I remember a post from 3 years ago, when I reached my golden milestone, and was taking a serious look at my life….

The wrong choices, relationships, commitments, partnerships, acquaintances, unions, etc can have seriously negative impacts on your life and if care is not taken, they can completely and irrevocably derail your destiny.

Many people are existing in positions far below their potentials, wasting away on minimum productivity and annoyingly low paid jobs – when they are meant to be highflyers! They are living as the tail when God made them to be the head, toiling under some tiresome supervisor or manager – when they are meant to be heads and leaders! All as a result of seriously wrong choices & terribly wrong decisions….

©BaronessJ

I am so proud and will always be proud to be British – born and mostly bred.
But I am also Naija to the core.

I understand both of my worlds – completely.

Barely 24 hrs after the Tory party election for a new PM, ministers were announced and they got straight to work.

No thanksgiving
No aso ebi for owambe victory parties🤢🤢🤢🤢🤢
No stupidly flamboyant eagles square swearing-in ceremony
No dilly-dallying for months around self seeking ego filled Godfathers BEFORE you can appoint your own commissioners or ministers.
No hordes of “special assistants” made up of mistresses, drop out cousins, drinking buddies and olodo children!

My fellow Nigerians whose country is gradually melting down the abbys of economic oblivion are sitting at their laptops, glued to their phones criticizing the leader of a WORKING DEVELOPED COUNTRY.

The reason many of us hate PM Boris Johnson is because of the tag of racism we have stuck on him. Admittedly, BoJo gets carried away and is prone to exaggeration.

He also sometimes talks too much. And he probably also loves his country too much. But since when did loving your country or talking too much become a crime?

Our own leaders in Nigeria might want to emulate that quality of loving your country above yourself!!!

Unfortunately folks who talk too much inadvertently say some things which even if not entirely wrong, can come across as nasty – often taken as racism if coming from a white fellow.

And tell me, as stinginly hurtful as the words of the PM about us, which almost every other leader of the Western world is thinking about Nigeria(ns) but too much of a coward to say out loud (except Trump) might sound, tell me which one of them is untrue?

Past sneaky PM David Cameron did not mince words when he described us in what was meant to be a whispered conversation as “Fantastically corrupt”. Unfortunately, that whisper was picked up by microphones on live TV and beamed across the world! Nigerians almost shite ourselves castigating and vilifying “Dagenham Dave” for his words.

But was he wrong?

My dear friend Ayo Akinfe in this morning’s edition of his daily writes-up spoke about Boris while inserting interesting tags such as xenophobic, inept, doomed to fail etc, also in the same article called on or rather made it a mandatory obligation for the new PM to drive investors towards Nigeria citing the example of Siemens who have launched a power producing plant and the Chinese who are building a transformer manufacturing plant.

These are good developments….

But these are new investors.

The possible reason Britain is not encouraging investment could be past bitter experience of dealing with Nigerians. If they built a wind turbine farm stretching from Badagry to Calabar, like Ayo suggested, Nigerians will steal the blades in one month! Every single blade!!

And let us look at just a few of Nigerians’ work ethics:
*Lazy workers who will turn up at work when they please and steal materials and funds from their employers?
*Educated but painfully illiterate workforce who will not read, talkless of trying to understand simple instructions?
*Or greedy employees who will bribe potential clients out of their eyeballs before even as much as a penny…sorry Naira has dropped into their employers coffers???
*Rude workers who see their positions as a favour to clients
*Nauseating customer service
*Lying, scheming, cheating, ritualistic, sycophantic, superstitious and over religious tendencies

Should I continue???

Here in the UK, Nigerians in the 90s almost single handedly broke the welfare benefits system, housing, credit card and Euro cheques banking system – to mention just a few.

Is it just fine if we say or know these things to be true about ourselves, but a crime when someone else says it??

Nigerians – we are like a 60 year old man with only 1 eye which is also riddled with astigmatism & glaucoma, pointing fingers at a man with 2 eyes with a tiny little speck in one of them.

We Nigerians MUST look at ourselves both as a nation and as individuals and find out why the world hates us so much.

I bet you won’t need to look far. Unfortunately, we are not honest people.

Not with others
Not with ourselves

The truth, they say is a bitter pill to swallow.

I AM SO ANGRY RIGHT NOW!!!!

A few months ago when I ran the anti gangs, guns & knife campaign, organised marches, seminars, etc, MANY OF YOU FROM OUR COMMUNITY could not be bothered to respond or turn up.

Before the matter became the “serious situation” we now know, I started to talk about the issue of knife crime among our kids via my Blogsite and on my radio show “Baroness Js World on Naija FM” – from 2017.

I turned myself into a common nuisance trying to sensitize our people and open your eyes to what was happening to our kids, and to mobilize us to publicly show our collective moral outrage at the increasingly alarming number of Black/African/Nigerian/Yoruba boys being stabbed to death on the streets of London, but so many of you turned your faces the other way and shut your ears.

“AFTERALL, IT IS NOT MY CHILD. JUST DRUG DEALERS, JAMO KIDS, AND SONS OF SINGLE PATENTS WHO PROBABLY DESERVE IT” was the attitude of very many of you.

Many times, I visited and recorded from scenes where our kids had been murdered – sometimes late at night and early in the morning – just to make you all see the seriousness of the problem and bring home the reality of the involvement of our kids – both as victims as well as perpetrators of violent crime.

I spent thousands of my personal funds (with a tiny amount donated by just a handful of friends and supporters) to put on programs to bring our people together but you ignored my calls and apart from a few empty words on facebook, you mostly pretended it was not your problem. In fact, I was accused by some of you of whipping up fear and anxiety. Some even went as far as reporting me to FB getting me blocked a few times!

I organised a safeguarding seminar at the Woolwich Library and invited God so called community leaders, many council officials, school heads, teachers, police officers – but only a handful of African parents could be bothered to attend.

I put on a total of three peaceful protest marches but on 2 occasions, there were less than 20 of us who could be bothered to show up. The third one, I simply cancelled because I did not think it was worth the effort.

I even spent my personal funds to organise a dinner for the same purpose but what a waste of time and money that turned out to be.

I am totally and utterly disappointed in our community, and every single one of you that now has the audacity to say no one is doing anything about the problem.

WHEN THE CALL WENT OUT TO JOIN US IN DOING SOMETHING, WHAT DID YOU DO???

Our people will attend weddings, birthdays and all kinds of “Owambe” parties even of people the don’t know – just for a plate of jollof rice, and spray 00s of dollars at musicians who don’t know them. But will not spare a few hours to attend events where our kids’ lives are being discussed.

And then there and the African fathers who will attend clubs, every week from Thursday to Sunday, spending 00s of pounds on champagne, brandy and all kinds of drinks for even strange women, and then a few pounds more on seedy hotel rooms to go with their “friend” for the night but when it comes to community events, they claim they were not invited and will never donate just £10 to help organisations.

I have heard more moans from African men over the past 11 months than in my entire life! Grown men blaming mothers for our boys killing each other in the streets or being involved in gangs.

Like the Biblical Adam blamed everyone else but himself for actions God accused him of, so also are our fathers refusing to take any blame in the matter at hand. With the exception of just a handful of community leaders and activists, the faces of African fathers have been shockingly scarce in the entire anti-knife crime campaign picture. They claim “it is a women only thing” or “they were not invited” or “they feel pushed out”

Our men need to start to realise that it is not about them. But our kids’ lives!

My aim for running the knife crime awareness campaign was to get us to get up and work together as a community and find solutions to the problem facing us. My resignation from CANUK (with apologies to my former colleagues on the executive as they are all still my friends) was as a direct result of the failure of the leadership to see the importance or need for the programs I had planned and pull together to support me.

I get so upset nowadays when I see folks jumping on the bandwagon and organising yet another empty “conference” to talk about knife crime with no clear strategy or policy in place. Many of the so called organisers can not even mention names of just 2 of the kids who have been killed through knife stabbings yet they call themselves campaigners!!!!

I remember when I produced the comprehensive list of Nigerian boys who had lost their lives, I was accused by many of you of making things up to boost my blog views.

One woman from my church actually boldly said to my face she had to Google the names to verify my story!

I get really angry in my spirit when I see yet another idiot (pardon me) saying no one in the African community is doing anything when these same folks failed to respond to all the calls we made for their involvement and support.

My sista Daizy Ajisefini and her business partner Kashif Da Flash twice, at the cost of thousands of pounds, hired a London tour bus for another Anti Knife and Gun campaign.

Almost no one turned up – on both occassions!

One friend constantly bugged me for months to send my account details so they can make a donation to my organisation MAGAKC. I eventually gave the details. NOTHING.

And another well meaning sista contacted me with info that they wanted to “give me award” for the work I had done in this area – but then started to bug me about bringing a specific number of people to the event and buying tickets for them.

I realise that a few toes will feel stepped upon by this post, but it will also show the level of anger I had been harbouring.

To God be the Glory, my own kids are safely tucked away out of London and by His grace will not fall victim to any kind of violent attack. But I feel for parents who have not been so lucky. And I weep each time I read the news or see images of another young life being stolen from the blade of a knife or machette. No parent should have to go through this pain.

Preventing this is what has been my motivation. But the process has to be a joint and collective effort. But when those you reach out to, pointedly ignore you, then wail and complain about nobody doing anything – that gets me really angry.

Like my page: https://www.facebook.com/MAGAKC/

By

Baroness Olajumoke Ariyo – Anti Knife Crime Campaigner
Founder SADE
Founder Mothers Against Gangs, Guns And Knife Crime (MAGAKC)