Aramanda Okunrin

 As the year 2023 rolls out in a few hours, I have found myself mentally scrolling through pages in the year. One thing I hardly do is join in the usual ritual of end of calendar year taking stock and new year resolution making. I respond to that frenzy to join the New Year resolution and some self-adulation or self-flagellation people engage in the same way I respond to birthday celebration. I have no problem with others indulging in such acts, if it works for them, it just doesn’t work for me. Taking stock is an ongoing thing for me. I don’t set a day aside for it. I don’t know what happened this time, maybe it is age, maybe because of the attempt at taking a semblance of a real break in several years, I find myself joining in the self-indulgence of that ritual. I suspect too, that the public presentation of a book, “Our Punch Year”, reminiscences of some 38 former editors and staff of the Punch Newspapers, may have also been a trigger. I had gotten into the year 2023 exhausted f...

I was not there in 2019. I was too distraught to venture out to cast a vote. I knew it was going to be a farce. I had in 2011 and 2015 voted right there at the back of my residence. Lucky for me, my polling centre was right there in the public primary school behind my house. Walking down my street and turning around to enter the school premises was less than a five-minute walk. This year, it would be a 15-minute drive, but that urge to share in the optimism out there was irresistible, even if I felt it was another dream that would laugh in our faces in no far distance. And I drove the whole stretch from Gudu to Wuse Zone 6 Abuja. And there seems to be on the streets that intense optimism - or is it just hope - that this could be different. I counted four security checkpoints, mounted by women and men of the Nigeria Police, the Civil Defense, and the Federal Fire Service. All were civil, and all appeared high on some positive energy. Taking another route, a longer one and counting this ...