I am in the backseat of a Volkswagen wagon on the highway from Zungeru. I just opened my last bag of chips and plugged my earphones to Kid Kudi singing The Prayer. The road is proving unsurprisingly thrilling and subtly revealing the reasons behind its pull on dedicated and professional travelers. It is very easy to get sucked into the love of the wind and occasional dust in your face. The freedom of being in a place where you are nobody. The glimmer in the eyes of the locals when they witness your astonishment at simple elements of their daily lives. They also respond with hostility when you try to objectify them, as in their physical bodies. They don't mind you taking pictures of their landscape or the livestock but you don't just take a picture of Almajiri boys hurdled by the roadside on the highway to Kontagora. They will throw rocks at you. Can't have everything right?
The more things change, the more the stay the same. This is the story of the world we live in today as we seem to be stagnated in a constant flux between the hopeful possibility of a better, more peaceful, healthier future and a cataclysmic devolution into irreversible anarchy. The handwritings are on the walls and pretty much everywhere else you look. Global Warming is ravaging the earth - no thanks to our collective irresponsibility. Global warfare on another note has spiralled out of control, with the institutions of state facing new kinds of enemies - the faceless kinds who are happy enough to just spread the gospel of fear. Global population is on an uncontrollable rise and we all keep saying the same things, attributing our actions and inactions to the will of the almighty. It all has to be part of THE PLAN. We pretend that the world is some kind of fictional place where all our actions have pre determined consequences of which we need not take responsibility and when they turn ...







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