Came across this really nice article (doesn't happen often...lol)
written about me by writer, Joy Isi Bewaji, which was shared on www.happenings.com.ng. Please read below...
Schadenfreude. Pleasure derived by someone from another person’s
misfortune. There is something about Linda Ikeji that seems to bring out
this morbid emotion, even in people you wouldn’t ordinarily consider to
be of the morbid sort. Something about the No. 1 blogger in Nigeria,
West Africa, Africa that people seem to always expect her to be a
constant Freudian slip; a perpetual error of sorts for their
entertainment;
a gladiator who upon slaying all adversaries, squelching
their ruin beneath his sandaled feet, proceeds in order to meet an
insatiable bloodlust, to hack himself to bits to the rousing applause of
the constantly cheering crowd.
Her slips are patented, with the keenness of a 90 year old museum
director, methodically curated. In a multiverse of bloggers, that
contemporary vocation now practiced by hundreds of thousands, Linda
Ikeji alone and always, is held to account for the excesses of the
trade; scapegoat, saddled with communal sins and driven into the
wilderness to perish.
Her moments of oversight, which aren’t any more frequent than any
other blogger, are exaggerated, acts of unforgivable heresy that unites,
pitchfork flailing around the raging pyre, the cyber-angry, the
cyber-frustrated and the cyber-deprived.
Apart from her faithful followers, not too many a favourable word has
been written about her in our public spaces, in praise of what is
surely one of the most important crafts of our increasingly digital
times.
No. Linda is always wrong.
She is wrong because she is rich, her gains gleaned off of peoples
misfortunes, and hell and horror, with very little creative effort
required on her part. A concept that pulverizes the minds of the sort of
people who believe your back must be scarred, your ligaments torn
before you can get ahead in life, and even then, we all know the
ultimate reward lies for us beyond the grave.
So how dare she have access to riches here?
How dare she squander hers here? On a bag, on a Range, on a House, on her business, on a private jet…
Not in this lifetime and definitely not in a crushing recession will
people be able to reconcile their innate schadenfreude – the need to be
caught in this collective monsoon where everyone is getting drenched,
with Linda’s steadily burgeoning wealth, presence and influence.
They want her to be wrong. They need her to be wrong. To feel a
constant guilt set to the sway of their suffering, to be perpetually
deferent, and eternally mortified.
So yes, we’re going to call them haters, not necessarily because it
is wrong to question the system that throws up these “monopolies”, but
because they go about expressing this angst in the most ridiculous ways,
like all the other things most Nigerians do; without much thought or a
careful consideration.
A hue and cry at the latest outrage, followed by a frenzied cyber
lynching, then a momentary consolation that settles for a moment our
Linda-angsts, and then a sudden remembrance, the opiates worn off, of a
collective and personal lack and desperation. Cue renewed outrage.
Rinse and Repeat.
How can they not see that this necromantic practice is a futile endeavour?
Linda wins. She has been winning for more than four years; slamming
the balls thrown at her with the kind of fervour only gods can confer.
This fight is done. It is not worth fighting anymore. Your time would
best be utilised in finding another pastime to well…pass the time.
The intellectual fraud her detractors perpetually moan about has
become commonplace practice even among corporate entities who you’d
normally expect to employ a little tact and judgment during creative
executions.
Many have called out, too many times, network companies who in broad
daylight steal tweets with the hope they will not be discovered. A
noodles company was caught a while ago doing that. Monies and lawsuits
were flung at them. But it never gets as sensational or as frenzied as
when Linda picks up a post or tweet lying around to publish on her blog.
This is in no way meant to excuse the crime, by all means let all who
feel aggrieved seek justice in the right quarters, but the now tired
and overplayed routine of marinating, frying, dressing and then having
Linda for lunch and casting about the cybersphere allusions to her
marital status is lazy, unoriginal and really getting quite irksome.
It is impossible to survive the successive waves of cyber lynching
the way Linda has. Then again, it shows the impotence of our digital
rage; its disappointing flaccidity because Linda might as well be
sipping a glass of lemonade whilst her name is dragged around by people
who really should be spending their time in creating something –
anything in a country that lacks everything.
Enter Lindaikejisocial:
It has become a fashionable thing to hate Linda Ikeji. You would
struggle to find more than a handful of people who would publicly
declare their love, or admiration for her. There’s an online
pseudo-intellectual community that stays “woke” by making pompous
assertions of her ingenuousness to wealth and success; like something
she tripped over, unplanned, and undeserving.
But Linda is here, with wealth and with success, and with a new project that admits even haters.
If you’ve never been sure what winning looks like. This is it.
She has launched a genius of a platform, a social site that condenses
and combines the strengths of Facebook, Blogger, and Ebay. On day one
of the launch, the site was stuck by thousands of bees. The rate of
signups per second was overwhelming. Shocking? Not really. Hate and love
have always worked for good for this woman. Linda, like every smart
woman, knows that a tall glass of lemonade is all you need through a
rumpus. Don’t even sweat it.
I do not dismiss her offences, just as much as I do not dismiss those
of network providers who plagiarise single tweets, or websites who lift
entire bodies of art without credit to the creative slave behind its
perfection. But I have always questioned the motives of cyber mobs.
There’s no barrier to entry, no fee required – monetary or
intellectual, to register oneself in this pack of slathering hounds. It
is too much of an unstructured process to mean anything, to drive any
meaningful reforms, and is especially absent when a truly dire situation
in need of intervention appears; like the rape of a child or the theft
of public funds or the monstrous excesses of an unscrupulous religion.
Linda has built her success on the stories of people who cannot keep
their mouths shut; and in most cases, she did not need to send a SWAT
team to clarify why they couldn’t just keep their mouths shut. I have on
occasion stood in judgement of her, but it is time to focus on the
social/media empire she is building loan-free that will employ
Nigerians, thus giving hope to many families, lend an added voice to
social discourse, unveil many young talents, and promote even further
the entertainment business.
And that’s even before considering her TV and radio stations getting set to dish new and exciting programmes.
It’s a new season for Linda, and new beginnings for many people just by this singular act of expansion.
It is something worth commending from a woman who sits on a swivel
chair, staring at her laptop, TV permanently on CNN, only half
interested in anything else around her, with nothing but pure
determination, and an unbridled desire to succeed to keep her coming
back. Again and again.
Posted by , Published at Saturday, November 05, 2016 and have
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