STORY ONE

Once upon a time, there was a man who looked up and saw the roof of his house crumbling. “This roof will surely fall in,” he thought to himself. The next day, he thought about calling in a builder to take a look but decided against it. At any rate, the pressure from the external water tank, on the ground next to the kitchen was really poor. So he called a plumber instead, and the moved the tank from the floor and installed it on the crumbling roof. “This roof will fall in a few months’ time if you don’t reinforce it immediately,” the plumber warned the man. “I know.” the man replied. But the next week, he installed a large satellite dish on the roof and then moved his sofa right under the fault line in the ceiling. Damn, he thought, as he looked up from the sofa one evening into the widening crack in his ceiling, this collapse of this roof is imminent. And then he turned back to his program.

STORY TWO

The villagers at Poposhinshin village were in the middle of their daily feast, when a young man ran into the village square, panting. “Quick,” he said between pauses to gulp in air, “they warriors of Alajeju village are on their way here to attack us. They are still about two days away. What do we do?”

“Hmmm,” said the village chief, stroking his chin very slowly, “this calls for a meeting of the council of elders. We shall meet after the feast today.”

“Forgive me, my elders,” said the breathless man, now much more composed, “but what is there to meet about? They outnumber us 5 to 1, their weapons are far more advanced than ours. They are a village of giants. We must either flee or send an emissary with a peace offering to beg them.”

“You have spoken very well and we will consider all this at our meeting.” The chief replied.

At the meeting later on, the chief divided the council into two committees, one to look into the obvious and remote causes of the pending invasion, the other to propose ways of appeasing the Alajejus. The committees deliberated until sunrise the following day, when the spears, arrows and swords of the would-be conquerors could be seen glistening in the sun, just over the horizon.

All over the village, the mood was surprisingly calm as the glistening metal cluster drew closer to the village. One man decided to leave with his family that day, for Animashaun village. The Animashauns were more powerful than the Alajejus.

As dusk approached again, the people of Poposhinshin had begun to hear the stomping of the Alajejus. “We are doomed”, they casually remarked to one another. “When our village falls, these people might enslave our men and take our women as their wives.” Still very visibly unperturbed, they carried on as normal. The council of elders continued its meeting.

STORY THREE

Once upon another time, the people of Doofus discovered the gift of tea. The tea was brought to their village by a travelling European explorer, who was temporarily their king but was deposed when they decided they could rule themselves. They figured this tea was desirable, for the European had described to them all the wonders of this tea and how it made his own village so much different from and better than Doofus. While the European explorer was king, he dispensed this tea to them in small portions from his nice metal canister. After he left, they decided they needed this tea in much larger amounts.

But they didn’t know how to make tea. They had the fire, they had water, they had tea leaves. But they weren’t sure what to boil the tea in. The European explorer never showed them how he brewed his tea. Their day of triumph came when the council of elders proudly announced that they now knew how to boil the tea. The people of Doofus gathered and watched in amazement, as the elders produced a chocolate teapot and put it on the fire.

STORY FOUR

The people of Nigeria, when looking at the indices and benchmarks of a functional nation, have for a long time predicted the implosion (in a calamitous conflagration) of their nation. They do not flee. They do not fight the forces of the impending doom.