiveness about them. By focusing on the individual and not comparing them with anyone else, we can see it.  In the seclusion of the counseling room, as she unburdens herself with intimate details of her life, the minister may feel emotionally drawn to her.

The problem then becomes you, pastor, and not her.

Pastors should almost never become professional counselors. When church members come to you for help with problems, if it cannot be solved in a session or two, refer them to a trained professional.

Pastor Ed Young of Houston’s Second Baptist Church told some of us pastors once that we should not counsel at all. “All you need is for someone–man, woman, or child–to run out of the office accusing you of something, and your ministry is gone!”

He’s right. Pastor Young said when someone says to him following a church service, “I need to talk to you sometime,” he says,”Let’s sit in this pew right now and talk.” It’s in public and it will be done quickly.

I hate that life has come to this, but it has, and we have to deal with it.

7) The woman you work most closely with in ministry.
Once again, it’s a matter of focus. The minister of worship meets with the organist (or pianist or his personal assistant or whoever) on a regular basis to plan the services. The youth minister has frequent conferences with his secretary or a young woman in the church who assists in programming. The pastor meets with his children’s director or ministry assistant or the head of the women’s ministry or the chair of his personnel or finance committee.

Beware, minister. You must be proactive in heading off any possibility of a compromised situation.

Billy Graham decided early in his ministry never to be alone with a woman at any time. Some might find that extreme, but say what you will, his long and very public evangelistic ministry was never tainted in the least by sexual scandal or innuendo.

The most important woman in the church to you the minister.

Your wife must be your lover, your intimate friend, your best adviser and strongest counselor, and your “mother” (the one who cooks your favorite dishes and is always there for you).

Let the home fires get cold and you are setting yourself up for trouble, pastor. This is why the writer of Proverbs urged the young man he was mentoring to “drink water from your own cistern, and fresh water from your own well.”  He says, “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth” (Proverbs 4:15-23).

A pastor I know makes frequent mention of his wife from the pulpit. He makes it abundantly clear that he loves her dearly and, may I say, you get the impression that their intimate relationship is strong. He makes sure the church knows and supports his devotion to his wife and family, which means (among other things) that his off-time is as holy as his time in the office.

When he counsels women in his office, my pastor friend takes care. The door has a small window which allows anyone to see inside. At an agreed-upon time, his assistant phones to allow him an excuse to end the session. He is not a hugger.

Resist the devil by being strong in the Lord!

Source

Nuff said!

Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Olajumoke's Public Speaking: Exploitation in View?


Just as Ayo Shonaiya (if he really said it) said in the last post, it has begun!

Oljumoke Orisaguna has not lactated, but they have started milking her already!

Why?

Apparently, people are begining to milk this poor fortunate girl for their own gains because I don't understand how you are going to get a girl who was selling bread and doesn't even speak English a few months ago to do public speaking.

The even tagged her 'Motivational Speaker' on this poster. Do these guys understand what Motivational speaking entails?

I say this because I have done public speaking before and I know that its important to know how to deliver speeches that won't bore your audience.

Me suspects that she'd probably end up being used for window dressing or just a means of drawing crowd to the event.

Is Olajumoke ready for all this? All this exposure can really backfire if not controlled. Rather than put her all out on the spot, they should be thinking of helping to school her or refine her as Sujimoto planned to do for her.

Olajumoke needs prayers oh...before she falls into the wrong hands!

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

On Ayo Shonaiya's Concerns on Olajumoke Orisaguna's Breakthrough...

I came across this article that featured on Snitchngr.com which was said to have been written by Nigerian Film maker and promoter Ayo Shonaiya on his Facebook page. Though I was unable to find anything like that on Facebook as it was claimed to have been culled from, the piece was however interesting and insightful.

The article surrounded the story of Olajumoke Orisaguna who was catapulted from grass to grace by accidentally photobombing a photo shoot being done for Rap artiste Tinie Tempah.

Her story is heavily trending with serious follow-ups on her progress hitting entertainment/showbiz tabloids and blogs.

Ayo Shonaiya
In the midst of all the razzmatazz, glitz and glamour, Ayo Shonaiya fears that there may be some things that could be dangerously overlooked and I very much agree with him.

There was a statement where he was said to have mentioned that in his line of work, he looks where no one else is looking. Now I liked that because its one thing I always try to do on blogosphere. I could relate with what he said very much because my line of work also had to do with working with models and artistes of all kinds from time to time. What he said was very on-point.

Check out the article if you haven't read it:
At the risk of sounding like a hater, I am genuinely nervous as I read and watch this amazing story of a bread seller, who unknowingly strolls into a Tinie Tempah photoshoot, caught the eye of photographer TY Bello, and almost overnight becomes a global talking point. I must say also, that I absolutely love it.
This type of story gladdens everyone’s heart and serves as inspiration to millions of people that despite your current situation, your good fortune is just round the corner and never loses hope in life.
But, I can’t help but look beyond the fairytale and feel a sense of apprehension at the same time. In my line of work, my job is to look where no one else is looking when it comes to negotiating contracts, maximising earning potential for talent, and pretty much protect such talent, and I pray to God there’s someone doing that for this girl. I have discovered and developed raw talent in my time, some from unknown status to superstardom.

I have met others half way in their progression and developed together, but one thing I’ve never done is base anything on sentiment or “eeeyah”, or “Na only Baba God o…” etc, I am sometimes the one to bring up the unpleasant reality, the reality no one understands until years later.
But I always feel it’s best to understand the whole picture and be prepared for whatever happens next.
When I saw that this Olajumoke girl couldn’t even speak or read English, my first concern was she’s going to be bewildered by a lot of things, especially in the fashion and modelling world in Nigeria. Then the sudden fame and spotlight, which often times can confuse ‘experienced’ talent. There’s also the clamour for her time, makeovers, interviews, and of course the good stuff, endorsements, jobs, goodwill offers and donations (I hear she has 2 kids already).
I’ve seen her take pictures, holding up a Contract (which I hope has been explained to her well as she can’t read it), then the makeovers with heavy make up and lipstick (she looks nothing like the sweet girl we all fell in love with).

Forgive me I’m not a designer o, seeing her dressed in some shine shine outfits, I start to wonder, firstly I hope she’s getting paid well at least, and secondly, most people are only absorbing her story, as most of us don’t really know much about characteristics that suggest a great modelling career.
I really do hope and pray that, whatever happens to Olajumoke from now on, she is well protected.
The fashion and modelling industry (in Nigeria or anywhere in the world) can be the worst place you wanna be when “they” decide you’re no longer happening or trending, or worse, not useful anymore.
You wanna bet that some other models are already beefing her already? And another thing, when the same people who are “tapping into her anointing” now, start to write really disgusting and hurtful comments about her (anonymously of course) on blogs because her own is now getting too much, I hope she has a strong support system in the people that really love and care for her. But for now, Olajumoke ride on and God bless you.
Anyway, that’s my own. Me too I need to go and sell my proverbial bread in the market.” - From Facebook acct of Ayo Shonaiya   

Like I said earlier, this article was claimed to have featured on Ayo Shonaiya's Facebook page but on visiting there, I saw no such thing there; in fact his last entry on the account was on March 10, 2015. So where did this post come from? Was it mentioned on somebody elses page or comment section? If it was then this report was not done properly. I just hope its not a fake story.

Nevertheless, a lot mentioned in there made a lot of sense. Olajumoke needs to be protected....moreso, she needs prayers that will preserve her testimony.


I'm Back....


Distractions...distractions...distractions.

They keep coming like a horde of attacking apes reminiscent of classic scenes from the unforgetable Planet of the Apes franchise.

Distractions...distractions...distractions.

They rear their ugly head and take me on some lost trip making me forget what made me tick, what oiled my gears of creativity and how productive it had been.

Distractions...distractions...distractions.

They almost made me decide not to come here again, not to do the one thing that keeps adrenaline surging through my fingers to churn out features and fiction that made me realise what I'm very capable of.

Distractions cease....because my attarction is rekindled

Distractions begone...because Afronuts is back to his blog...and Twitter...and now on instagram as @maestrokush!!


Oh...Happy New Year anyone...everyone!