PROPER TRAVEL DOCUMENTS

Prior to my post on legal ways of leaving Nigeria, someone asked me the difference between visa and passport. Here's the simple answer.

The global standard of travelling which covers Immigration forces around the glob.

Passport is a small paper booklet which contains person's personal information and other papers attached for endorsement. You can only obtain one passport of a country and once your data is captured, you can only renew it in case of any other reasons approved. Only citizens are eligible. In Nigeria, for instance, the common standard passport for everyone is issued at any Immigration State Command close to you, not necessarily your indigene. And it is valid for 5 years.

Visa is a permission granted to someone who wishes to visit another country. This is an easy process. You must obtain a passport then go straight to the embassy of the country you want to visit and apply for visa. There's stipulated amount of some non-refunded money attached. You can also apply through an agent. Most visas are valid for only 3 months and can be extended by the Immigration of the particular country if one wishes to stay longer. But you should have a reasonable reason or purpose before they grand you a visa.

But if you want to visit any country within West Africa, you don't need a visa; you only need either a passport or ECOWAS/CEDEAO. These countries are: Benin, Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cote d'Ivoire, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Togo. Apart from these countries, you must obtain a visa. Even if you're lucky to find a way to enter their country, they'll repatriate you. And may not allow you to enter their country forever.

Passport is digitally captured while ECOWAS/CEDEAO is handwritten. To avoid fake passport, you should never make a mistake of applying through an agent because your data must be captured at Immigration office. Once you're a citizen, you're eligible. No follow up. Once you follow the normal legal channels, no Immigration of any country can harass or hinder you from movements. Remember, those countries are not like Nigeria, they decisively deal with immigrants.

For more details on this, you can visit Nigeria Immigration Service website.

Thank you.

THE TITLES I READ FROM JAMES HARDLY CHASE

1. Cede

2. Hit them where it hurts

3. Not my thing

4. We'll share a double funeral

5. Have a nice night

6. Hand me a fig leaf

7. You can say that again

8. A can of worm

9. You must be kidding

10. Consider yourself dead

11. My laugh comes last

12. Do me a favor, drop dead

13. Believe this, you'll believe anything

14. So soon to die

15. Goldfish have no hiding place

16. So what's happen to me?

17. Knock! Knock! Who's there?

18. Have a change of scene

19. You're dead without money

20. Just a matter of time

21. Want to stay alive?

22. Like a hole in the head

23. The vulture is a patient bird

24. I will rather stay poor

25. A coffin from Hong Kong

26. Just another sucker

27. A lotus for Miss Quon

28. What's better than money?

29. Come easy, go easy

30. The world in my pocket

31. Not safe to be free

32. Hit and run

33. You find him, I'll fix him

34. The guilty are afraid

35. You've got it coming

36. Tiger by the tail

37. Sucker punch

38. This way for a shroud

39. Mission to Venice

40. The thing men do

41. I'll burry my dead

42. The fast buck

43. The wary transgressor

44. Why pick on me

45. Strictly for cash

46. In a vain shadow

48. But a short time to live

49. Mallory

50. You never know with women

51. The paw in the bottle

52. Trusted like the fox

53. The flesh of the orchid

54. Make the corpse walk

55. Eve

56. Miss Shumway wave a wand

58. Just the way it is

59. Get a load of this

60.  Lady, here's your wreath

61. The dead stay dumb

62. I hold the four aces

63. An ace up my sleeve 

64. This is for real

65. You have yourself a deal

66. The whiff of money

68. Believed violence

69. There's a hippie on the highway

70. An ear to the ground

71. There's always a price tag

72. You're lonely when you're dead

73. The Doll's bad news

74. Double shuffle

75. Tell it to the birds

76. Double shuffle

77. Figure it out yourself

78. The way the cookie crumbles

There's a particular title I forgot.

By Aliyu Ibrahim 

JAMES HARDLY CHASE

JAMES HARDLY CHASE

He's called the maestro. The best thriller writer of all time. If you've never laid your hands on his books, I bet you've still never read a heart-throbbing story. His books have cover pages painted with welcoming half-naked women but doesn't in anyway showcases explicitly in his story rather than the irony of life.

My long time childhood friend, Muhammad Garba and my course mate Usman Zakari who despised me for his mysterious enmity recommended Chase to me. I am highly grateful. I read almost 70 titles from his 100 books. Once you start, you cannot sum up the will to stop.

CATFISH IN NEXT LEVEL: THE TWO-FACE ZARAH MANSIR

Shakespeare said that man has two faces, one given to him by God and the other he made by himself. This is a typical example of the recent most virile social media incident of one young lady, Zarah Mansur who was impersonated by a 25 year old Musa Lurwanu. And has been mining huge amount of money from invididuals and organizations until his arrest. Social media platforms were his conductors of his deceptiveness and conningly way of making money illegally.

"Catfish" or rather "catfishing" has been a major cyber aproach to social crime such as faking relationship or even blackmail. Catfish simply means a hoax social media account used to deceive others into unreal relationships or play with their psychological emotions. Mr. Lurwanu is one of them behind the face of Zarah, using her beauty and academic qualifications to juice out money from his preys online. She only came to realise the event after so many people were dopped.

The reality is, whenever this happens, some innocent-like men seem to be the scapegoats. The thing with emotion is it doesn't choose personality to melt on but one should absolutely control his urge and even if it becomes necessary to lust, it should be on physical contact -- not on social media applications. In the trending video, one victim was called on the phone and he testified of given N20,1000 to Zarah but Mr. Rilwanu said he gave him the money for the quest to satiate his libido!

One of the famous social media handlers, Bulama Bukarti also twitted that his company or associates was deprived into giving N20,600 on a project they wanted to execute in Uganda; believing based on the online CV of Zarah using that she once resided there during her Bachelors.

Base on his confession, Mr. Musa Lurwanu said he was using a Voice App which made him sound exaclty a female while talking on the phone with his callers. This was as a result of some who were desperate to know whether he was the real Zarah. He is now in Nigeria Police custody in Kano state and are thoroughly doing proper investigation. I hope this would be a deterrent to other so eager to fall in love with the person they have never set their eye on.

Written by Aliyu Ibrahim 

GRAMMAR: "If I were"

" If I were...I would..."

We use sentence constructions like the above to express non-realistic or hypothetical situations:

1. If I were the president, I would reform the education sector.✔️

2. If I am the president..❌

3. If I was the president...❌

Why do we use "if I were you..," a past form in a present contextual sentence?

We use "were" instead of "was" because the sentence is in the subjunctive case, a condition which is contrary to fact or reality.

Grammaticality, we use the following formula in such sentence: If I ( or any other pronoun) were you (or any other pronoun)+ would+ verb (uninflected verb):

If I were you, I would slap the girl.

 Sentences like the above one express what decision one would take if he were in the same circumstance as the person he addresses. In other words, " If I were you..." is used when giving advice about what you would do in the same situation as the other person in that case:

1. If she were here, I would advise her to disengage.✔️

The above sentence is called the subjunctive case; it consists of two clauses, one with a wish, the other with a second subjunctive verb. 

" If she was..." can only be used when writing in reference to past context. Example: I apologise if I was wrong.✔️

But " if I were..." is only used in hypothetical sense or when writing/speaking about non-realistic situations:

If I were the husband, I would advise her to go.✔️

By Salisu Yusuf

"The Other Side Of Midnight"

I thought I have read crime stories that could last me a lifetime through the maestro, James Hardly Chase and other famous crime story writers until I laid my hand on "the other side of midnight" by Sydney Sheldon. His ability to come up with three different stories and characters and linked them up with a resolution or rather catastrophe that was as treacherous as the whole story itself. I found it hard to swallow the same way the characters were taken to a rollercoaster surprise ride. Sydney Sheldon's unpredictablity was awesome as literature itself.

The story was about three different characters and among them rose a villain or two. First, Larry Douglas who was an American sexiest charming pilot and a womanizer. Then Neolle Page, a beautiful and attractive village girl in Paris whose father referred her as queen and wanted her to be a precious diamond when she grew up. And Catherine Alexander; a young girl from a poor family whose father died with his unsuccessful ambitions of becoming great and she quit school to also chase her unknown and undefined dreams outside academia.

Let's begin with Larry, shall we? He had been a military pilot, flew birds largely in two different countries: England and USA and won medals for his outstanding performance. He's a charmer and women fall in love with him at first sight. He'd been taken them for a sucker punch. His biggest ambition was to fly planes all his life. After the second World War, he left the American Air Force and settle for private companies which didn't work out well for him. Women were his greatest weakness.

Neolle left her home when her father wanted to exchange her for money and used her beauty to charm many important men in France. She met Larry Douglas and spent some couple of weeks together through which he promised to marry her after his return from England. He never returned and left her behind with unwanted early pregnancy which she subsequently got rid off. One thing about Neolle was that she possessed the sensual qualities of pleasing men more than any woman on earth. Through this, she was a movie star and became the mistress of the richest man in the world. She lived to avenge what Larry had done to her through her entire life.

Catherine Alexander quit school after her unsuccessful father died with his dreams. With her intellect and beauty, her boss, Bill Fresser fell in love wit her. Life was too cheap and easily for her until she met Larry Douglas and was hooked by his undeniable charm and she fell in love with him. Even though her boss, through whom she met Larry beamed her a warning about him, she sacrificed everything he'd gotten to marry him. And later when his job was not flourishing, she moved with him to Athens for another job.

Neolle Page was keeping tap on Larry through a detective for more than six years and got him a job with her husband in a mysterious way which both him and her husband didn't know. To her biggest disappointment and upmost surprise, Larry didn't remember her. So she cunningly used her sensual charm and revived her dead relationship to a level of no-return, then asked him to murder his wife and she would get divorce so that they could get married. In his efforts to please the only woman he cannot say "no" to, Larry planned to execute the plan but mysteriously his wife, Catherine drawn herself.

Both Larry and Neolle were charged of murder. Constantin Demiris, Neolle's husband and the richest man on earth knew about their relationship and had been planning to nail them as forgiveness was never a word he adored. His lawyer, Chotas, was undisputed and never lose a case. Through his mastery of crime, seeing how the prosecutor was closing in on them, he asked Larry and Neolle to plead guilty in the court and he would get them not more than six months sentence. Trusting Chotas was like trusting god; they plead guilty in the public on a crime they had not committed, not knowing that there was no deal on the table. Both were executed.

Revived by Aliyu Ibrahim

aliyuibrahim004@gmail.com