By Tony Okoroji
Happy New year to every reader of Saturday Breakfast. I pray that 2022 brings us good tidings and that the many horrors and challenges Nigerians have faced in 2021 do not follow us into the new year. May the good Lord lift all of us higher and higher, this new year.
After 9 years of writing and publishing Saturday Breakfast and not missing one edition, come rain, come sunshine, in sickness or in health, I have come to the point where I must ask whether I am simply on auto drive.
Saturday Breakfast must be one of the longest running columns in Nigeria. For more than 9 years, I have shared with you, my experiences, joy, pain, opinions convictions and aspirations. I have shared family tales, professional stories and expressed my positions on serious national issues, some of them, heavily political. I have also been a teacher on Saturday Breakfast, teaching my favourite subjects of Copyright and the music industry. On this column, I have made friends and enemies. Some have asked me if I am not worried that the opinions I express, may lead to some dreadful actions being taken against me. Those who know me well will tell you that I verily believe that no great nation is built by cowards.
Maybe, I have been lucky. I have never had anyone write a rejoinder against any piece in Saturday Breakfast or file a defamation suit because of something I wrote.
I very much understand that words have power and can cause enormous damage when used recklessly. It is well known that I may have filed more defamation cases than any other Nigerian living or dead. I therefore have tried to practice what I preach. I do whatever it takes to ensure that no matter how passionate I am about any subject, facts remain facts and opinions are very clear as opinions.
Several times in the last couple of years, I have been asked to write a column for one publication or another. Several times I said no. Why? As I have grown older, I have taken more to heart the Igbo saying that a palm wine tapper does not reveal everything he sees from the top of the palm wine tree. Just imagine what would happen in the hamlet if the local palm wine tapper had to describe all the luscious naked women who thought they were bathing safely away from prying eyes or the illicit love affairs where the lovers thought they were in a world of their own and that apart from the skies, their secrets were all theirs or the big tubers of yam thought to be secure from all and sundry in the rich man’s ban. Like the local palm wine tapper, I have seen quite a lot and I have thought it better for me to stay away from the babble.
The other matter is this: Is anyone still really interested in what I have to say? Will what I write make any difference? Is anyone going to read what I write when all the kids are busy pinging and chatting away on their smartphones or playing computer games and their fathers and mothers are busy plotting how to steal all the money that belongs to their country and there is “breaking news” chasing you every minute on WhatsApp and the many other emerging platforms? How do I write a column when every jerk looking for some cheap publicity decides to attach ‘PMAN President’ to his name and is busy telling everybody that I am a fraud and the people at the Copyright Commission which I laboured to set up can’t wait to put me in jail for any reason they can fabricate? How exactly do I concentrate and write a column when from morning to night, from Kano to Calabar, Nigerian artistes with all kinds of needs are calling me for royalties which some mischievous and mean Nigerians who have nothing to offer them, have frozen in different banks?
Pray, how do I write a column when my staff at COSON and TOPS warn me constantly that I need a break but let me not show up for one or two days, they will be calling my phone off the hook? How do I write a column with the endless meetings with lawyers, back-to-back court sessions with countless adjournments and the impossible Nigerian music copyright user who manufactures every excuse under the sun to avoid paying small royalties for the music that sustains his operation?
I still do not understand how I was trapped into writing Saturday Breakfast in the first place and how I have done it every week for more than 9 years. Please talk to me. After 9 years, should I continue to serve Saturday Breakfast or is it time to put out the fire?
Happy New year and see you next week!
