It was a glorious and beautiful day. I woke up at 5.00am and got ready to go out by 5.30am. Actually, I didn’t sleep deep that night because one sentence kept reverberating in my head through the night

Walk for Light!

I ran to my mentor’s room to find out if he was ready and soon after we set out for the airport (Omagwa International airport, Port Harcourt). We had had a great time that weekend starting from saturday. We landed in Port Harcourt around 6 pm and went straight to Presidential Hotel from the airport for “Purple Night”. A event with over 700 people in attendance. My mentor spoke powerfully at the event and I met a few friends and members of my team there. It was a fun-filled event.

On Sunday, we went to church and then had to do 2 seminars on Holidays and Cash in the evening. My team in Port Harcourt were already having seminars at Little Africa Restaurant, Woji Road, GRA, Port Harcourt by 4pm and we needed to be there to support them. After which we moved to Landmark Hotels to hold another seminar for an older, larger team. I also took a trip into town to see my babe’s sister’s family and didn’t get back till quite late. I eventually went to bed in the wee hours of the morning all the while thinking about what the next day(Monday) held in store.

Me at "Walk for Light"

I had been waiting in earnest anticipation for the “Walk for Light” day. We had been told earlier that we’d march on protest to the governor’s office in church and that August 12 or so would be the date. This was announced around May/June. August came and went and nothing happened. I was beginning to think that the leadership of my church (Daystar Christian Center) were growing cold feet with respect to taking responsibility for our underdevelopment and lack of good leadership in this Nation.

The church has proved to be very passive and irresponsible in my view in the last few decades with respect to the emergence of a New Nigeria. They have neglected their responsibility to take action and substituted it for making long and ineffective prayers for God to do what they should do.

Statistics have it that 45million Nigerians go to church every sunday. That is all the critical mass needed to change a Nation of 140million people if they would only take responsibility. The church had taken a back seat too long and were becoming irrelevant as opposed to light shining in darkness.

On the backdrop of this, I felt my own church even though it has shown what church is supposed to be by engaging in empowerment and community development on a large scale, was retreating in the face of imminent confrontation. That is why when it was announced that the walk would happen on Monday, October 19 by 10am, I was ecstatic. Finally, we are going to let the world know that we don’t agree with the black state of our Nation (epileptic power supply) and we were going to do something about it.

Rev Sam Adeyemi, Pst Nike Adeyemi, Pst Godman and other ministers at Daystar's "walk for light"

So, that was the reason why I was so restless knowing that I was far removed from the site of the walk. We got an early flight that day though we missed the first one out of PH and I almost ran through the arrival lounge pushing my luggage trolley. Since we landed at Murtala Domestic Airport in Lagos, I had been communicating with a couple of friends who were already gathered at the church venue for the commencement of the walk. My mentor and a friend who I travelled with kept making fun of me as they saw my eagerness to get united with other Walkers for Light.

We got into the car quickly that came to pick us at the airport and told the driver directly that he should do his diligence to get us as close as possible to the walkers since we had already found out that the walk had commenced. We caught up with the first set of walkers around Radio busstop, Obafemi Awolowo way in Ikeja, jumped out of the car and immediately joined the nearest platoon of walkers.

We stood out as the odd ones for a while because we had no “Walk for Light” t -shirts which had been handed out to everyone to wear before the commencement of the march. We chanted and sang songs demanding for Light and expressing our sorrow, discontent and disapproval of the current situation of lack of power in the country. Many people laughed at us, some encouraged us, others wandered at us and some where disgusted at us.

Light walkers at the Governor's office in Alausa

We couldn’t care less. We were on a march for light. After all, we were the light of the world and the least we could do was “Walk for light”. We caused quite a traffic jam because over 4,000 people turned up for the walk. What amazed me the most was that people took time off from their regular jobs to participate in the walk.

Finally, I started feeling in my heart that

Maybe we are on our way to change after all.

Maybe the church is recognising that if only they’d get involved and committed to the New Nigeria project, it would move from being a mere dream to a reality our eyes will see in our own lifetime.

Anyway, by and large we got to the governor’s office in Alausa and expressed our compelling reason for marching in protest.

Let there be Light

Afterall, that was God’s first creation on earth.

If we must therefore rebuild a Nigeria that has become void and lacks any sensible form whatsoever, our first assignment must be

LET THERE BE LIGHT.

The inauguration of the 44th and 1st black president of the United States of America was realised on the 20th of January, this year. With regards to America’s standing as the leader of the free world, it was imperative that most countries that had foreign missions in America would have been represented at the inauguration one way or another. To buttress this, invitations were sent to such countries to have their delegates ably represented at the event. Nigeria, by default also got an invitation. We are the most populous black nation and the fifth largest seller of crude oil to the U.S. It would have been quite surprising if we weren’t invited.

As if that was not honour enough, I learn’t that some state governors decided to go and witness history being made live. One can only hope that they were not just fascinated about Obama’s glory but that they would have critically observed his story and will take actionable steps to implement positive change in their various states.

Anyway, the governors are not my concern. Everyone has a free will to take 1 or 2 days off to be part of history. What I read concerning our foreign delegation is what irks me. President Barack Obama who was sworn in on that day has since started work in earnest. Signing in documents into law, meeting with members of staff of the white house and his cabinet, dealing with the shutting of Guantanamo bay, addressing the way forward in Afghanistan and so on. Our own foreign mission representatives headed by Ojo Madueke are yet to return from the United States.

I really am not angry at them after thinking through deeply. Afterall, you can’t acheive history like that in Nigeria and just let it go so unceremoniously. Firstly, since the gods have finally accepted our prayers, they must be duely appeased with all sorts of sacrifices and festivities. Also, God almighty needs to be given the praise for allowing it to happen, so we need to give him loads of praise and worship with a few popular bands (about 2o) declaring these praises for a few days. Also, since of course, the president would have become president on the platform of a particular party, that party would have to host the president to a high profile success party with the party executives in attendance where the monies spent earlier on other celebrations are re-spent and a lot more noise made through the media, musicians and so on. And because the president is from some local area in the country, then his community must host him to another party where the traditional ruler and high chiefs of his local community can congratulate him in person and where ordinary citizens from the area can catch a live glimpse of their “brother” who has just become president.

Unfortunately, all these didn’t happen in the U.S. though our foreign mission must have booked for about 2 weeks in their hotels not expecting that all will be over so soon. It may be also that I’m wrong. Possibly, the foreign mission delegates might just have thought to themselves,

“since we are already in America, even though on official assignment that has elapsed, can we just convert

sometime into vacation. After all, estacode that we collected must not be returned. We must spend it

by every means possible even if we have to stay back in America for 1 month or is there any other country

that is swearing in their president or rebel leader that we can visit officially?”

I really don’t know which it is but I appeal to our representatives to please return home ASAP. Thank you for representing us. It’s time for you to come and earn your keep and add value to your country by serving to the best of your ability. America is that way because people made it so. Come back and make your country so………Deliver the future if you can, and please resign if you wouldn’t.

Very early, saturday morning,  we set out from Lagos for Abeokuta, Ogun State. Our destination was University of Agriculture, Abeokuta. The theme of the seminar was Ideas, Opportunities and Wealth. The hall was almost packed full with students desirous of learning how as students they can leverage on the ideas and opportunities available to them to generate wealth. Of course,  one of the most pressing needs they had was knowing how to source or recognise opportunities around and take advantage of them.

The seminar host/organiser, Mr Olumide Adeleye, a young,  inspiring and entrepreneural student of the university took a session on the 21st century and the relevant ideas and opportunities that exist in this age. So fluent was this speaker that I wondered why he needed external facilitators at all. In my opinion, he did justice to the topic.  Anyway, Deolu Akinyemi (CEO,Generis Solutions) came up next speaking on the same theme but from a different perspective. Deolu highlighted that to take advantage of opportunities, you need to first see those opportunities; for you to see those opportunities, you need to be tuned to them.

“Opportunities pervade our environment all the time. There is no scarcity of opportunities, but you’ll never be aware of them until you are tuned to recognise their presence.” He said.

Man has within his brain an antenna like device that is activated by different interpretations of different things in his environment. This device is called the Recticular Activation System (RAS). The RAS is what is responsible for mental balance because man is said to have access to 60,000 different signals coming into his brain per second. The RAS is what makes it possible for the human brain to filter such signals and messages to particular ones that the man requires or is willing to process immediately. The reason one’s RAS would not pick an opportunity is because he’s not tuned to it, so it’s being filtered out.”

He also let them know of some opportunities that were available at the moment. Opportunities like CV Bank, Forex trading and so on. After Deolu, came up Femi Onagoruwa (former associate editor, StockWatch magazine and presenter on Stocks on 101.5 FM). He spoke on how to maximise the very bearish Nigerian Stock Exchange and how to play in other investment opportunities. I also was invited to speak on how the CV Bank opportunity worked. Interestingly, I met a few people from my past there at the seminar. One was a friend’s younger sister. We used to be in the youth choir together in my former church. She was all grown up now and looking really beautiful and different. Coincidentally, her boyfriend had been looking for a way to get in touch with Deolu Akinyemi and since his babe knew me, he seized the opportunity to become my friend so that I can organise a smooth access to Deolu…Lol. Amazing what networks can do ei? Another was a guy who used to hawk plantain every night at a particular bus terminus not far from where my family used to stay over 10years ago. Every night, himself, his sister and brothers would carry trays loaded with plantain and go and sell them at the bus terminus till the early hours of the morning. I was so glad to see that through all that struggle, poverty and stress, he’d been able to push himself to the university. There’s no telling to what heights he’ll reach and all that had happened in the past would be juicy history.

We left UNAAB at about 5pm, but not before a few of them had signed up to the CV Bank and New Nigeria Club and set out to see my parents who incidentally reside in Abeokuta. You’ll get the rest of the gist later……….

Yesterday marked a memorable day for the online industry in Nigeria. Notable online writers or bloggers as they are popularly called from all parts of Nigeria came together at Elomaz Hotel, Maryland, Lagos to spark off a new movement in the online industry while the World Bloggers Conference was going on in Las Vegas, USA. I can hear someone ask “What exactly is blogging?” and to that I answer,

“If you are reading this now, you are reading my blog. If you still don’t understand, please indicate as a comment and I’ll get back to you”.

“Who were the bloggers represented at the conference?”

“Popular and successful bloggers like Deolu Akinyemi, Gbenga Sesan, Olumide Alabi and others”.

The conference started on a very good note with Ogho emore (www.emoreogho.com) kicking off the proceedings with a welcome message and the national prayer. Thereafter, Deolu Akinyemi introduced the agenda of the conference and the meeting swung into full beat. Already, there were seated several participants from different parts of the country in the Hall.

Deolu Akinyemi spoke on how the internet community in Nigeria though large and growing steadily, was not reckoned with internationally. In fact, he said “Nigeria is stated to have only over 9,000 registered personal web domains hosted online”. In response to this, Gbenga Sesan, Olumide Alabi and a few other people disagreed stating that most websites owned by Nigerians are paid for and opened by friends or affiliates in Malaysia, Singapore, USA, UK, Canada or Australia. As a result of this, a large percentage of Nigerian websites are not accounted for on the web as being Nigerian.

Deolu further spoke on how bloggers in Nigeria should begin to look as blogging as a more powerful tool than just writing for the fun of it.

“There are personal blogs that are more popular than CNN, do you know?” He asked.

Gbenga chipped in “CNN when they first did a review on blogging made a mockery of it and said it won’t go far. Today, the most active part of the CNN website is the blogs.”

Blogging literally swayed the view of voters in the past 2 elections in the USA. Someone said “If you want to know the undiluted truth, look it up in a blog”. Did he mean that all people wrote in their blogs was the absolute truth? No. He just was saying that if one was going to tell any truth at all, he’d probably do it more likely on his blog where he has no restrictions and no particular obligations to anybody but himself.

Of course, many bloggers around the world also make regular income from blogging. In the US, about 40 million registered personal domains exist. About 12 million of them are adults. The Nigerian online literates might not match that of America or the UK currently but millions of Nigerians, especially youths are internet literate, meaning that there’s no reason why Nigeria shouldn’t boast of at least 1 million personal registered blogs.

It used to be said that Nigerians don’t have a reading culture bla bla bla……I think that is changing big time because the more exposure you get to the internet, the more knowledgeable you can become. To confirm it, at the bloggers conference were present a few people who didn’t have blogs at all but were addicted readers of other people’s blogs. The only reason they were present at the conference was to seize an opportunity to meet some of the authors of the blogs they read consistently.

Gbenga Sesan tried to answer the question – What is Blogging? During introductions, some participants had brought up the fact that they didn’t know what blogging was all about and where at the conference to learn. Gbenga’s session served them well as he broke down as much as he could the ideology behind blogging. For him, he said he decided to start blogging when he discovered that he could influence and control what would be said about him when he left this world (died) because his blog would be alive to furnish sympathizers with information about what he stood for forever.

Olumide Alabi treated the topic – Why you should own your own website. Among many reasons, he stated that it makes you unique (it sets you apart), it increases your control (most blog hosts are restrictive to what they allow to be done with your blog). It also increases your findability.

Gbenga Ajijotan came up to educate the participants on how to make money while blogging beyond Google Adsense. He practically opened my eyes to the possibilities of earning steadily from my blog. Of course, he didn’t forget to state the most important property your blog must possess – Traffic. How to drive traffic to your blog is another topical issue for yet another post.

After Gbenga’s session, a panel constituting Deolu Akinyemi, Anu Oluwadare, Gbenga Sesan and Olumide Alabi (luminous) was convened and they answered as best as they could questions fired at them from the audience on website hosting, blogging and other related matters.

Anu Oluwadare explained to the audience the importance of RSS feeds. How bloggers and/or blog readers can maximize the use of them. RSS feeds makes it easier for people to find your blog and makes it easier for you to read your favourite authors’ blogs.

All in all, the bloggers conference was maximum fun and an epoc making event. This is the beginning of an online revolution in Nigeria. Those who take position in Nigerian blogosphere may just rule the country in a few years to come. If people are reading you, then,  they probably will listen to you.

“The only way to say it is “Thank you for the impact you have made in the lives of the people. The testimonies of yesterday, I’m sure, will be said in the next 20 years and you guys will be at the receiving end. Thanks for being a blessing to this generation. I quite appreciate.

And also for the huge cheque dropped, thank you. I know it will get better for AGESS with people like you and people like me ready to bless them with what we have.

I gat to go.”

                  - Toyin Ewuola (AGESS President)   

 Tuesday this week, I was back in my alma mater – Obafemi Awolowo University to speak to the students of Agricultural Engineering department. November, this year will make it 3 years since I left that department. I spent 7 years in that school studying for a 5-yr course. I’ll leave the gist of those 7 yrs for now…but i remember very vividly that just before I left, I opened my mouth and passionately declared

“I’ll be back in 5 years time with proof to show my lecturers and the department as a whole that it’s not what degree you graduate with that matters but what pedigree you graduate with or acquire after graduation.”

I’ll need to take you aback a little to explain to you how that statement came about but I had been invited by the Executive Council of the Agricultural Engineering Students Society to come and present a seminar to the whole department during their departmental week. I was offered this honored privilege along with a colleague who had in school been my closest pal and was also excelling uniquely in his own way.

On gaining admission into OAU, I was offered Agricultural Engineering as against Electronic/Electrical Engineering which was my first choice of course of study. I felt really cheated because I had been told that I’d get my choice of course or get Mechanical Engineering. Now, understand that the last course on my mind was Agric Engineering. I didn’t like it and couldn’t stomach the fact that i’d be tied down for 5 years studying a course I detested. To cut the long story short, I got into Agric Engineering anyway and set out to studying for the 1st year after I had alongside my parents been able to negotiate a sure release from the department with the Dean of the Faculty of Engineering and Technology, if I performed beyond a particular grade point average (GPA).

Ofcourse, I surpassed the GPA and even ended the 1st session as the best student in my class but I was not  to be released from the department under different pretexts that ranged from the department not wanting to lose it’s best student and the Dean not admitting that he had committed to letting me go to my desired department. I got really sorry and frustrated and when it seemed like I was going to be spending my 2nd yr in Agric. Engineering, decided to sit for SAT and try to get into Canada. That’s another long story I don’t really want to start in this post but suffice it to say that I performed excellently in the SATs and bettered 93% of those I did the exams with. I had good scholarship scores, but watched to see other friends of mine get scholarships and admissions and travel out with much less scores than I had.

I really had lost interest in OAU at this time and just kept on faffing all around the place. I hardly went for lectures and did my diligence to ensure that I did not perform at all or well in my continuous assessment. Needless of a talisman, you can guess that I performed absolutely woefully that session and decided to wake upt the next. So 300 level as we typically refer to 3rd session was a slow comeback to status quo.  400 level went beautifully and by 500 level, I was sure I’d graduate with my desired GPA. Towards the end of the 2nd semester of my final year, I was told that one of the courses I did in 400 level has been dropped from an A to a B grade. Now, that course had over 10 course units and had the capacity to drop my GPA from one grade level to another.

I tried to solicit the lecturers in the department stating my case passionately about their not letting my hardwork towards the end of my stay in school go to waste. After several passionate appeals and reviews and even staff meetings, they finally decided not to upgrade it to an A. To make matters worse or simpler as the case may be, I had scored in my 1st semester, final year, three 68Bs in 3 different courses. The department was unwilling to upgrade any of these courses as well. I was one of the most popular guys in my set and one of the most respected and friendly with respect to lecturers in the department, but I wasn’t treated particularly well in my own estimation. Hence, I declared with a lot of passion and emotion the statement in quote above.

Amazingly, only 3 years after, I’ve been able to live the words that I proclaimed 3 years earlier as I stood up to speak to over 150 students and lecturers of my former department about how to succeed beyond the four walls of the University. It gave me a feeling of accomplishment and joy knowing I can positively impact a department that negatively motivated me for the challenges outside the university. My lecturers would  probably have been in my success story as supporters, rather, they are there as antagonists whose hurdle I needed to overcome to succeed outside school.

I thank God that he put me in such a position but I challenge you to challenge your challenge currently and declare to it your desire very passionately in a measure of time and see if it is possible or not to change your world with your words.