I Read The Iron

I saw tomorrow. Right, I saw today and tomorrow yesterday and that is why I have reviewed and collected some of my millennial newspaper articles in chapters to make this book that I call I Read the Iron. The articles were instructive at the time, as people testified; they matter just as much today, as I realized and as the reader also will; and without a doubt they will remain vehement for more decades to come. Their freshness and vigor mirror live speech and the power of their insight and foresight recommends them universally, if not for all time. The synonyms of insight are as similar as vision, understanding, awareness, intuition, and perception are to foresight, forethought, anticipation, wisdom, and prudence. The articles are just as nuanced individually and collectively. In railroad parlance, to read the iron is to read the rail switch that steers the train this way or that way. It is the training to tell how the rail switch positions itself to guide the train at a fork. Rail switches at forks are there to guide the wheels of the train off their straight course or curve, because, like the rest of its wheels, the front wheels of the train do not turn. To avoid an accident, a near miss, or even a derailment, as the train approaches a fork, the train operator and the railroad workers on the tracks must be able to interpret the rail switch that is thrown in the direction the train must proceed. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, I read where Nigerian politics was headed, like the railroad worker read the rail switch. The chapters of this book read the iron, as it were, like nobody else did in print consistently at the time. In other words, we may be bemoaning today the chaos Nigeria has plowed into, but over two decades before now, I screamed myself hoarse to get our attention to stop or mitigate today's bedlam. In railroad parlance, to read the iron is to read the rail switch that steers the train this way or that way. It is the training to tell how the rail switch positions itself to guide the train at a fork. Rail switches at forks are there to guide the wheels of the train off their straight course or curve, because, like the rest of its wheels, the front wheels of the train do not turn. To avoid an accident, a near miss, or even a derailment, as the train approaches a fork, the train operator and the railroad workers on the tracks must be able to interpret the rail switch that is thrown in the direction the train must proceed. At the end of the last century and the beginning of this century, I read where Nigerian politics was headed, like the railroad worker read the rail switch. The chapters of this book read the iron, as it were, like nobody else did in print consistently at the time. In other words, we may be bemoaning today the chaos Nigeria has plowed into, but over two decades before now, I screamed myself hoarse to get our attention to stop or mitigate today's bedlam. My work was at Apapa Wharf, and my apartment was at Jakande Estate, Meran, on the opposite end of the Lagos gridlock. I hurried the articles on scraps of newsprint, after I had turned in either my cartoons and caricatures or my news reports and features. Sometimes I turned them in at the same time. I underwent that multi-tasking until I traveled out to the United States to cover Professor Chinua Achebe's Seventieth Anniversary at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA. According to our Editor-in-chief on the eve of my departure, I was on my way to becoming the Assistant Editor of our Arts and Culture desk, behind my illustrious town's lady, Chidinma Ibegbu. As it so happened, I did not return. And from USA, I watched with horror as my former employer squirmed for some reason and went out of circulation. The Post Express Newspaper died and with it the fight to break the Yoruba media juggernaut that had cornered free speech in Nigeria for thirty-four years- since the middle of 1966...