Lekki Conservation Centre, Lagos

I visited Lekki Conservation Centre in 2014 but I hardly remember much from that visit. Maggie, suggested we visit last week and it was such good fun. 

The entire centre stands on about 78 hectares. It is open every day but on Mondays. To visit, you'll need to make a reservation online. We didn't know this, by the time we got to the gate, the guard asked if we had made a reservation. He insisted that we do before he let us in.

Sisterhood and life lessons

I was up late last night reflecting and would like to share experiences of the two ladies in my life I cannot do without. Their experiences have taught me some life lessons which might be relevant to you too.

One of my sisters was put in a corner last year where she had the option of resigning or asking in the 'nicest possible way' to be retained. This was a job that drained the life out of her. She hardly had a life outside work as she worked crazy hours. There was generally no job security as she worked under someone who was quite impulsive. As an outsider, this was my observation.

Ill treatment by the Nigerian Police

So my sister, Odachi Abah was featured earlier this week on this post. But yesterday,  08.10.2014, she got asaulted by a Police woman in Lagos.

I was having lunch with a friend when a picture came into my phone. I screamed and my friend with whom I was having lunch kept asking what the matter was. I simply showed her the picture, she became so filled with rage. It was a picture from my sister with a caption: ‘ I was assaulted by a Police woman this afternoon’. It didn’t look good! I tried to speak to her but she could not talk, she was at the Police station, the unit where the woman in question works. She went to file a complaint.

Eventually Odachi wrote her account of the assault below:

"On the 8^th of October 2014 I got assaulted by a Police Woman. This is what happened. 

On my way home after my NYSC clearance from Oshodi-Isolo LGA, Lagos State, Nigeria, with a friend, Maduka Benson, our vehicle (Maduka was driving) entered a hole which pulled part of the car bumper out. The Police woman controlling traffic kept shouting at us so my friend driving was trying to tell her that our bumper had pulled out, but she insisted that he moves away from there. A gentle man asked my friend not to drive or the entire bumper would pull off the car. He crossed to the other side and helped us fix the bumper so we could move on.

Up and About Nigeria - rejoinder

From my last post, I got a very detailed reply via e-mail from a friend. Waking up to that was such an amazing thing, that I decided to write a follow up post with his comments. 

I say a very big thank you to all of you who follow my blog and come here to read whatever it is I have to write. Please keep the comments coming, they make it all worthwhile :-)

That was a very great piece by Ene and I thought I should lend my thoughts to some points she raised. Yes, Nigeria just reached her centenary year as an entity and quite frankly, many aspects of her nationhood leaves a lot to be desired. However, there are many contributing factors to this and I feel obliged to respond to two main issues: History and the state of historical artefacts. I would not mention much about the economic aspect as that can be an article on its own. What I may want to clear up is that Nigeria was not referred to as a ‘giant of Africa’ because we had actually attained that status. It was in recognition of its enormous POTENTIAL in terms of population and material resources that gave us the moniker. We were just ‘work-in-progress’.