The Nation Newspaper

Tag: age

  • The age of uncertainty

    The more I look into the age we’re living in now the more I’m convinced of how uncertain it is. Economies are wobbling, intolerance and hate speeches are on the rise, wars and politics are becoming more brutal with some defying logical solutions, airplanes are being shot out of the skies and people’s consciences are no longer pricked, except those of the bereaved. I can go on, but you’re at liberty to fill in the “blank” spaces.

    Back home in Nigeria, the idea is being mooted that the government is set to convene a national economic summit later in the month to discuss the way forward. This move is not without its criticisms, especially from those opposed to the present crop of leadership which they have accused of not having a road map on how to revamp the economy when they were campaigning for power.

    My humble standpoint is that we are in far deeper trouble than we realise. The fuel queues are back – as always; power outages has defied any reasonable logic with the DISCOs insisting on a tariff hike in the midst of perennial blackout, restiveness has crept in again as the economic hardship bites harder. Suddenly, a “Biafra” is becoming very attractive to hundreds of thousands of misguided youths who are being used as willing tools by some to achieve set goals of some puppet masters. Most importantly, critical reasoning has been thrown out of the window.

    In all these, one wonder if the present administration really knew how deep the rot in the system was before they assumed power. This notwithstanding, the age we’re in calls for deeper and honest reflection because there are no quick fixes for the plethora of issues we’re contending with. For starters, how do you jump start a comatose economy like ours? How do you shore up the value of the naira in a heavily import dependent economy like ours? There are tougher days ahead, no doubt.

    In an age like this, people oftentimes look for heroes or messiahs who would use empty rhetoric to promise them heaven on earth. Such “leaders” will whip up ethnic, racial, religious and political tension to achieve their aim. They’re found everywhere. As I Look at this age today, my focus will be on the unexplained rise of Donald Trump, the leading US Republican presidential candidate in the race to the White House for obvious reasons.

    A few weeks back Trump made this statement: “To make America great again, we need to get rid of the Muslims, Mexicans and the Africans, especially the Nigerians…They take all our jobs, jobs meant for honest hard working Americans, and when we don’t give them the jobs, the Muslims blow us up.

    “We need to get the Africans out. Not the blacks, the Africans. Especially the Nigerians,” he said in his blind and incoherent rage. “They’re everywhere. I went for a rally in Alaska and met just one African in the entire state. Where was he from? Nigeria! He’s in Alaska taking our jobs. They’re in Houston taking our jobs. Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why.

    “Because they are corrupt… Their governments are so corrupt, they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and take our jobs. We can’t have that! If I become president, we’ll send them all home. We’ll build a wall at the Atlantic Shore. Then maybe we’ll re-colonise them because obviously they did not learn a damn thing from the British!”

    There you have it. If you’re a rational human being you won’t even listen to a fellow like this. But we’re living in an age of uncertainty where the unimaginable happen. But the most surprising thing is that in all his rhetoric – the majority of which are controversial – Trump continues to lead in the polls with the “real” politicians struggling to catch up. Why is a ‘politician’ like this popular?

    I believe political theorists are now taking a closer look at theories that might explain this. Despite his sexist comments and racist remarks including his breaking nearly every rule in political communication, he has gained a zealous following as a result. It doesn’t matter whether you love him or hate him; it’s hard to deny the man is a master of communication. His style simply resonates with many people.

    The reason for this is not farfetched.  We live in a post-trust era when the public looks at every institution – government to business – with incredible scepticism. Voters are anxious, angry and open to alternatives, whatever alternatives. As a good communications expert, Trump knows this and has tactically worked to fill this void. His numerous gaffes and hate speeches aside, he has used some strategies to shift his image from billionaire reality show host with no political experience to an influential “man of the people.”

    As a communications student, I’d focus on five strategies. Trump is a master of manipulation. He has a clear narrative, an ‘exciting’ storyline that he sticks to. He tells the people what they want to hear, and not necessarily what is true: “Nigerians are the ones taking your jobs.” But any sane mind knows you cannot employ a carpenter as a surgeon! So if Nigerians are being employed as doctors, computer whiz kids and into other professions what stops Americans from striving to fill such slots?

    Secondly, he understands and taps into simple emotional truths. The economy is biting harder globally and people are losing their jobs. In some countries like Greece, recovery has defied all economic theory. The “Coalition of the Radical Left,” otherwise known as “Syriza” party learnt this bitter truth after it won a popular election promising critical reforms to bring the economy back on track. This party “from the roots” soon painfully learnt that the situation is far deeper than it anticipates.

    Thirdly, Trump speaks the language of his audience. The “leaders of Biafra” speak the same language. They – just like Trump – paint a rosy picture of Eldorado or a “Garden of Eden” scenario where all problems would vanish once their aims are achieved. Again, sceptics should ask the leadership of the Syriza party and South Sudan and they will give you the true position.

    One defining feature of Trump is that he reframes every debate question into language he prefers, and he often gets away with it. He is so incoherent on some issues which make you wonder why he still remains the top favourite. The way things stand at the moment, the republican ticket is his to lose. What follows next is anyone’s guess.

    He deliberately and consistently relates all of his ideas back to a master slogan: “Make America great again.” For example, GOP candidate Jeb Bush could not clarify to the public just what he stands for – beyond being anti-Trump. Bush did not offer a consistent narrative or tone, and he struggles to present an idea or story for voters to embrace. Little wonder he backed down.

    By practicing consistency and discipline in his message, Trump ensures his campaign carries momentum by swaying voters with emotional truths, not rational arguments. Painfully as we know, elections aren’t fought and won using reason; they’re fought using emotion.

    Trump recognises this, and while his rivals focus on debating various issues, Trump is busy leading an emotional movement. Sen. Lindsay Graham had the best technical understanding of any of the candidates, but he dropped out of the GOP race too because he couldn’t convey his message in a captivating way.

    Often, the way to persuade people is to tap into what matters to them emotionally. Trump offers that by persistently raising issues that strike emotional chords with voters. He might be the wealthiest of all the candidates, but he comes across to many as “deeply human” by using their vernacular.

    So far, a plausible explanation for this is that provided by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor and intellectual Noam Chomsky who has rightly attributed Trump’s success to “fear” and a “breakdown of society. People feel isolated, helpless, victim of powerful forces that they do not understand and cannot influence.”

    Those forces are found everywhere. They are the forces behind the perennial fuel crises and blackout we continue to face.

  • Age of doubt

    Age of doubt

    It’s scepticism all round, over President Muhammdu Buhari’s long-awaited list of ministers; and Nigerians do appear to suffer the syndrome of that Yoruba figure who, sick and tired of seeing phonies, permanently shut his eyes, in vigorous protest.

    But pray, in that period of voluntary blindness, what if the very original wanders by?

    That passionate sense of doubt somewhat echoes William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the Irish playwright, poet and cultural nationalist, who won the Nobel in 1923.

    He won because his poetry voiced deep Irish dissonance, when his people chaffed under British imperialism, cultural and political.

    Still, he has had quite an influence on Nigeria’s literary temper.

    Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, provided the title for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, perhaps the most famous book to come out of Nigeria — an indeed, all of Africa.

    Besides, Nigeria and its shambolic governance over time, could well be the political equivalent of the Yeats poetic chaos, of the falcon not hearing the falconer.

    Even then, his quote that opened this piece — the best lack all convictions, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity — could well have been penned to dramatically capture Nigeria’s current high age of doubt.

    “These ‘analogue’ ministers”, quipped a columnist with The Nation.  But with all due respect to the democratic licence to differ, there appeared little digital proof in his own writing!

    Another snapped: a “breathe of stale air”.  But again, pretty little evidence of freshness, outside seeming group-think — hardly a crime, though.

    Yet another savaged the president with alleged “ancient thinking”, perhaps simply because Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t wax poetic in the neo-liberal lingo of growth sans development.

    But what did the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the very epitome of cutting-edge technocracy in governance, do with the economy, aside from count empty beans?

    No matter!  Nigerians have been too much bitten in the past.  The age of innocence is lost.  They are in no hurry to trust anyone again — not even the near-ascetic and puritan  Muhammadu Buhari, who at least holds the high promise he won’t steal — or tolerate stealing — in office.

    Still, the rather mundane bases for the rippling scepticism is worrying.  Take the rather one-track debate of youth versus old age, from which has come the Audu Ogbeh example.

    Saraki, the father, as senate leader, announced Mr. Ogbeh’s name as nominated minister, in the Second Republic.  Now Saraki, the son, as senate president, is considering Mr. Ogbeh as putative minister.  Conclusive proof: Mr. Ogbeh is “recycled” and therefore “useless”!

    How about that for (il)Logic 101!

    First, there is something noxious about the creeping contention that age is useless, simply because a few senior citizens, over the years, had given less than a good account of themselves.  It all smirks of lack of enough introspection to think matters through.

    Take Mr. Ogbeh.  At 35 in 1982, he was made minister, in the Second Republic (1979-1983) under the Shehu Shagari presidency.  He was about the youngest in that cabinet.  But when that dispensation collapsed, and principal characters were probed for alleged sleaze, he came out smelling of the proverbial roses, despite his relative tender age.

    Then, the same Mr. Ogbeh, as Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, had a sensational but principled fall-out with President Olusegun Obasanjo, over the then Anambra Governor, Chris Ngige, kidnap saga, on which the president was hee-hawing.

    He got railroaded out of office, which, looking back now, was the beginning of the end for the ruling PDP.  But the career farmer from Benue State kept his integrity intact.

    Indeed, in an age where politicians flit across party lines, like some wayward witches on broomsticks, the moment he joined the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), he never looked back.  In the run-up to the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential win, he played his own part, once marshalling farmers to sell some million tubers of yam to raise money for Buhari’s presidential run.

    Now, what simplistic thinking would hold that such a proven man of conscience and integrity jars against a new order, promising rectitude, simply because he is now 68 and was minister at 35?

    Still, on age and youth.  The senior citizens today — Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Ahmadu Bello (all of blessed memory), Gen. Yakubu Gowon, Obasanjo, Gen. Theophilus Danjuma, Gen. Buhari, at his first coming as military head of state, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and  Philip Asiodu (he of the “super permanent secretaries” fame) — what were their modal ages when they gloried or fumbled in office?  Dashing youths or aged and decrepit?

    So long for the shallow, mutually exclusive, dichotomy between age and youth!

    And yes, the politician versus technocrat argument!  First, what was Awo, when he wrought great development wonders in his days as Western Region premier — politician or technocrat?  And what, indeed, was Babatunde Fashola as Lagos governor and Kayode Fayemi, as Ekiti governor?  Ay, what is Nasir El-Rufai now as Kaduna governor?  Or Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, then as Lagos governor or now as national leader of APC — politicians or technocrats?

    So long for another phoney dichotomy, when there is none!

    Indeed, there appears something eminently dishonourable about the so-called clamour for “technocrats”.  Where were these “technocrats” during the whoops of electioneering?  So, the so-called “politicians” are good enough for the rigours of elections, but only “technocrats” can excel in government?

    Like Tinubu, Fashola, Fayemi and El-Rufai, all technocrats in their own rights, that technocrat secretly salivating the gravy of office, solely on the strength of his “expertise”, should first scale the strictures of politics and politicking!  Insisting on reaping where you didn’t sow is as much a corruption of the ethos of politics, as sleaze is a corruption of the ethos of governance.

    Still, all this Babel of Doubt, reasonable or not, means just one thing: Buhari is condemned to delivering — and there will be no excuses.

    So, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu (for the Presidency), and whoever becomes the Information  minister, aside from the new party spokesperson, given the imminent exit of Alhaji Lai Mohammed, have their job cut out.

    They will do well to open a vigorous communication segment to every policy and programme, to continuously engage the public.  They sure could do more of that, right now, to calm the voluble Buhari-sceptic army.

    At the end of the day, however, only results matter.  Obasanjo started well, in the opinion of not a few, with some promise of renaissance.  But all too soon, no thanks to his grave personal failings and contradictions, he ended a damp squib.

    Only performance, solid performance, can cure longsuffering Nigerians of their hard-earned scepticism.  In Nigeria’s contemporary history, only Awo and Buhari approached the presidential job with a prospect of human sainthood, and firm control over team.

    Awo never got the job.  But Buhari has.  So, it’s time the president leveraged his sparse personal baggage, push his ministers hard along the narrow and winding path, guided by superb policy and programmes, to deliver the goods — and keep Nigerians believing again.

  • Pastor Tom Samson hits golden age

    Pastor Tom Samson hits golden age

    God uplifts the righteous and blesses the just. That much has manifested in the life of the founder and General Overseer of Christ Royal Family International Church, Bishop (Dr) Tom Samson. His strength appears to get renewed each passing day with the perks that come with working in the vineyard of God.

    In a couple of weeks from now, Bishop Samson will hit the golden age, and he plans to celebrate the occasion in a grand way. The bishop, who was born into the family of Pa Enweliku Samson and Madam Eunice Enweliku Samson on December 12, 1965, has lined up a number of activities to mark his 50th birthday celebration.

    The much anticipated event will hold at his Royal City in Ota, Ogun State. Friends and members of his ministry are all gearing up to celebrate the man who has inspired their lives in various ways.

  • ‘Start preparing for old age now’

    It is never too late to prepare for old age as it is an investment of one’s younger days, a community medicine and public health expert, Prof Bayo Onajole, has said. According to him, man ages with time and he has to prepare for old age.

    Onajole, who spoke to The Nation, said geriatrics is the science that deals with the ageing process. The process of ageing, he said, is multi disciplinary, stressing that a lot of care and attention should be devoted to old people.

    He condemned the abandonment of the elderly, saying: “most time the old are left out forgetting they are humans and are left to take care of themselves.”.

    The consultant in public health said: “Old people need specialists to address the problem of ageing. These specialists can make the whole ageing process pleasant and pleasurable.”

    He added: “The specialists who handle the ageing process are known as Geriatricians”

    He said as people grow older, the cells in their organs begin to reduce, which is why the aged need to check their organs.

    “For instance old people may have problem with their sight and will need an ophthalmologist to aid their vision. When they have the problem with hearing an Ear Nose Throat doctor (ENT) is needed. They sometimes have blood pressure increases in their cardiovascular system. So, they need an endocrinologist to teach them to manage sugar to avoid diabetes,” he said.

    He spoke about individuals of the same age growing differently. “One can age faster than the other because there is no specific age for ageing,” Onajole said.

    Ageing, he said, is more of a mental characteristic than any other aspects because “the old tends to be very forgetful as forgetfulness is associated with aging and most cases a psychologist may be needed and sometimes a psychiatrist too”.

    He continued: “Old people are often lonely and need company. They have much time on their hands. Most of them are retired from their places of work and they need people to talk and play with. In cases where a partner is dead, life becomes even more boring for them and as such makes them to pass through the aging process alone.”

    He said a very successful way of creating interaction among old people is by organising a get together for them in a particular community. “By this, they will come together to interact, play games and socialise. It will make them explain their feelings and conditions to one another.

    “The biggest problem is boredom for the old people, mental depression and poor eating pattern. Most of them do not have anyone to prepare meals for them and most times have to eat whatever they can find. Most of them are prone to hypertension, diabetes and cancer as they undergo the process of aging. Old people also have problems with their dentition, their teeth begins to fall off. In some cases, it is a failing heart. The heart is not able to pump blood around the body,” he said.

    Onajole advised people to drink good portable water, adding that they should avoid air and water pollution. “But they must eat good food, improve environmental engineering and try to avoid stress,” Onajole said.

  • This age that we live in

    In time, what youth deems to be crystal, age will find to be dew. Apology to Browning, but at no time has his rational thought attained greater realism than the present age. This age that we live in, we claim, is the age of the Nigerian youth. Thanks to the “wasted generation,” they have learnt to tell us what we love to hear: that we are the proverbial bastions of hope and sureties of a better tomorrow – even as they abort our dreams of bliss and we feed on the fetuses as hope, today.

    Such is the magnitude of duplicity we excite. In spite of the falsity we inflame, we have learnt to live for the benefits of the trifling and maleficent. And when the glitter begins to dim and the applause of the gallery begins to peter out, we recline to do what we have learnt to do best; we mount our soap boxes and curse the times; we blame everybody and everything but ourselves for the emptiness we personify, always.

    Just so hollow and ineffectual are our lives today that for the most part, our wantonness and insatiable lust for wealth smothers that towering humanity that we ought to live for. “Wealth at all cost…Craftiness above sweat!” becomes the mantra and mighty levers by which we seek fulfillment and perpetuation of the Nigerian dream. Thrift and toil and saving that were once unimpeachable sureties to dependable hopes and fresh possibilities are today, guiding principles of the “weak” and “slothful” according to the 21st century Nigerian youth.

    Today, we seek the benefits of the chase and scorn the chase, except in infinite circumstances in which we pervert the context of the pursuit to chance on success. We elevate material prosperity as the touchstone of all successes and already the fatal might of this persuasion consumes us overwhelmingly, replacing the finer type of Nigerian youth with vulgar fortune hunters.

    That is why today, our banks are riddled with youthful bankers adept at stealing and fleecing poor, unsuspecting customers of their hard-earned savings. That is why today, our offices are plagued with promising youths able at adding limitless zeros to the back of every numeral with a Naira sign. That is why today, our podiums reverberate with the footsteps and platitudes of cunning and undeniably lazy youths remarkably versed at regurgitating stolen anecdotes to their intellectually challenged peers at random.

    Today the promising youths that we are, parade ourselves as willing muscles for devious politicians and criminal masterminds with a “master plan.” Such promising youths we have amongst us whose ministries traverse “Advocacy,” “Mentoring” and whatever fancy title aptly befits their “Ministry.” What are they advocating? Who are they mentoring? In pursuit of what? Money…maddening stacks of craftily earned money. Need I mention the doctor, nurse, journalist, internet scammer, accountant, policeman, and student whose hearts dangerously skip at the mention of every speedy shortcut to the good life?

    The tragedy of today’s youth lies not in our catastrophic unity in pursuit of devastating fortune and self-destruct, but in our perpetual inclination to delude ourselves by subscribing to the farce that we are the next best hope to happen to our ailing fatherland. A broad wave of disillusionment and darkness yet hangs above the silver linings we desperately hope to succeed our darksome clouds. Yet with precision and unfaltering devotion, we work ourselves up into such a state in which we can only see the volcanic flare of our destructive acts as glitters of grandeur.

    Just some few months back, during the April general elections to be precise, certain characters were erroneously identified as youth leaders amongst the nation’s youth and they were therefore, courted by the ruling class. The objective was to win their support and eventually, the overwhelming goodwill and patronage of the Nigerian youth. They did win their support and apparently, the patronage of a major percentage of the Nigerian youth.

    Today, we reap the benefits of self-deceit. It hardly matters if President Goodluck Jonathan and company are everything we thought they would be or they promised to be – we get what we deserve. We deserve the incumbent administration. And come 2015, we shall elect such characters that we deserve.

    Today it makes little difference what we think or dream, we lack the will and beaming brightness of morality to actualize it. The ferment of our striving towards self-realization is to the order of the universe like a cog within a wheel: beneath our brazen display of will are smaller but like problems of ideals, of tact, of leaders and the led, of poverty, of courage and cowardice, of tribalism and corruption, of order and subordination, and, through it all, the problem of self-deception.

    Very few of us know of these problems, and the few that are intelligent enough to know are too unintelligent to do anything about it; and yet here we are, awaiting a miracle, a messiah or another martyr to sacrifice on our altar of hollowness and self deception. In the thick of it all, we suffer the slow, steady disappearance of a certain type of Nigerian,—the hopeful, faithful, dependable patriot with incorruptible honesty and dignified humility.

    Never in the history of this potentially great nation have we witnessed such decadence as we have now. The Nigerian youth, despite our clamour for change, are caught in the vicious grip of our innate will. Our agitations for change are simply whimsical, their cadences and deployment for change are wholly determined by the promontories of our vanities, the ancient axe of fate and nemesis of humanity.

    Like the “wasted generation,” we seem to accept and joyously celebrate the ridiculous and passionate belief that somewhere between men and cattle; God created a tertium quid, and called it Nigerian. But uncomplicated as they are, our wanton inclinations have become virtually intolerable by even you and me. Our clownish, simple strivings that at the outset, made us tolerable within our limitations, have manifested as excruciating yokes choking us all, to the death. Hence we cry out and predictably direct our anger and grief at the wrong culprits: the ruling class.

    Why should we continue to attack and blame President Goodluck Jonathan and company for the shamefulness that our lives depicts? We should be ashamed to lay the death of our hopes, unalterable poverty among other things at their doorsteps knowing that like us, they are caught in a similar vortex of wantonness, mental and psychological handicaps. Even the whole world knows that the ruling class as we have it now, merely constitutes a tangle of thorns and forest shrubs; in time, they will wither and die off – if we cannot man up and clear them over.

    Our talk and dream is to become such men and women of character that Nigeria is yet to herald but behind our talk and fantasy lurks an afterthought and unavoidable reality of our inability to become the men and women of character that Nigeria deserves.

    We are no better than our “wasted” elders. For all the genius and vaunted depth of our self-styled youth leaders, the best we could do is rehash the idiocy and incapacities of our ruling class. Surface meets surface.

    • To be continued…

  • Road to ‘Nigeria’s computer age’

    Road to ‘Nigeria’s computer age’

    How can Nigeria develop its Information Communication Technology (ICT) sector? It is through software awareness, say Computer Science students at their convention at the Delta State University (DELSU) in Abraka. PHILIP OKORODUDU (Electrical, Electronics and Computer Engineering) reports.

    They came from different campuses with a mission: they wanted the domestication of Information Technology (IT) in Nigeria, using software strategy as tool. This is the aim of Computer Science students, who gathered at the Delta State University (DELSU) in Abraka for their national convention.

    Under the auspices of the National Association of Computer Science Students (NACOSS), they resolved to lead the nation into an era of software awareness and development to facilitate the migration from digital computing to quantum computing.

    The convention with the theme: Software strategies for equipping the Nigerian higher institution’s work force, featured the presentation of well-researched papers by scholars in the discipline and software exhibition.

    In his keynote address titled: Domestication of Information Technology in Nigeria: Software Strategy Imperatives, the immediate past president of the Institute of Software Practitioners of Nigeria (ISPON), Mr Chris Uwaje, said Nigeria could only streamline its fragmented IT structure through transformational strategy, which could be achieved by building software talent and mentoring youths in IT.

    Uwaje said the roadmap and primary take-off point for sustainable solutions was to enthrone and elevate software engineering as a strategic national policy. This, according to him, could be accomplished with the establishment of a national software strategy to be supported by legislation and encapsulated in a national software bill.

    He advocated the need for government to rejig IT, which, he said, is currently in a fledgling state. He urged that the discipline must be made part and parcel of education with a national IT skill-conversion strategy to boost the nation’s capacity in software production.

    Other speakers at the convention included ISPON president Mr Pius Okigbo, Deputy President of the Computer Society of Nigeria (NCS), Prof Adesola Aderounmu, Director, Information Technology and Communications Unit of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Dr Nicholas Ogini, and NACOSS Adviser, who is also a Computer Science lecturer at DELSU, Tope Oguntade.

    Earlier in his address, the NACOSS National President, Kingsley Okotie, a 400-Level student of DELSU, urged members of the association to take advantage of interaction with the speakers to network and improve their knowledge of computing.

    Okigbo donated a trophy and N100,000 on behalf of ISPON to winners of the software exhibition contest. The exhibition was to test the software usage abilities of students through the design and implementation of programs that could solve industry problems.

    Seven institutions participated in the contest, but at the end, Abia State Polytechnic (ABIA POLY) won the first position with its software named Students Activities’ Management System (SAMS). The polytechnic was presented with N50,000 cash prize and a trophy. The Institute of Management Technology (IMT) came second and won N30,000, while the University of Uyo (UNIUYO) emerged third, taking home N20,000.

    John Nnanna, an HND II student, who represented ABIA POLY, said the software was designed to make life easy for students in the management of information relevant to them by downloading SAMS on their smart phones. The software would send reminder of students’ daily activities and help them to access relevant information with on their studies.

    John noted that the software could also be used in e-voting, which is currently trending on campuses, adding that it is being implemented in his school.

    On his part, William Alfred, a 400-Level student of UNIUYO, rated his school the best in the exhibition, saying: “Although we did our best and we presented the best software but the judges rated us as the third best.”

    He said the knowledge acquired at the convention made students to be software-conscious, urging the association to use the recommendation to create IT awareness programmes in higher institutions.

    The association’s outgoing Vice President, Joy Idam, a 400-Level student of Ebonyi State University (EBSU) said she was happy about the success of the event despite hitches at preparation stage.

    “Events of this magnitude are not easy to organise but we are happy that God helped us to surmount the challenges that came our way and we are also grateful to our speakers who have exposed us to new trends in software development and applications,” she said.

    Highlight of the event was the election into the national executive council of the association, which produced Michael Onwugbolu, a 400-Level student of the Federal University of Technology, Owerri (FUTO) as president.

  • Monarchs seek 65-year age limit for politicians

    Monarchs seek 65-year age limit for politicians

    Traditional rulers in Ezza North Local Government Area of Ebonyi State have suggested that the age for all political aspirants be pegged at 65 years.

    They said anyone above the age should resign from politics and support younger aspirants.

    The monarchs were reacting to the senatorial ambition of Governor Martin Elechi and the governorship aspiration of his in-law, Senator Chris Nwankwo.

    They noted that there would be purposeful and credible leadership  when young persons become involved in politics.

    The monarchs decried the number of politicians  above 65 years and jostling to go to the National Assembly or some other positions.

    They regretted that the state had not had good representation in the last couple of years.

    Their spokesperson Igwe Gabriel Ngele, who is the traditional ruler of Oriuzor autonomous community in the local government, spoke when a former Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) Chairman, Chief Obinna Ogba, solicited their support for his senatorial ambition.

    The monarch urged old politicians to stay at home and advise young people.

    He said: “I advocate that politicians above the age of 65 years should resign from active politics, come back home and advise the younger ones who are more vibrant and have the zeal to make impact. The older politicians still live in the past; they are not in tune with the current realities of life. Their representation at the National Assembly has been a total failure.

    “What would a 70-year-old man be looking for at the National Assembly? The world is changing and younger persons are now assuming political positions. The future of the country lies in their hands. What we should do is to render fatherly advice to them and not to be jostling for positions with them. At my age, what would I still be looking for at the National Assembly when my children are already men with children?”

  • ‘You can regain your sexuality as you age’

    ‘You can regain your sexuality as you age’

    Managing Director, Sylken Limited, Mr Uche Nwang, representative of Nature’s Field, makers of Adam and Eve’s Desire, answers the question on sexuality. Seaduck Nigeria Limited, Health Coach  Sam Ayeni tackles the one on the immune system.

    I must first decry the culture of silence around the problem in Nigeria. Data from the researches by Nature’s Field suggests that 43 percent of women and 31 percent of men report some degree of sexual dysfunction, yet it is a topic many people especially women are hesitant or embarrassed to discuss.

    Sexual problems occur in adults of all ages but in women many factors can contribute to low libido, including a lack of desire, including hormonal changes, medical conditions and treatments, depression, pregnancy, stress, and fatigue. Boredom with regular sexual routines also may contribute to a lack of enthusiasm for sex, as can lifestyle factors, such as careers and the care of children. Menopausal transition is considered the most difficult time for a woman to remain sexually active. In addition to the hot flashes and fatigue, vaginal dryness and loss of libido often interfere with sexual function.

    Eve’s Desire is a unique targeted blend of vitamins and standardised extracts, supporting the mechanisms that promote healthy sexual function and libido in women. Benefits that can be derived from Eve’s Desire include: Enhancing libido and sexual appetite in women; regulates hormonal levels in women; improves vaginal dryness in women and helps restore their sexual desire; helps the body to react in positive ways to sexual stimulation; increases strength and improves sexual performance.

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  • For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    For WS @ 80: Baroka and the long road to and beyond his age

    Last semester, I taught Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel for the first time in about thirty years. Though I do like the play a lot, it is not one of my favourite Soyinka plays, not one of his dramatic writings that I regard as some of the best plays ever written. I believe that the last time that I actually read The Lion and the Jewel was around the late 1990s when I was completing the first draft of what would eventually become my full-length book on all the writings of Soyinka titled Wole Soyinka: Politics, Poetics, Postcolonialism. At any rate, when I re-read and taught the play recently, I was in no small measure tantalised by the fact that though I had long reached and passed the age of 60, I was startled by the realisation that I am much older than Baroka, the quintessential “old man” of all of Soyinka’s plays! To be exact, I felt at one and the same time shocked and elated: shocked that I am now and have been for a long time Baroka’s elder; elated by the rather deeply personal and existential proof of the old, hallowed Latin proverb concerning the relationship between art and life, “ars longa, vita brevis”. The phrase literally means “art is long, life is short”. The central meaning that has traditionally been ascribed to is the view that while life, lived human life, is short, art lasts for ever. Additionally, the phrase also implies that that the life of the artist and the epoch in which he or she lived is preserved permanently in his or her great works. In other words, let life be as short as it usually biologically is; great art makes life imperishable. More on these later in this short tribute to WS at 80; for now, back to my disbelief that I m now the “elder” of Baroka.

    Definitely, speaking for myself and those of my generation of writers, critics, actors, artistes and “groupies” who have been close to WS, from now on, any time that a discussion of the characters of Soyinka’s plays comes to a conversation about the crafty “lion’ of Ilujinle, some self-referential vibes will go through us when he is, yet again, identified as an “old man”! WS, why didn’t you make Baroka 80? A futile, perhaps even fatuous wish! For the fact is that Baroka will always be 60 anytime he is performed or read in the play. If Soyinka had made him 70 in 1963 when the play was published (it had been performed many years earlier before its formal publication) he would still be 70 today. He will always be, now and forever, any age that Soyinka had given him when he wrote the play – 70, 80 or 90, any age he was given at his imaginative “birthing” by WS.

    Perhaps the most astonishing thing of all in what I am here catachrestically calling Baroka’s “birthing” by WS is that Soyinka was a young man in his early 20s when he wrote the play and yet he wrote compellingly, memorably about an old man of 60. Let us set aside the fact that he wrote a self-serving craftiness with not a small amount of conservative power lust into Baroka’s captivating senescence. The point remains as indisputable as it is also astonishing that in his early 20s WS could enter so completely into the emotional, psychic world of an old man. To this we should counterpoise the fact that Lakunle, the young man who at that stage in Soyinka’ career was much closer in age to WS was made the butt of the jokes of all the other characters of the play and the hapless victim of Baroka’s wily stratagems. WS will have to both believe and forgive me for saying this, but since my very first reading of The Lion and the Jewel I have always thought that Soyinka took sides with Baroka against Lakunle not only because the foppish and naive village schoolteacher was everything WS did not want truly radical and progressive members of his generation to be but also because WS was looking well into the future and seeing himself in those aspects of Baroka that defy age when it comes to matters concerning members of the opposite sex! As a teacher of literature for five decades now, I know that characters should not be confused, not be conflated with their authors, but I am giving my honest opinion here. [If a libel suit is served on me for making this “aspersion”, I will have Femi Falana tie up the lawsuit in an endless, irresolvable knot in the law courts!]

    More seriously, it strikes me now – and only now – that some of the greatest and most memorable characters of Soyinka’s plays are all old men whom the playwright wrote into imperishable imaginative existence when he was a young man well under the age 40. Some of these are Forest Head of A Dance of the Forests; Professor of The Road; Oba Danlola of Kongi’s Harvest; Old Man of Madmen and Specialists; and Elesin Oba of Death and the King’s Horseman. Parenthetically, I might add here that there are two and only two old women in all of Soyinka’s plays that match the towering presence of the old men in the plays in which they appear and these are Iya Agba in Madmen and Specialists and Iyaloja in Death and the King’s Horseman. But maleness as such is not part of the essence of the old men of Soyinka’s great plays, with the exception perhaps of only Elesin Oba in Death and the King’s Horseman. Neither is age in and of itself the thing that stands out in the characterisation of the old, senescent protagonists of Soyinka’s great plays. It is something very tragic and at the same time very exhilarating, something in fact deeply aporetic: they all bear the burden of ironic truths and a dazzling wisdom which neither saves them personally nor those who surround them in the expectation that they will fulfill the messianic hopes they inspire.

    Now I first read all these plays and came across these characters when I was myself a young man, at a time when the formless, apolitical and post-adolescent, non-conformism of my teenage years was being gradually supplanted by a lifelong devotion to socialism in our country, our continent and our world. In that context, these characters of Soyinka’s great plays confused but also endlessly fascinated me. On the one hand, the characters all stood for or in the end inscribed a radical anti-messianism in social contexts that had a surfeit of evil, cruelty and suffering and therefore had a great, overwhelming need to be changed for the better. But on the other hand, the characters each took an unsparing and savagely corrosive look at the evil in themselves and in their world and refused totally to be “saviors”, even at the cost of being destroyed themselves.

    In a way, Soyinka can be described as a consistently non- or anti-didactic playwright but he does have some plays and many poems that can be described as quasi-didactic, plays like the “Jero” plays, The Beatification of an Area Boy and the sketches and revues of the “Before the Blackout” series. But the thing that confounded me when I first read and/or watched Soyinka’s plays in performance was the fact that it was the group of radically non-messianic and anti-didactic plays that far more fascinated me than the other group. Which is why, in the years of my young intellectual and political adulthood, when, without exactly knowing it, I was on my way to achieving a complex understanding of the role of contradiction and aporia in life, art and politics, those great plays of Soyinka and their larger-than-life “old men” characters were of immense help.

    WS is now biologically 80. But vicariously, through a life in art of ferocious and stunning imaginative power, he had already been 80 and older for many decades now, while all the time he retained a youthful energy and drive that were all the more amazing in that he combined many lives into his one single and exceptional life. His appetite for life is vast, like that of an okanjua, a glutton whose capacity for life and living is matched only by the vastness of his capacity for work and self-renewal. By the law of averages, he should have departed this life a long time ago. Sani Abacha was not the only dictator who sought mightily to terminate his life, Idi Dada Amin of Uganda having also been one who sought to end what he regarded as his torments at the hands of WS by plotting to have his life cut short. And the accounts are fully documented that Soyinka was not supposed to have survived his detention by Gowon’s regime during the Nigeria-Biafra war. But Abacha went further than any other megalomaniacal user of the weapon of killing implacable foes by having told confidantes that he would like to be the first ruler in history to have the satisfaction of hanging a Nobel Laureate. Abacha it is that died; WS is 80. And ko tii si iku lo ju e, Ahusubitrue!

     

    Biodun Jeyifo

    bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

  • Age grade system drives communal growth

    Age grade system drives communal growth

    The age-grade system in any typical Igbo contemporary set-up has always helped to fast-track communal growth. The case of Amokwo Item in Bende Local Government Area of Abia State is not different.

    Over the years, the people of Amokwo Item have benefited from the benevolence of the age grade system which is believed to have come into existence in the community form more than 100 years ago, including individual persons who have seen the need to plough back to the community where they were born.

    The normal thing is that the age-grade starts with a few youths coming together to form a social club, but they must have been born within the same period with a five-year difference. Within this period they scout for members who are of their age bracket and have the same mindset.

    When they increase in number, they approach the town union for registration, after which the town union gives them responsibilities, even financial targets to meet in the interest of the community.

    While they are still a social club in the community, they are regarded as boys even if they have married and produced children, so long as they have not graduated to become an age-grade and the already graduated age grades have the right to send them on errands and they must also have an age grade that will be their patron.

    When they are ready to come out as an age grade, they must approach the town union executives to assign them a project they must finish before they are allowed to come out and be regarded as men and a fully-fledged age grade in the community and will serve the community as the vanguards and local errand men and in most cases as the local vigilante people in Amokwo Item community.

    When they are tired and aged within the age bracket of a minimum of 70 years, they are expected to retire from active community service including paying levies as may be directed by the community union leaders. This is called Ikptonma “dropping of knives for the men and holes for the women” and they must also complete a retiring project before they are allowed to retire.

    They will serve the community in that capacity until a new age grade comes out to replace them as the vanguard of the community, even if it will take the new age grade five years to come out, they must remain the main errand boys of the community.

    On December 31, 2013, the Amokwo Item community under the executive leadership of Chief Kingsley Ogba Nwokoro, the community led a social club then known a Lovers Social Club to graduation into an age grade now known as Ochonma Age Grade of Amokwo Item.

    The new age grade had earlier been assigned a project at the village main market to build one of the stalls in, as the union had made the local market which normally opens every eight day into a daily market.

    The new age grade had built and painted the stall and handed same over to the town union as part of the criteria for their age grade outing.

    On New Year’s Eve, the new age grade with their men dressed in pink Igbo top with a black hat and a wrapper to march and their women wearing a pink top with a pink head gear and a wrapper to march danced from the village hall led by Chief Nwokoro and his executive council to the mini stadium built and donated to the community by Ms Arunma Oteh, the director general of SEC.

    The chairman of the day was Dr Davy Ukegbu Osoka, whose duty it was as the chairman of the occasion to charge the new age grade members to live up to the standard set by the founding fathers of the community and to be ready to serve the community at any level and at all times.

    Dr Osoka witnessed the handing over the baton of service from the outgoing age grade that served as the vanguard of the community for a over four years, the Chinemere age grade and it was handed over to the president general of the new age grade, Sebastian Odu Onwuchekwa who pledged on behalf of the new age grade to serve the community wit diligence until another age grade comes out.

    The ceremony which took place during the Okwo Day ceremony was witnessed many sons o the community which include the insurance guru, Chief Joe Irukwu, Prof Herbert Orji, chairman, BON, Chief Emmanuel Akwari Ukpabi, Emelike Igwe Kalu, Commissioner for Public Utilities and James Kwubiri Okpara commissioner for special duties, Legal and Due Process office of the governor both of them who are from the community and  among others saw the President-General of Amokwo Item Welfare Union [AIWU], Chief Nwokoro, thanking everyone for finding time to grace the occasion for that year.

    Kwubiri Okpara used the occasion to tell the people of Amokwo Item that the governor, Chie Theodore Orji has promised to build the road from the Umuahia/Ohafia/Arochukwu road down to Amokwo Item and that it has been budgeted for, while Kalu said that the water schemes in Apuanu and Okoko Item will be revived within the shortest period and urged the people of Item to give their support to the governor.

    The highlight of the occasion was the giving out the certificate of age grade outing to the new age grade, Ochonma age grade and the assigning of a stand during Okwo Day to the new age grade, after which the masquerades took the centre stage.