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Nobody certainly thinks a two-hour old kid is cute. (For many kids, we still can’t tell after a week by the way.)

I woke up yesterday an uncle.

One year is an awful long time to wait for a new blog post. I’ve been busy and lazy at the same time. Very busy with work and other ish and lazily hiding under the guise of that to leave this here blog (and you my teeming audience *straight face*)unattended to.

But I’ve started this post near the end. Let’s get back to the start real quick.

Last year was a tough year. The long wait to get drafted for service pretty much gnawed away any inspiration I had to keep the blog – and some other stuff – going. Being made to suffer due to an inherent ineptitude/irregularity in a system, it took a lotta grace to not lose my mind. Anyways, all of that ended in September as the draft finally came at the end of the month.

By mid October I got a mail from one of the editors over at Ynaija, telling me I’d been selected to be among the Y! Superblogger project. The gist was all over the web, on Twitter and various blogs, and I was awed, to be honest. Friends were ecstatic for me and I felt like, yeah, now Imma be able to move outta my father’s house and finally have a girlfriend, yo. Lol… I checked the shortlisted bloggers from across the country and I kept wondering how I made the cut considering I was arguably the most inconsistent writer in the lot. I mean the list had people, quite renowned, who updated their blogs daily! I guess I was picked for my content, maybe.

Anyway, the Superblogger project kicked off in the first week November – same time I shipped out to camp in service of the Fatherland. The project required me to send in an article every week that month so I quickly wrote 3 in a matter of days and sent in the drafts as it wouldn’t have been possible to write in camp. My first piece went up November 14 – just over a week into camp (which was a horrendous week as the first week usually is, but we’ll be reading about that on another post). It’s been a good ride since, getting the avenue to reach a wider audience. And the mere satisfaction that came from seeing a lotta people appreciate my art and have a discourse on Twitter about stuff I wrote far outweighed the persistent inner turmoil it took to write them.

Also, at the turn of the new year, my buddy Stanley Azuakola (yep, Google the name already. Dude’s a rock star writer) of Guardian and Ynaija fame, told me about the project he was working on and gave me the honour of being a part of it.The ScoopNG site went up on January 6 and it’s been magnificent. Writing about politics, public policy and affairs is hard for me as those aren’t really my forte but the opportunity has helped me learn to pay keener attention to Nigerian politics and affairs thereby helping to make useful contributions to the national discourse.

So Imma just put the link to the Superblogger and Scoop articles I’ve written since that got published. Check them out if you haven’t. A second reading won’t hurt too:

The Limit of Intelligence was my very first piece that got published by Ynaija in the Superblogger series. I wrote about factors we overlook which had a bearing on students’ performance in college.
Looking Through Time is arguably the coolest piece I wrote last year. This one got tweeps tweeting about it for days.
The Story of Death, a piece borne out of an old blog post of mine went up on Christmas eve.
Obeying the Clarion Call was my first piece (Scoopinion) for The ScoopNG. I basically ranted and analysed about the NYSC scheme.
The Value of Vanity was my first post this year for Ynaija. Looking in the mirror inspired this one.
Grading Good Governance was written when the Minister of Information’s good governance tour came to my place of primary assignment in February.
Water board blues was borne out of a nostalgia for the days when our taps worked.
Curriculum Adaptation went up on the ScoopNG in March.
Virtual Connections and the Distance Dilema went up in April after a hiatus. This one has a poignant feel to it.
Winning the Porting Race, published by the ScoopNG in May was about addressing the drama and attendant issues with the MNP service launch late April.
When the wells dry up addresses the possible issues that will define Nigeria when the sun sets on the golden age of oil.

So, there you have it, the first chapters of my Ynaija and ScoopNG chronicles till date. Check ’em out and lemme know what you think. Remember, sharing is caring.

It’s good to be back. I’ve been busy with work, serving the Fatherland and all. Working at a broadcasting corporation barely gives me enough time to do other things. But I try to find the time to write and do stuff I love still. Many thanks to my buddy AY for consistently but ever so subtly nudging me to post here again. Writing is hard, more so if you’re writing for a magazine/newsletter – it’s pretty much like having an assignment hanging over your head everyday for the rest of your life – but it’s exhilarating stuff too and I love it.

I’m grateful for the audience Ynaija and The ScoopNG afford me. All that’s left now is for the pay to start rolling in when I write and then I’d truly have arrived, hehe.

Most importantly, I’m grateful for you, reader, who visits this lowly blog of mine to see my latest musings.

*throws on cool shades and work up my Arnold Schwarzenegger voice*

I’ll be back.

This is the Transcript for a post written for The ScoopNG. Read the original post here.

Depending on where you live in this country of ours and/or how old you are at the moment, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve never had the opportunity of having drank tap water.

Yes, there used to be a time when “tap water” wasn’t a subtle euphemism for the water you got at your kitchen sink via the water pump engine in your apartment. And it didn’t come in plastic bottles either. Tap water, back when I was little, came via a long labyrinth of pipes buried in the ground linking to the water reservoirs operated by the government’s Urban Water Board.

Boreholes were a very rare source of water fifteen years ago. Water flowed in our homes; our showers worked. Of course there was the occasional incident of burst pipes that had to be tied or replaced. And just like it was/is with PHCN, when the workers at the Water Board went on strike, scarcity ensued and all roads led to the rivers. Those who weren’t close to any water body sought for the nearest compound with a water borehole facility. Life wasn’t always grand in this country, I tell you. Oh wait…

As the years rolled by, finding water dripping down the street became a rarity. Then the streets became permanently dry. It’s not that all the burst pipes had finally been fixed; water just wasn’t coming through them anymore. The taps stopped flowing. More water boreholes sprang up in various homes and instead of paying the water rate to the government, people started to pay other people for access to water. A new industry – the potable water industry kicked off soon afterwards and never looked back since.

You’d think there couldn’t possibly still be such a thing as an Urban Water Board around these days. Much to my dismay, while driving across town recently, I stumbled across a building whose sign post bore the four words: State Urban Water Board.

Questions automatically cropped up in my head. Did people still leave their homes in the mornings and go to work a job at the water board? How does the government justify floating a ministry of water works and still pay salaries when tap water has since become an issue of folklore?

Is it a settled matter that we can’t have tap water back in our homes? It doesn’t seem to be a big issue – at least it doesn’t get the level of discourse that power attracts, even at election campaigns. Are we resigned to the fact that, as the general population grows richer (if they ever do), people are going to have to sink their own boreholes to get water?

Truly, there are a few places that still get water from the water board. For most of these areas, the water is anything but potable. Smelling, unclean water often comes up through the pipes, rendering the water almost completely unusable. This is as a result of the pollution of the water bodies from which the water is gotten – very likely a direct product of the rapid rise in population and urbanization. The water board is handicapped by old equipments (for purification, pumping, etc), understaffing or a dearth of properly trained employees and, among a myriad other problems, low prioritizing by the government.

The federal government needs to rethink its stand on the issue of people having water flowing in their houses again. The Federal Ministry of Water Resources and the various state arms across the country need a revamping. The potable water industry is booming and people are gradually paying more for water. The cost of bottled water is a bit ridiculous. And there have been instances where we’ve had reasons to question the quality of some of these brands of water on sale.

The increasing number of boreholes may pose an environmental risk yet. Poking all that many holes in an area may yet compromise the safety of the area from the effect of environmental/climatic hazards like faults and/or earth quakes with time. Whatever rationalizations we muster up for why things are the way they are, they just won’t hold water in the face of the plunge we’re headed for if things don’t change soon enough.

It’ll take a responsible government to give people water in their homes again. Only such a government can make the painstaking effort required to revamp the water industry, staff the Water Boards with well trained civil engineers, purchase standard purification and storage equipments all in a bid to provide potable water. And should the day ever come when tap water flows in our homes again, we shouldn’t have to be afraid to drink it. Any government that can get that right would have done right by us all. It’ll have passed a responsibility test.