Ruyi's World of Books & Stories

Yesterday I spent my whole morning with the police trying to locate a young Kenyan man who went missing. The fellow had developed hallucinations a few days ago after a friend told him that his young girlfriend in Kenya was seen with another man.  He soon started complaining of seeing snakes, could not sleep, woke up the following day and later came home dropped by an ambulance. He has two other roommates who are rarely at home and no one knew the extent of this condition.  On Thursday night, he had asked one of the roommates to take him to a church to get a Bible but they ended up at Wal-Mart where they eventually bought the Bible. On Friday morning, no one knew where he had left his car, and he had not gone to work either since Wednesday. Yesterday morning one of the roommates called me and said John is missing. Apparently, they had stayed up till 3 in the morning guarding him from leaving the house but they fell asleep. Then he then got the chance to escape. The roommate...

Prayer is a cordial and orderly interaction between a man and his Creator. You are at liberty to discuss whatever you feel is urgent or important with God during the exchange. As you grow in this dialogue, your friendship with God grows. You can only interact with God for your own good and benefit. The lesser you communicate with God, the farther you get from His divine supply. Men who tag along with God are larger than life.  God earnestly desires to talk to us and spend time with us through prayers. When we come to the Lord we can be certain that he is not reluctant to help us, but He is ever ready to bless us. Luke 11 verses 9-10: “So I say unto: Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, he who seeks finds and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.” In this process, one pours out his mind expectantly and with the assurance that God is listening. God approves by granting our requ...

Nigeria, a potentially great country with abundant resources. The land is vast with different tribes and languages. A great country, pregnant with the solution to the predicament of many African nations and the world at large. Once upon a time giant of Africa, the country that have brought peace to many African country, a country with a great treasures but eaten up by a deadly canker-worm called poverty, corruption, bad governance, impu nity and hopelessness. I am optimistic, patriotic and yet realistic enough to know that the canker-worm has eaten deeply into the fabrics of this country. A country though blessed, but yet not satisfied. A great man lamented vehemently in the following lines: "Our inheritance is turned to stranger. Our houses to aliens. We have drunken our water for money. Our wood is sold unto us." This is the condition of this country. We lack what we have and want what we need. Though we have raw materials, we cannot produce. And what we pro...

In 2014, during the attempted constitution amendment process, NASS granted autonomy to LGAs, however, 23 states and their state governors and house of assemblies opposed LGA autonomy. Only Oyo, Ogun, Anambra, Adamawa, Nasarawa, Plateau, Kogi, Lagos, Ebonyi, Benue, Abia, Niger and Kwara supported the idea. That was how LGA autonomy died. I am sure by today, if the process is repeated, many of the previous supporters above will oppose it too. More than 90% of the thirty-six states will likely collapse if LGAs are granted the kind of autonomy they desire. What do I mean? The reason why states like Kano, Rivers, Delta, Sokoto, Imo, Ekiti and in fact a majority of the Nigerian state governments are still surviving today is because of their access to LGA funds. The reason why many Nigerian states can still pay salaries and execute projects is because they have been able to strangulate the LGAs within their domain. This is wrong but it has become our reality. The LGA as a third tier...

Details emerging from Tuesday's ambush in northeast Nigeria suggest the death toll is higher than initially reported. More than 50 people were killed in a  Boko Haram  ambush on an oil exploration team in northeast  Nigeria  earlier this week, multiple sources told AFP news agency on Thursday, warning the death toll could rise. Tuesday's attack in the Magumeri area of Borno state on a convoy of specialists from the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) was the group's deadliest in months. It underscored the persistent threat posed by Boko Haram fighters, despite government claims they were a spent force, and also the risks associated with the hunt for crude in the volatile Lake Chad basin. Details of the ambush, which was initially thought to be a kidnapping attempt, have been slow to emerge and an exact death toll difficult to establish, as the military strictly controls access to rural Borno. Telecommunications and other infrastructur...

I just wonder how many Nigerians have taken their tongue to count their teeth lately? If they did, calmly and dispassionately, without the emotive effusion that often beclouds the intellect of even ordinarily reasonable men and women, they would find that if care is not taken soon and i mean very soon their country could become a toothless bull dog. The unthinkable would happen Nigeria would disintegrate. The Not Negotiable would be negotiated. While the focus is on Nnamdi Kanu, IPOB and Ndigbo and their agitation for or against Biafra, a geographical minority in relation to the rest of the country, the Northern Elders Forum, a behemoth led by stalwarts beside whom Kanu would be a small boy, have declared the "readiness of the North to break up Nigeria."  From the cowards and docile elements, the Facebook pontiffs whose stock in logic is the easy resort to insult and abuse, and the others who find Kanu, IPOB and Ndigbo a soft and easy target, I have not heard a whim...

I am not cursing you; I am wishing you what I wish myself every year. I therefore repeat, may you have a hard time this year, may there be plenty of troubles for you this year! If you are not so sure what you should say back, why not just say, ‘Same to you’? I ask for no more. Our successes are conditioned by the amount of risk we are ready to take. Earlier on today I visited a local farmer about three miles from where I live. He could not have been more than fifty-five, but he said he was already too old to farm vigorously. He still suffered, he said, from the physical energy he displayed as a farmer in his younger days. Around his hut were two pepper bushes. There were Coco yams growing round him. There were snail shells which had given him meat. There must have been more around the banana trees I saw. He hardly ever went to town to buy things. He was self-sufficient. The car or the bus, the television or the telephone, the newspaper, Vietnam or Red China were nothing to him. H...

The Abu Dhabi Government that owned Etisalat pulled the company out of Nigeria last week and gave the Nigerian ex-partners 7 days to change its name and drop its Trade name. That has been complied with. Etisalat Nigeria changed the name this past week. The news information about this I monitored on my travel to Dubai on the local news which indicated that the Nigerian Etisalat claimed it invested over $20 billion on equipment and facilities in Nigeria. The news Analyst from Dubai Business New Network TV insisted that it is not possible. The parent company invested $13 billion in Gulf Area to attract over 40 million subscribers, with high world class services , how can Etisalat Nigeria invest $20 billion for 22 million subscribers with epileptic services and a debt ridden company? The Abu Dhabi home office is struggling to remove the negative effect of the news on the company's stock market performance. It is being very difficult because the numbers are not adding up. The ques...

Scandinavia, Britain, France, Netherlands, India, China, the US - everyone is in a scramble to announce the end of fuel-powered cars by 2040 and so on. Everyone is announcing that every car on their roads will be green by 2040. Only electric cars. No more petrol and diesel cars. Many of my friends, who still are yet to come to terms with just how terrible the psychology of Nigeria's political elite is, have been agonizing. They are worried about what happens to an oil-dependent, monocultural economy like Nigeria when all the buyers of her oil go green and her oil pretty much becomes useless. Well, I can tell you for sure that from Aso Rock to the National Assembly, to Governors, down the ladder to the most inconsequential member of the political class - you can add the socioeconomic elite too - they are already thinking and planning ahead for the advent of electric cars in 2040. They are just not thinking the way you are thinking. If you do a laundry list of the solutio...

On Sunday the 23rd of July 2017 I paid a courtesy call to the supreme leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra(IPOB) Mazi Nnamdi Kanu in Umahia, Abia state. The thick mushroom cloud that my visitation engineered is still permeating the political skies of Northern Nigeria. The empire dogs are jeering while lovers of freedom and liberty are cheering. It's hard to predict when the rumbling cheers and jeers of my solidarity visit to one of the most courageous and foresighted Nigerian and leader of IPOB will cease. The ultra-conservative elements and oligarchic beneficiaries of a skewed cum dysfunctional unitary system baptized and labeled a federal system are hysterically yet unsuccessfully trying to throw the kitchen on me and divert attention to most mundane issues. Their bait is too pedestrian for me to swallow like brainless turkeys happy for Christmas. IPOB's takes are:Nigeria is an unhappy matrimonial home full of ruckus;colonial masters that engineered the political...

Those interested in the dustbin of Nigeria's history will one day find APC inside the rubble, among the putrefaction, just beside PDP, and bring out her carcass for examination. Such students of the dustbin of history will likely conclude that APC's signature contribution to the Nigerian tragedy is not in the empirical failure to deliver on measurable electoral promises in virtually all areas of national life but in the deadening of the Nigerian mind. A nation's mind is lost when the capacity for ironic sentience dies. And no group of Nigerians, at any moment in our chequered national history, has contributed more to the assassination of irony than the confederacy of parochial interests in the leadership of APC. If blindness to irony stopped within the ranks of APC's leadership, if it was limited to Governors, Senators, Reps, and other political figures within her ranks, I wouldn't be so worried. It would be their funeral. I am not in the habit of shedding...

Three failed attempts so far to pick up a few things I need at Shoprite. Each occasion, I see a sea of shoppers massed at the pay points. The queues are so so so very long, with orbs of Nigerian chaos in places along the way. It's almost like the faithful circling Kaaba. I am not going to spend an hour or more waiting in line to pay for items I can still pick up from Iya Biliki of Alanamu in her roadside store. I am not thinking of the killing that shoprite is making in this land. I am thinking of the sociology of the crowd that has abandoned Iya Biliki of Alanamu for the aisles of Shoprite. You look at those very long lines waiting to pay: 99.9% are single-item shoppers. One loaf of bread, you go to Shoprite; one pack of Indomie, you go to Shoprite; one apple, you go to shoprite; one tomtom, you go to shoprite. At the pay point, the two-kilometre queues are a wonderful spectacle of red shopping baskets and shopping carts containing a single item. Although I have thus f...