I have found my Naked Man, I have found the hero that epitomizes all that I want to be, but can't be. I have found the one man in Lagos that is taking a stand against the status quo, and chosing to forge his own path. The road less travelled was to crowded for him, so he took his machete and headed off into the bushes.

So who is my hero? I hear you ask. Who is the Motorcycle Man?

Well I cannot just tell you, I must show you, after all you must appreciate the wonder that is the Motorcycle Man.

So Snazzy as was his wont on a Saturday was avoiding the scorching of the noon-day sun, when a neighbour of his held in high regard crossed the threshold of his humble abode. The neighbour's visage was masked by a motorcycle helmet that the okada riders recently awakened to the object could only dream to own.

My intrepid neighbour soon disappeared into the sun leaving my housemate, followed swiftly by myself, to brave the sun and enter the compound. It was here that we saw the Motorcycle Man, however he was not the Motorcycle Man then, he was just a guy on a power bike.

However it was during the course of the conversation that we realised that greatness stood before us. We stood before a man that had saved 3 hours everyday in traffic and N3,000 a week. Here was a man who could say without fear or favor, I choose to live on the mainland and still sleep in. Here was a man who dared the highways on an 850cc bike, breezing past us all as we struggled through the various bottlenecks of the third mainland expressway.

As we watched him drive off to the island, our neighbour perched behind him, we saw in him something we could never be. We saw a trailblazer to whom we could only admire, and never aspire. The courage to be him, to solve the problems of living in lagos definitively, would never be in us. We could only watch and know that somewhere out there a hero lives, doing his part to ensure that traffic doesn't always win. A hero known as The Motorcycle Man.

So it's been a bit of a minute since I've been around, but like Mystical it a'int my fault. Honestly, between random work jumping off, and hitting the final stretch in the cfa I just haven't found the time. One of the things I did want to blog about was one of the most talked about Next articles. The article was on the "embattled" central bank governor Chukwuma Soludo. I forgot about it, but remembered when This Day printed a back of the page editorial by a friend of Soludo referring to the work of a weekend "tabloid" (ouch!). Granted his 'take-down' of Next was not really anything, however it did bring the issue back to my conciousness.

Next, for those of you who don't know, is a new paper in Nigeria. It promotes itself as being a different breed of newspaper. Now anyone who is being honest will tell you that it is. Currently it is a Sunday paper, but has plans to expand to a daily. First off, I will say that Next is one of the better things to happen to journalism in Nigeria in recent times. The fact that these guys are commiting to putting out a paper with high print quality in a land that doesn't really see that as priority should be commended. Also their stories aren't half bad, in that they generally don't annoy me half as much as most newspapers do.

However the article that was published on Soludo rubbed me the wrong way. The article started brightly enough, pointing out the incongruencies in the lifestyle of Soludo and the salary he currently earns, while also pointing out that he used to be a university lecturer (so no past life arguments here please)

However where the article falls down is on the hearsay and ignorance bit. Some of the allegations are single sourced or don't make any sense. For example, they cite a bank executive who claims that Soludo must have colluded with Zenith Bank for a forex transaction because Zenith won the bid for that day. There are too many different reasons for this to have occured for them to publish the allegation without verification. The second thing regards the Ascot loan. It is not the job of CBN to check the collateral for bank loans. It is the job of CBN to make the banks provision for bad loans. The article somehow implies that CBN is reponsible for checking all the loans in the country before they happen and every dodgy loan that happens is its fault. I could go on, but then this gets long. Oh and the less said about the Turai Yar' Adua bit the better. Though I suppose it fit in with the breathless tabloidy tone of the article.

Ultimately I was disappointed by the article cos it was by a paper that was supposed to raise the rhetoric of reporting in Nigeria. The article read like a political hatchet job, and opinion masquerading as reporting. This is one of the things I can't stand about Nigerian reporting, and it is sad to see Next sinking to that level so soon into its run. Still here's to hoping it is an abberation, and the paper can fulfil its potential.

In the last month, a story has been making the rounds in Nigeria about the private planes of Nigeria's elite. There were stories on the private planes of the bankers, the oil companies execs, and the pastors. The purchases of the planes were universally decried as an extravagance that we could do without in these economic times.

However unlike the media firestorm in America surrounding Citigroup's purchase of a private jet (which they eventually returned) there has been no comparative firestorm. Granted the "talking heads" media phenomenon in the states is miles apart from what it is here but we can whip up firestorms ofour own if we feel the need - see fuel deregulation and refinery privatization as examples.

Anyway all the organizations involved trotted out the standard soundings of cost effectiveness, convenience of scheduling and all that. Which of course are valid reasons, however this doesn't change the fact that it is extravagant.

While there is a "plague on both your houses" thing going on with everybody involved in the private plane saga, I feel that a special one should be devoted to the religious insitutions that indulged in the private planes.

The fact that a church can spend $28 million (N4 billion) on a private plane that seats sixteen people is insensitive to say the least. When the majority of your members are earning a small fraction of that, it doesn't seem like the best use of that cash no matter the "convinience factor." Of the top of my head I can think of at least ten uses for the money that would impact greatly on the lives of the individuals both spiritually and materially. Now my challenge to those of you who would justify the purchase as "not extravagant" is to think about what you would do with N4 billion if you were a pastor of a church in Nigeria and compare it to buying a jet.

No one was more surprised than I am that I was away from blogging for a month. I had tons of posts I wanted to write too. It's just that by the time I was done with work enough to write a post I was generally too drained. I would blame the fast, but that is not really done in polite circles. Well I'm back and aim to stay there in keeping with my 2009 swagger.

Aiight so today's post was sponsored by the lunch room at my work. We have had this conversation a few times, and by now it has become like that old friend that comes around once in a while to liven things up. There are a few issues that generally get hashed out during this conversation.

Issue 1: Who is doing the cheatin?
So conventional wisdom is that men cheat a helluva lot more than women. Of the tops of most peoples heads if they had to guess, they would say 90:10 or 80:20 in favor of men. However I rememeber reading somewhere that it was somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60:40 in favor of men. If that stat is true (big if) then it probably means that women don't get caught as often. However as the stat was for US or Europe, I strongly doubt that Nigeria would be that high. Our conservative nature argues for the 80:20. I think that 90:10 is male wishful thinking

Issue 2: Why are they cheatin?
There are generally three main reasons to cheat. There is attraction, emotional connection, and boredom. I suppose, if you through in retaliatory cheating, then you have a fourth. So men are more susceptible to the pretty face cheating, while women are more susceptible to the boredom cheating. One of my people thinks that emotional connection cheatin is a lie people tell themselves to excuse attraction cheatin. I think that emotional connection cheating is the working professional cheating, and so will get more common in women as work place participation increases. Boredom cheatin goes down as fewer women are expected to be housewives but this of course leads to increased opportunites for emotional connection cheating as mentioned earlier. There is a question, as to whether mid-life crisis cheating should be given its own separate label after all a lot of the cheating that goes on in Lagos is men trying to discover their lost youth. However I would argue that all mid life cheating can neatly fall under boredom or attractiveness.

Issue 3: Women versus Men.
This is the debate about why female infidelity is seen as infinitely worse than male cheating. I'm all about equal opportunity when it comes to cheatin, I am neither unnecessarily forgiving of male cheatin, nor unnecessarily censorious about female cheatin. I think cheatin is cheatin. I think that it is unfair that women have to have a higher degree of self-control than men. This is one of the weirder effects of the slut/stud dynamic. However in this particular case it is worse because most people believe that women do indeed have more self control than men, biologically speaking that is. I think it is socialisation myself. Granted, it takes more in general for women to be attracted to men, than vice versa however once that hurdle of attraction is crossed, women do not have inherently greater self control. I have four years of undergrad in the U.S. to back up my claims.

Issue 4: Repercussions.
The issue that we normally end at was actually skipped today. We normally come to the conclusions that people (read men) in Nigeria cheat as much as they do because there are no real repercussions to infidelity, apart from the religious ones anyway. Though if you were going to be restrained by religion in the first place you wouldn't be cheatin. Until divorce law becomes a helluva lot stricter than it is currently, the whole cheatin thing would not go away. Lagos is one of the few places I know where a man will take his mistress (sometimes even a sturves) to a location / event where he will run in to his friends and sometimes her friends and not even think it is an issue. Our conclusion is normally for the fear of God, oh and for California style divorce law :D

Conclusion:
These are the general issues we cover on infidelity, so what do y'all think. Oh and are there any others that we should add the next time this topic comes to visit.