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Starting a new year with a blank slate of mind for inspiration should be a bit worrying.

I remember the hyped up excitement over the New
Year’s days of my youth – the niggling anxiety at not having made a
singular resolution on how to conduct my life for the next 12 months,
the determination to have the New Year meet me celebrating in the
manner in which I hoped to become accustomed.

The pursuit was almost always more exciting than
the actual moment which passed in a split second and was only
noticeable if you made it so. Nothing actually changed. The onus was
still on you to translate that difference into reality, otherwise, it
was still the same sun that rose and the same moon that set on the same
terrain as the day before. No leave no transfer, unless you forced that
belief onto yourself and found the energy to make it so.

Tossing out yesterday’s soup, simply because it
was made in the old year must be a pretty optimistic statement about
hope in the future not to mention the confidence of a well lined purse
ready to go out and buy all those ingredients again without blinking an
eyelid. Who is crazy enough to do that now? Or maybe it requires a
certain state of inebriation, a quality of numbness to achieve.

But 2011 has met us at a familiar crossroads with
travellers of the same terrain hurrying in different directions, some
on foot and others flying first class, some in mourning and some in
celebration, some braced for war and others newly bereft of shelter
facing a world of uncertainty in the days to come.

At the risk of repeating past sentiments, there is
little that is discernibly new looming ahead, and much that is worse
than it used to be. In fact the biggest, newest, thing sticking up
above the morass is the chairmanship of the Independent National
Electoral Commission, towards which we all lift up our eyes in hope.

Some of the issues we wanted to see resolved this
time in 2009 still remain. To pick just three of the most public ones,
there has been no improvement to speak of in the provision of
electricity and water to citizens, and that horrifying picture that
confronts planes heading for the Delta, the miasma of smoke billowing
from the eternal flaring of gas, a resource that other nations gladly
harness to improve the well being of their citizens, is still a
constant, since 1958; LNG 1 to 6 later; Halliburton bribery scandal
later; one millennia later…still burning after all these years.

At some point in the past I said to myself enough
with all this focus on new resolutions, and just keep on with
implementing and improving on the old ones. My concerns were never with
what to do but with how to be. One particular year, I think it was
sometime in the mid eighties I resolved after a particularly rocky year
buffeted by other people’s political aspirations during which I had
been turned into a chess piece by various and sundry characters, that
it would profit me to listen more to my instincts and pay closer
attention to reading people around me.

We are poised yet again on some kind of brink,
defined as usual by uncertainty, but it really depends on the extent of
your inebriation as to whether you are feeling it or not.

Nigeria is a huge country and the problems of
communication within it keep it so, which is probably a blessing for
now. Western commentators tend to notice these schisms quicker than we
do but often do not have the subtlety to read the portents. We do not
boil over as much as heat up to a slow simmer that ends up changing the
consistency of the soup into something else with a different boiling
point and a more lethal concentration of elements.

Against this background a blank slate becomes very
attractive, unmarked by the flares or violence that keep igniting over
the country, free of the question marks over who will win that key
nomination and what the consequences could be, unblemished by that dark
cloud of doubt over what it will take to inspire the citizens to demand
the respect for their leaders that they must first believe they deserve.