Author Archives: Calabarboy

Health

MY GRUDGE WITH ANDERSON COOPER OF CNN

I waited with patience for the new production of Planet in Peril by Anderson Cooper, which I think is a brilliant effort by the reporter to bring the realities of issues about the planet to the uninformed world. I must commend the likes of Cooper and Christine Amanpour for leaving the sweet suits and cozy offices and reaching out to the epicenters of global concerns and bringing jaded facts to the fore to engender public discussions. This is what I believe modern journalism should emphasize rather than the shallow concepts of personality clashes and celebrity buffoonisms which seem to attenuate instead of educate our curious minds.

Commendable also must be the recent trip of Anderson to parts of Africa to have a look at some specie of Gorillas and animal viruses particularly how they transport from these animals to human and eventually become global epidemics such as HIV. After watching this report I must conclude that I am very troubled by the reports made. Mr. Anderson and friends have joined the discordant voices of those who now claim HIV came from the jungles of Cameroun, particularly from Chimpanzees which are hunted and eaten. Their theory goes that the HIV virus passed from one of these monkeys to a certain hunter by blood contact. The virus they believe lingered for a while in Africa and eventally with the improvement of transportation modes, it got spread to other countries.

PATHETIC!!!!

I must state very clearly here Mr. Coorper that your report is heavily lopsided and biased. And I am more appalled that the famous Dr. Sanjay Gupta who was in your company could not inform you better from a medical research perpective. I am too sure your intentions were dear, but your directions were tear. The same researchers had told us before that HIV came from monkeys in the Congo region, now it has moved to Cameroun, it may as well land in the Eastern jungles of Nigeria very soon. Ohhh please Cooper, settle down before you mire your impeccable career with a forged report to create more disregard for a continent already bruised by the Western negatives.

I will advise you to research exhaustively before you embark on your quest for truth. The first appearance of HIV was in a gay population in Los Angeles and again in San Francisco and was also known as the gay disease. The theory you are now swallowing is called the Cut-Hunter Theory. There are several other more scientifically proven theories about the origin of the disease and I sugges you check them out first. You can read a book called The River by Ed Hooper, a former BBC reporter like yourself who resign and went into ful research on the origin of the disease. The book is over 900 pages of research work done. Dr. Leonard Horowitz is another man you can refer to as well as Robert Gallo.

I am sick and tired of people using Africa as an experiment and brutalizing our image internationally. Imagine your fans asking you to make sure you take shots to prevent you from catching a disease because you are going to the forest of Africa. This is unacceptable and we Africans demand that you retrace your steps and focus on issues that you can make object proofs on and stop hunching about Africa. When Oral Polio Vaccines and Hepatitis B Vaccines were being cultured on Chimpanzee Kidneys in the 1960s in Central Africa, didn’t they release that zoonosis (transfer of disease from animals to humans) was a possibility? It has become very obvious that these diseases have come as a result of dangerous experiments Westerners have carried out using Africans as scapegoats.

We Africans must begin to invest in medical research. Let us withraw our brains that are contributing elsewhere, bring them home and pay them well to invest their time and minds to solve Africa’s health problems. Let us also celebrate out traditional medicines as the Chinese, Japanese, and the Indians have done. Let’s stop swallowing every lying statistics that are shoved down our throats from western research and begin to carry out objective studies on our peculiarities so we can take charge of our future and ensure the freedom of our children. I expect you reading this note to get informed on lot of things about your continent and refuse any suggestions of neo imperialistic tendencies that so beclouds our perception of issues.

Thank you Anderson Cooper for your good work, but no thanks for your baised report on HIV.

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issues

THE VALUE OF PEOPLE IN NIGERIA

Would you kindly for a moment glance through the pictures shown below. While doing this think about what kind of facility this is. After that please read through the note below the pictures. I will make it short enough and directly buttress my point to allow more discussions on the matter.

I am carefully reminded of one of the greatest questions of all time: What shall a man give in exchange for his soul? whereas the answer is obvious, the question also points to a greater reality which I want to highlight here and make inferences about my country, thus provoking our thinking on how we can reverse a societal ill that threatens to reduce our future possibilities as a people. I am by no way conclusive on anything but on what we must do to to change a existing wrong that I seem not to know when it made an inroad into our values system.

There is nothing on the face of the earth as precious as a human life and no argument can alter that position. This is why the summation of all human struggles is simply to improve the conditions of human life and living. Whether living or simply existing, there is a constant quest to improve the parameters for which such realities are nurtured. These struggles for a better life can be seen either on the group level like in most African societies, or on the individual level as evident in most western nations. This shows that there is an innate value that every person carries, which is recognizable by we all as we engage each other. We work to ensure our kids have a better life, our parents live well in their old age, we can give ourselves anything we want, and that nothing about us or ours should be devalued.

Although pricelessness of a person is most important to us, we somehow manage to downplay the value of another to create and enhance our own concepts of personal value. The ‘misms’ and ‘isms’ of our personal agendas messes with the value we then place on the next person we see, seeing them as a non-responsibility or over-responsibility in our path to give betterment to our human person. This is so real in Nigeria that people now have a blatant disregard for one another because we have lost the sense of value we each carry. We are primarily blinded by each ones absolute engagement with the race up Maslows’ ladder and seem to display an uppity in our attitude towards each other. Crazy! People don’t even mind packaging powdered chalk into capsules and sell as drugs for others to buy and assuage their ails when it’s not a placebo.

I am so sorry that these has become even the predominant attitude of even the government. When it comes to the point that people groping in darkness is of no concern to the powers that be, we can easily assess the level of value they place on their citizen. Some things are just not discussable because they are tied to the fact that humans must be valued. Electricity, Housing, Water, Food, Health, Transportation, Justice, and Jobs are not to be celebrated when provided. These are a must simply because Nigerians are human beings who must be valued. Public officials in the assembly are busy voting huge budgets to add value to their living conditions and allocating lands in the Capital city for their cronies, while the yawning wastes in our infrastructures lie as an epitome of a broken government and dysfunctional leadeship and you tell me they value Nigerian??? See how much they spend to secure political power. Of course their intentions are not to fight for people but their abdominal desires and debased ambitions.

If you haven’t seen the pictures above before I am sure you would guess wrong as I did after seeing the first few images. Those are pictures of a Prison in Austria. Prison??? Yes I wil say it again PRISON!!!!! If you like slap your face. I reckon that that society must definitely value the lives of its citizens including the social misfits. When will Nigeria start valuing people like this abeg? I am tired of Nigerians looking down on each other and placing no value on the life of others. We insult each other, shout on the streets, have no courtesy towards another, defraud each other, smear ourselves, and worse steal the justice of the poor. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE SHOW US HOW TO VALUE US!!! If we don’t value ourselves, how do we expect someone else to value us?

Very frankly my friends, there is a veracity in this claim: SOMETHING IS WRONG WITH THE NIGERIAN MENTALITY!!!

I ANGRILY REST MY CASE.

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