Apology ko, Akunyilogy ni – FG demands apology from Sony Corporation

Posted on September 10, 2009

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The news title from the Vanguard says: FG demands apology from Sony Corporation.

The Federal Government (FG), has demanded an unreserved apology from Sony Corporation on the advert that was placed on the internet, which according to the FG, is meant portray Nigerians in a bad light. This was stated at the weekend, in a statement signed by the Minister of Information and Communications, Prof. Dora Akunyili, she noted that the allusion is not accepted by the people and government of Nigeria and asked Sony to immediately withdraw the advert from circulation. read on here

Below is the video from YouTube, a commercial about Playstation 3, for which our Professor has taken offense.

Turn up your speakers plzz:

 

From trying to rebrand or reboot Nigeria, as if Nigeria was a hundred dollar laptop, to rebranding her daughter and then holding Sony for ransom for a flimsy commercial, momsi Akunyili has been ‘fokasibeing’ everywhere and we are seriously getting confused.

Allright, whatever the above commercial tried to imply, Nigeria and the rest of the world got the message, and whoever didn’t get the message is an official Mugu. But hey, is this(below) not the kind of music that hits the airwaves ‘more than just every single day?’. Isn’t this and it’s likes, what Nigerian children are growing up with, listening to, and appreciating?

A wedding engagement ceremony near my house some 2-saturday’s ago had the MC and guests dancing to “e fi Yahooze gbe Jesu ga”, (use Yahooze to lift up Jesus), which left me sad and wondering where exactly are we headed to in this country. Any music today without the words backside, frontside, SUV, hummer, hennesy, escalade, pounds sterling, dollar, Naira, control numbers etc, is not worth listening to – so to say.

So what the heck. What did Sony say that a 5-year old Nigerian cannot understand? What did Sony say that hasn’t been said before, and that won’t be said over and over again. Doesn’t the video below(for example) do more National damage than Sony’s commercial?

And I believe even Madam Akunyili taps her feet once these and many kinds of Nigerian-soul music hit the airwaves.

On a more serious note, Is Nigerian-scam a Sony problem or a Nigerian problem? If someone calls us thieves, is it their responsibility or ours to prove that we aren’t thieves?

And why didn’t Prof Ak. ask Sec. Hillary for an apology?:

Clinton rattled off a string of figures, including a World Bank study that Nigeria’s corruption and related problems had cost the country some 300 billion dollars over the past three decades.

"The raw numbers are staggering but they don’t tell you how many hospitals and roads could have been built; they don’t tell you how many schools could have opened, or how many more Nigerians could have attended college or how many mothers might have survived childbirth if that money had been spent differently," said an enlivened Clinton.

"Today I’m in Nigeria, a country that produces two million barrels of oil a day, has the 7th largest oil reserve than any country in the world. But according to the UN, the poverty rate in Nigeria has gone up from 46 per cent to 76 per cent over the last 13 years," Mrs. Clinton said.

She said the rising religious extremism, militancy and criminality in Nigeria were obvious signals of social exclusion, and said the key to lasting solution was effective governance, service delivery and social inclusion. read on: click here

Or perhaps she should try to explain the ‘figures’ that Sec. Hillary could not explain. In a country where the FG itself is officially corrupt, how can they be asking for an apology when someone else implies it.

No doubt, the Nigerians are scammers scourge is a hard one to bear, but hey, what are the Politicos doing about it? And if Madam Akunyili wants to really do something about Corruption in this country, why not put things down on black and white, and lets start tracing these criminals.

Nigeria is a telecom jungle. You can virtually get lost with a mobile phone whether its your property or not. Just like sometime ago when I received a mail from Prof. Soludo, I received another one about last week, and this one was a Visa phone number. I called the number only for the guy to quickly say: ‘wrong number, wrong number’ and cut the call. So I got online, gave the phone number to a friend of mine, told him to make a call and put me on conference. Yes, our Visa phone scammer picked the call after seeing a foreign number. Our Visa phone guy immediately started speaking Jans/ as if he was a rapper. I told the guy I was a police officer and was going to trace him and have him arrested if he doesn’t stop what he’s doing. The guy called me an idiot, told me to go to hell, that I can’t find him coz he uses 1-sim card per day. He then cut off the conversation.

Now, that caught me, off guard, and it hurts.

Madam Akunyili, hope you got the gist. Lets call a spade a spade and focus on the real issues instead.

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