Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. What a mouthful! Nigerians inclusive of those in the Diaspora will not forget those names in a hurry. On December 25, 2009, he single-handedly achieved what Ojo Maduekwe, our ubiquitous Foreign Affairs Minister and his battalion of ambassadors and high commissioners could not accomplish in years. Umar Farouk, on that bustling Christmas Day elevated Nigeria from a relative obscurity to global prominence. Today, every earthling can no longer claim ignorance of the existence of a gigantean entity called Nigeria. It is a status which many nations of the world would have spent fortunes in diplomatic efforts to attain but to no avail. And it took our own Farouk a single act of attempted annihilation of about 300 lives, inclusive of his own, aboard a Delta northwest Airline to achieve that, negatively though. And thank God he did not succeed. Had he succeeded, the repercussion would have been more devastating on our already battered image.

Permit me to bore you a little with the graphical details of how Farouk posted his feat until his liver failed him at the crucial moment. After making nonsense of the equally nonsensical airport security at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos (did he use what the Hausas call layan bata?), Farouk landed in Amsterdam, Holland. There perhaps still with the aid of layan bata, he beat the Dutch security system and got into Flight 253 bound for Detroit in the United States of America. In the flight, far beyond the clouds, one of the passengers, Jasper Schuringa, a video director/producer from Amsterdam, heard a sound that reminded him of a firecracker. He must have wondered which kid aboard the aircraft would choose to unleash Christmas knockouts on the plane. As the sound cotinued, he heard someone shouting fire! fire! That was the moment Farouk's liver failed him. Jasper jumped onto our own Farouk, who was fiddling with a burning object inside his (hot) pants. Jasper promptly pulled the object from him and battled to extinguish it. He succeeded but had his fingers burnt just as Farouk too sustained first and second degree burns in his subjacent region.

Farouk has since been arraigned for trial in the States where he told his interrogators that he is just one of the willing tools the Al Qaeda has demonized in Yemen and elsewhere to unleash terror on the US and its interests. The million dollar question is how many Farouks are being crafted in Al Qaeda's workshop? That makes every Nigerian international traveler, male or female, young or old, minister or senator, a prime suspect from now on till eternity. Then a Nigerian again! Forty-eight hours after Farouk's adventure, another Nigerian passenger, believed to be sick and hovering around 30, was arrested also in the toilet of a Delta aircraft. Thank God that all they found (on him) were abusive words cascading from his lips rather than explosive device.

Jokes apart, I feel for Farouk's father, Alhaji Umaru Mutallab, a highly respected Nigerian and renowned banker. How could a banker's son get himself entangled in this kind of high-tech international terrorism? For sure, poverty did not drive Farouk into Al Qaeda's web in Yemen. And if the Nigerian and American security agencies had taken Alhaji Mutallab's whistle blowing seriously, perhaps this embarrassment would have been avoided. And perhaps if our universities were not bedeviled by endless strikes which usually scare away big men, Farouk would have ended up at the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, for his mechanical engineering education. Daddy Mutallab would have been able to keep tabs on him and save himself the undeserved blame of parental failure.

The dereliction of duty of these two agencies has not only brought our international image to an all-time low but also exposed us to all manner of indignation the world over. What President Umaru Yar'Adua envisions for Nigeria is to be among the world's 20 most developed economies by the year 2020. But Farouk had a different vision for his fatherland. In just one day, he single-handedly achieved Vision 14-2009. The hitherto Giant of Africa (now replaced by South Africa or Ghana) is now classified among the 14 terrorist nations of the world in the year 2009! Anytime a passenger is undergoing embarrassing search at the airport, he or she would curse Nigerians under his or her breath. And because of the Christmas Day episode, airports all over the world are installing body scanners capable of exposing any hidden device on a human body, inclusive of private organs. As for me, I have suspended international travel till further notice. In the past, I had been lucky to escape being frisked at airports in my numerous trips abroad.

For instance, in one of my trips to the United Kingdom in 1991, I was sure that I would not escape being fiddled with between the legs. The thought of a body search to be executed out by a fellow man when I am not a gay nearly frustrated that very important trip. This was because about that time, some Nigerian lady drug couriers were snuffing their private parts with cocaine sealed in santana receptacles commonly used for moin moin. And not only that. Some were swallowing the hard drug in Nigeria and excreting it on arrival at their destinations. The security folks discovered this and as a result, suspected Nigerian passengers arriving at Heathrow were delayed at the airport and forced to use the toilet to be sure they were bearing no cocaine in their system. The men were also being frisked because an average Nigerian man, they strongly believed, could supplant his balls with cocaine packaged in the size of palm kernels.

Few years after the trip, a Jos-based Pentecostal bishop was nabbed at Heathrow Airport for trafficking in cocaine. The smart man of Satan, camouflaged as a man of God, had dug out some pages of the word of God from the Holy Writ and swapped them with the devil's snuff. It took a sniffer dog to unmask the so-called bishop bedecked in customized regalia and complete with a huge Italian cross dangling from a chain around his enormous neck. That ended the bishop's phony ministry.

All told, I feel equally sorry for Professor Dora Akunyili, alias Mummy Re-branding. All her re-branding endeavour in 2009 has been jingled down the abyss by the unfortunate act of Farouk… just like that. The indefatigable information and communications minister and Nigeria's loquacious mouthpiece who has been running from pillar to post like Usain Bolt trying to change the negative global perception of Nigeria and her 140 million people must be feeling terribly betrayed by one gullible young man. Now, where will Auntie Dora start the re-branding repair from? As it is now, the battle to re-brand Nigeria is no longer the exclusive business of mummy and her garrison of image launderers. We are all in it together now. And I hope the corrupt elements in our midst who have also given this great nation and her good people a bad name will repent and enlist in the Salvation Army. As for me, it is bye-bye to flying, at least for now. Nevertheless, I should not forget to wish you all a Happy New Year.