Inside the Ball Room of Le Meridien Hotel in Abuja this past Wednesday evening, the din kept building up until the man just couldn’t take it anymore. ‘Mayhem’ may hammer the point too hard but that the situation was out of hand was evident in the disorderliness that prevailed.

It might have been a boisterous meeting of a school’s alumni. Certainly not a film festival award night where guests should have at least waited to hear who won what before turning the event into a talk shop for Mr Man, his wife, their son and daughter and ‘Aunty’ packing two cell phones with polyphonic ring tones set far too loud. It was clear something had to be done. Pronto.

So, quite rightly, the man got up. In the middle of some other person’s unheard speech, he stood, turned and confronted the unruly audience. Stern-faced, he told everyone in his now pet phrase that the noise was “absolutely unacceptable!”

Say hello to the no-nonsense Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mr Frank Nweke Jnr. Considering that Nweke works every crowd he’s in with the savvy politician’s trademark wide smile, hearty handshake and ready banter, seeing him take on the role of a pedagogic, “no noise making” classroom monitor might seem a bit like a Jekyll and Hyde performance. But hell, even if it’s theatrics, forget the man’s antics for a minute and focus on what he was beefing about—our seeming inability to conduct ourselves with any order or decorum at public events.

Beyond the fact that technical factors clearly matter in audience control, we have problems in just hanging out as a people while maintaining relative order. What could be responsible for this? Ok, yeah, so Nigerians are supposedly loud, brash and a very talkative lot. Does this mean we have no idea what events we should accord respect because in doing so, we’re ultimately respecting ourselves? Very unfortunate if that is the case.

Let it be conceded that whereas Zuma Film Festival proper, which held this past week from the 11^th to the 16^th of March, 2006, was well packaged, the organizers could have picked a venue with better acoustics for the awards because, in taking control of an audience, a hall with good acoustics is almost as important as a good sound system. If the acoustics are bad, expect problems because anything from fade-outs, sound-dead spots to multiple-echoes would likely occur. It gets worse if the sound system isn't up to par: a good public address system that could actually carry the hall would have helped the Zuma awards night.

In any case, to have youngish and usually urbane Nweke going ballistic on everyone drove home the point that there’s often a measure of disorder in our midst once we gather for an event. Time for a change? Your correspondent would go to sleep on this one; wake him up when the change comes.  In the meantime, thumbs up for Nweke for standing up—literally as it were—for order.

Thumbs down for Ngige

Not so to ousted governor of Anambra State, Chris Ngige. Though he won’t get kicked in this space because he’s already taken quite a beating as it is, it must be placed on record that his, like an impatient dog who ate the fattest bone it didn’t deserve, was always a very sordid case. With his untouchable godfather pal, Chris Uba, Ngige robbed the people of Anambra at the 2003 gubernatorial elections in that state, a deed the president of this country confessed being privy to, at least after the fact.

As it’s always the case in Nigeria, tongues—which typically do little else but wag in any case—are at it with gusto that it’s all because Ngige is anti-third term that’s why he’s been sacrificed. Ok, so what if that’s the reason? The man did not win the elections—he and his godfather pal had a well-publicised spat centring on this straightforward fact! What should it matter if he’s anti-third term or not?

Of course, this is not to say that if Ngige’s third term attitude were the sort preferred by the powers that be, he wouldn’t still be in office, court ruling or no court ruling. After all, as the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Justice Muhammad Lawal Uwais, said at the All Nigeria Judges Conference in Abuja on December 5, 2005, this government has been disobeying court orders with impunity.

What remains now is to see if new governor Peter Obi has the ‘liver’ to hold off the destructive cabal in Anambra that would surely be gunning for him. Incidentally, here’s another man who deserves the thumbs up. And talking about dogs and bones, he is a patient one who finally got what he should have had from the start.

Robot  # 1 | 17.03.2006 12:56

It might have been a boisterous meeting of a school’s alumni. Certainly not a film festival award night where guests should have at least waited to hear who won what before turning the event into a talk shop for Mr Man, his wife, their son and daughter and ‘Aunty’ packing two cell phones with polyphonic ring tones set far too loud. It was clear something had to be done. Pronto....Read the full article.