The Nation Newspaper

Tag: narrative

  • The scapegoat narrative

    We weighed the options together pondering if the trip would be worth the risk. Is life not of more value than ambition, we reasoned. You cannot be ambitious if you’re not alive, we concluded! This was the dilemma that confronted three members of my ‘circle of intellectual friends,’ a group of young adults that I often rub minds with. They got admission into the universities of Cape Town, Pretoria and Witwatersrand for their masters’ degrees. All the universities are in South Africa.

    Stories about the unfortunate xenophobic violence in South Africa are no longer news. What most Africans are trying to grapple with is the whys. Why vent your anger on your fellow blacks and leave other nationals alone? While debating the options for my friends we veered into why South Africans took up arms against fellow blacks in an endless orgy of senseless killings. It might sound strange for them, but not to me.

    In trying to analyse the situation for them I coined the phrase ‘scapegoat narrative’ under which I’m writing today. What point was I trying to make? When leadership in any nation fails there’s always the temptation to look for who or what to hang the failure upon. A scapegoat must be identified and a narrative wring round its neck. For the underperforming South African government that scapegoat is other Africans who are “stealing” jobs meant for South African nationals! Like it or not, that is the official narrative there.

    But I told my friends to immediately discount that dubious and weak narrative. To start with, South Africans, their psyche still weighed down by the trauma of apartheid, are whipping themselves into a frenzy and looking for foes where they should be building coalitions and allies. They have been holding anti-immigrant marches and their claim that they are cleaning their streets of drug dealers is a dog whistle to mobilise others to unleash violence which they have been carrying out. Unfortunately, those tantrums cannot solve their problems. Fundamentally, their major problem is not the Nigerian immigrant or small business owner who is trying to build dignity along with a business; it is that they have been asked to subsist in an economic and political system and structure that was not created for them to thrive in the first place.

    The economy is still firmly and effectively in the hands of the whites and Asians; however, some blacks cashed in during the early post-apartheid period and made inroads by building successful business but the majority is still downtrodden. There have been talks recently about confiscating white lands and giving it to blacks – Zimbabwean style – in other to empower them. But they are scared of this option for good reasons: they only have to open their curtain and peep toward Zimbabwe and they know that is not a route to follow. That is their dilemma and that is why they are fiercely pushing the scapegoat narrative.

    Decades after apartheid ended, over 52% of blacks still live below the poverty line. Effective leadership gradually fizzled out with Thabo Mbeki after the foundation laid by the late Nelson Mandela. The Jacob Zuma years were marred by allegations of corruption and abuse of office. During that era we all saw on live television how the South African police gunned down hundreds of protesting black platinum mine workers in broad daylight. They were protesting for better working conditions and improved pay.

    It was this misrule that forced Julius Malema out of the ANC to form the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) party. Alongside the Democratic Alliance (AD) led by Mmusi Maimane, they have been telling their compatriots’ that the ANC has lost its way and there is need for an urgent change. But the ANC’s grip on the people is quite strong, especially in the area of emotion. They often remind the people that they fought and triumphed over apartheid together so the people should stick to them no matter what. This is a very strong and effective narrative.

    But this emotional narrative will not put food on the table especially as the people are getting tired of hearing it years on end; a new narrative had to be conceived: other African immigrants are the reason why we can’t create jobs!

    Narratives are central in how we humans organise our society. Gossiping about others allows us to exchange reliable information about who can be trusted, whose behaviour is acceptable and who is behaving in a ‘bad’ way. Talking about metaphors, legends and myths gives us a common framework of meaning. Weaving life-lessons into stories that get repeated again and again helps us to learn how to behave and become accepted members of a society. If used in a negative way – like the South Africans are doing – it becomes toxic.

    In his book “Sapiens,” Yuval Noah Harari writes: “The new linguistic skills that modern Sapiens acquired about seventy millennia ago enabled them to gossip for hours on end. Reliable information about who could be trusted meant that small bands could expand into larger bands, and Sapiens could develop tighter and more sophisticated types of cooperation. Yet the truly unique feature of our language is not its ability to transmit information about men and lions (i.e. about observations). Rather, it’s the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.” This “ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all” is what is happening in South Africa.

    A video of a South African woman that went viral on social media is quite instructive. She appealed to her people to look inwards for the solution to their problems. Singling out Nigerian men, she said some even married South African women who have given birth to several children for different fathers and teach them “how to be women” in the process!

    Dave Snowden in “Think trope not meme” writes: “Common use of metaphors and habitual practice over time create assemblages that act as downwards constraints on behaviour and which escape the bounds of their creators to have independent existence. Metaphors carry associative meaning that emerges from use over time, not from an individual. It is interactive use and application which allows them to act as enabling constraints.”

    The main point Snowden makes here is that metaphors and habitual practice over time create a scaffolding of ‘how one should behave’. This scaffolding is independent from each individual; it is an emergent property of continuous interactions in society. The ambiguity that is inherent to metaphors allows their meaning to fit different contexts and different times. The scaffolding creates an overall disposition of a system, a system’s character, and a propensity for certain behaviours to be more probable than others.

    This means that if we can identify these common metaphors and practices, we can understand how they influence the behaviour of individuals who adhere to these narratives, i.e. who are part of that social group. If we want to nudge a social system, we should nudge in a direction of what is possible within the given disposition. This aptly captures the point I’m making.

    As Barbara Czarniawska writes in “Narratives in Social Science Research”: “To understand a society or some part of a society it is important to discover its repertoire of legitimate stories and find out how they evolved. These two initial points are so important that the two following points might be mere corollaries of them, but still worth pointing out distinctively.”

    To this end, narratives are central to sense making and the attribution of meaning to events occurring in everyday life. The attribution of meaning to situations and observations as part of everyday sense making is central to human life. To quote Barbara Czarniawska again: “Whole communities as well as individual persons are engaged in a quest for meaning in ‘their life’, which will bestow meaning on particular actions.”

    The South African ruling elite are treading on slippery slopes. Now that Nigerians are coming home, the monster they have succeeded in creating may consume them in future if there are no immigrants left to “steal the jobs.”

  • Positive narrative

    •Nigerian-born Imafidon is youngest scientist to bag British royal recognition

    It is, no doubt, a positive narrative that helps to put Nigeria in a positive light. Anne-Marie Imafidon is in the news and so is her Nigerian provenance. Recognised for her exceptional excellence and outstanding role in supporting and inspiring young women to go into Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM), she has earned her place as a remarkable influencer.

    Imafidon, 27, who was decorated by Queen Elizabeth II on May 19, reportedly made history as the youngest scientist to get royal recognition since 1890. When her name appeared on the 2017 Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) honours list in December 2016, it was not just a personal credit. Although she was born in England, her father, Chris Imafidon, an ophthalmologist who emigrated to London, has Edo roots, which gives a Nigerian flavour to the story of her glory.

    Described as a “British computing, mathematics and language child prodigy,” this description of Imafidon curiously downplays her Nigerian dimension, which deserves to be highlighted because it projects Nigeria positively.

    Obviously, being born in England and growing up there had advantages that helped Imafidon’s development. Her trajectory reflects a meeting of capacity and context. A pace setter, she is “one of the youngest to pass two GCSEs in two different subjects while in primary school.” At age 11, she passed exams in Mathematics and Information Technology at GCSE level. By the age of 10, she could speak six languages.

    It is a reflection of her phenomenal personality that at 13, in 2003, she got a British scholarship to study Mathematics at John Hopkins University; and she started a degree programme at the University of Oxford at 15.  Two years later, she started a master’s degree at Oxford University; and, at 19 in June 2010, she set a record as the youngest ever graduate with a master’s degree.

    In her pursuit of a career, Imafidon worked for Goldman Sachs, Hewlett Packard andDeutschebank before launching Stemettes in 2013. She saw an opportunity in the lack of diversity in the UK Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector, and responded by founding Stemettes, a social platform that supports girls and young women interested in a career in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (STEM).

    It is noteworthy that her leadership role at Stemettes attracted honours:  British Computer Society (BCS) Young IT professional of the year, 2013; Red Magazine, Women of the Year award, 2014; Prime Minister’s Points of Light Award, 2014. Her MBE honour, “For services to young women within STEM careers,” further defined her international recognition. A report said:  ”Over 7,000 young women from across the UK, Ireland, and Europe, in general, have had the Stemettes experience which includes workshops, public events, and incubators designed to introduce young women to STEM concepts, careers, and mentors.”

    Interestingly, Anne-Marie’s four younger siblings also have a claim to fame as prodigies that have as well broken records in Mathematics and sports. Indeed, the Imafidon children are known as “the smartest family in Britain.”

    It is striking that three other Nigerians were decorated alongside Imafidon:  Chris Ofili, an artist, got a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for his services to the arts; Elizabeth Nneka Anionwu, a Professor of Nursing, got an OBE for her services in nursing; Cadet Colour Sergeant, Jeremiah Oluwatosin Ayotunde, got an OBE for his services to young people and the community of London.

    The beauty of these awards is that they make the recipients informal ambassadors of Nigeria. They are testimony to positive possibilities, the kind of message that the country needs to communicate to the world.

  • The chicken narrative

    The chicken narrative

    Followership is a critical aspect of democracy, but unfortunately, it has never taken firm root in Nigeria. Even though it nurtures good leadership by invisibly helping keep leaders upright and on track, it simply does not exist here. Citizens are not positively engaged rather they are used to whip up political, ethnic and religious tension and crises.

    Yes, there is a conundrum in leadership: Most of the people who naturally gravitate toward leadership roles don’t have the humility or decency you’d want in a leader. And most of the humble and decent people that we might want to see in leadership roles quickly feel chewed up by the tensions, undue criticisms and the thanklessness of the job. They soon retreat to ‘safety’ by being aloof. And only their more ruthless counterparts – most of whom are mediocre and charlatans – are left to compete for supremacy.

    If we want to have any hope of changing this nation, we have to do a better job of building up followership – the people who aren’t natural leaders but who have qualities that can serve starting from the local government levels to the national level.

    Just as we have effective and ineffective approaches to leadership, we have effective and ineffective approaches to followership. And just that concept alone indicates that followership is not reactive or simply assigned, rather it is a position selected by those individuals who pledge their followership through a project, job role, group goal, or other shared desire for an outcome.

    The language used for effective followership is “exemplary followership,” coined by Dr. Robert Kelley in the early 1990s. Kelley successfully developed an assessment to identify the varying types of followers and brought high visibility to the importance of followership in the leader/follower relationship, which he details in his book The Power of Followership. Exemplary followers, according to Dr. Kelley, are highly engaged and thinking independently. They share in the same goal as the leader and are committed to succeeding in reaching that goal; thus a shared sense of responsibility.

    I tend to think of leadership and followership’s interdependence on each other for success as that of a canoer and their oar. A canoer without an oar is left at the mercy of the current. It moves in whatever direction the water takes it, colliding with any obstacle in its way. With an oar, the canoer can navigate through the waters, either speeding up, slowing down, steering around obstacles, or even parking along the shore. Without the canoer, the oar also sits in the canoe left at the mercy of the current.

    The oar is like a leader – whether that leader be president, governor etc. As the country or state moves along different types of currents both internal and external, the president, governor etc, provides the guidance and tools to navigate the currents effectively.

    Thinking of this in a leader/follower perspective, the leader being the oar is the resource to help the team succeed. The followers are the canoers who leverage the strength of the oar to propel the team along the currents. Without the canoer, the paddle sits in the boat at the mercy of the current. Without the paddle, the canoers are just as helpless to the currents. This sense of interdependency is what makes navigating the journey successful to reaching our goals. So, why is ours different? I will sign off with this story.

    In 1934, local and western media gathered at a local farm event aimed at propagating late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin as a ‘man of the people.’. The goal was to interact with the workers, and answer questions from the press.  All had gone as planned.  The farm was perfectly staged for pictures. The workers were handpicked and prepared for their performance. Stalin’s presence was undeniable as he answered every one of the prescribed questions given to the media.

    While answering questions, he was also spreading grain to a group of chickens. “Yes, domestic agricultural output has increased by four hundred percent since we nationalised agricultural production.” answered Stalin. “Through the implementation of modern farming methods and state control there is more grain, more cabbage, and more carrots.” He continued, “Even these chickens have increased egg production” He half joked.

    Suddenly, one bold and sceptical American journalist dared to ask an unprepared question; an honest and informed question.  “Mister Premier,” the journalist said “How long do you think you can keep up this charade?”

    Everywhere was deathly quiet knowing who Stalin was. Stalin just continued spreading grain as if he didn’t hear the question. The journalist asked again, “What makes you think you can starve and torture and kill your people and they won’t rise up against you?” The local media stood dumbstruck with fear and his aides in a panic attempted to shuffle off the question and the journalist.  Stalin motioned for them to stop and for the cameras to be put away.  He then reached down and picked up one of the chickens and held it tight under his arm so it could not move.

    Stalin replied: “We have more grain because we have nationalised farming and so we can sell the grain for capital in order to build factories to produce the things the people need.”  As he spoke he began to rip the feathers off the chicken back in great handfuls.

    He continued, “The people have need of many things that we are now giving them.”  The chicken squawked and screeched in agony.  Stalin’s grasp tightened.  His iron grip held the bird firm as he calmly turned to the journalist and spoke.  “It is a testament to the ability of man in this modern age that through the state we have overcome the individual weaknesses of greed and selfishness that have kept us from solving our problems.”

    The journalist could hardly speak. He stared in horror as Stalin savaged the chicken clean of feathers. The bird nearly limp, convulsed slightly as Stalin placed it back on the ground.  It staggered clumsily away, unlikely to have been able to process what was just done to it.  A feeling of disgust covered over by fear was palpable upon the barnyard.  Stalin reached into his pocket for a handful of grain and continued on as before to feed the chickens who flocked around him.

    The journalist stammer, “What… Why…?” Stalin continued in response, “We are solving these problems. In Russia, as it should be in the entire world, from each according to his abilities and too each according to his need.” Stalin, identifying the wounded chicken he had just damaged creeping back toward the edge of the flock to peck at the bits of grain remaining on the ground, reached again into his jacket pocket and pulled out a fresh handful of grain.  He knelt down a bit and held out his hand toward the injured animal.

    It was reported that the bird looked for a moment, cocked its head to the slide a bit, and then timidly step toward Stalin.  In a moment, it was eating the food right out of the hand that minutes before had torn the feathers right off it’s back.   Stalin dropped the remaining grain on the ground stood and turned toward the journalist.  Did that answer your question, he said.

    The journalist hesitated, locked in a momentary state of emotional and mental chaos. He responded, “Yes sir, thank you.” as the full impact of the situation became clear in his mind.

    Does this story remind you of something at home? To me, it graphically explains our followership problem in Nigeria. Beyond our over hyped leadership crisis, I strongly believe we should start focusing on our followership crisis. We – the citizens of Nigeria – have failed as much as our leaders have failed as our representatives. We have a long way to go, but the challenge is that we do not even know that we do not know. So, if you do not know how do you move forward? That’s our tragedy.

  • The other class narrative

    The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Sixteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.

    Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

    This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo, proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains our choice of the incumbent leadership.

    Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class, whose dominance he seeks to terminate. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

    No man, be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.

    Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future mistakes. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class and youth divides learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the Nigerian youth and working class in further substantiation of their capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization. A veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office and elect a younger, less ethnic, less directionless, visionary and humane leadership. But to achieve this, the Nigerian youth would have to establish a more youthful, brilliant, truly progressive and detribalized political platform.

  • Changing the Niger Delta narrative

    From the multi product economy of the 1960s, Nigeria has metamorphosed into a mono product economy, completely reliant on oil.  Every other source of revenue has been systematically abandoned by successive governments.  All emphasis has been on oil, oil, and more oil.  Scant attention was paid to other sources of government income because oil money was pouring in as global oil prices soared.  For years the boom continued. No one dared imagine Nigeria and indeed the Niger Delta, the proverbial cash cow, without oil. It was inconceivable!

    And then there was a burst. Oil price crashed. And for a long time it stayed crashed and refused to rise.  The cost of producing oil became more than the price it was sold. It was a harsh reality everyone had to grapple with.  Other sources of government revenue had to be found and quickly. The inconceivable had not only become possible.  It had become a reality, a harsh reality for many.  A Niger Delta whose oil could no longer save Nigeria.

    For organisations like the Niger Delta Development Forum (NDDF), which envision a Niger Delta where all persons are able to live sustainable livelihoods, generate income and employment, and create economic opportunities unhindered by constraints from within and outside the market system in the region and beyond, who have advocated and continue to advocate a self-sustaining non-oil dependent development in the Niger Delta, it was a validation that the Niger Delta can exist and develop without relying on oil and that sustainable development is not dependent on oil. In the five years of its existence, the NDDF has provided a platform for information sharing and collaboration opportunities for government, private sector, and civil society organisations pursuing approaches for equitable and inclusive economic growth in the Niger Delta.

    This year’s edition of the forum, the fifth in the series, was held in Owerri, the capital of Imo State on October 19-20. The forum was sponsored by the Foundation for Partnership Initiatives in the Niger Delta (PIND), in collaboration with Niger Delta Development Initiative (NDPI), the Imo State Government and DFID funded Market Development for the Niger Delta (MADE).  Technical partners for the Forum include USAID Nigeria, DAI, NSRP, BRACED Commission and DEMAND Alliance.  The theme of the two days event was ‘Towards Self-Sustaining Development in the Niger Delta: Narrating and Showcasing a Re-Imagined Niger Delta’. Participants were drawn from government, the private sector and Civil Society Organisations all over the Niger Delta.  Those in attendance include the governor of Imo State, the NDDC Chairman, representatives of the governments of the nine Niger Delta states and the federal government, development partners, academicians, activists and people from all works of life.  Celebrities of Niger Delta extraction were not left out. Tee Mac, Nigeria’s maestro Concert Flutist, Hilda Dokubo and Monalisa Chinda, renowned Nollywood actresses and Mike Nliam, composer of the new theme song for the NDDF, were in attendance.

    In his welcome address, Sam Daibo, the Executive Director of PIND stated that ‘with each edition, the attendance at NDDF increases, the number of stakeholders interested in the forums increases, and in the last two years, we have been able to involve the governments of the host states directly in the planning of NDDF in order for them to take ownership of and drive the policy recommendations that come out of the forums. We no longer need to convince anyone as to the importance of dialogue and collective action for the Niger Delta, as our partners now on their own individually take on policy recommendations and decisions reached at the NDDFs into their own respective work plans’.

    While acknowledging the current challenges facing the Niger Delta, especially the re-emergence of violence by new militancy groups resulting from the hardship caused by the crash in global oil prices, Daibo stressed that PIND has been working towards a more peaceful and equitable Niger Delta for over five years and that they had great confidence in the region’s ability to realize its fullest potential. ‘In the face of these challenges, it is important to understand how we got here and to articulate our vision of how to move from where we are to where we want to go. We are putting NDDF to the service of this need to re-imagining a possible future, beginning with changing the narrative of the Niger Delta. We must promote a Niger Delta that ranks high in inclusive citizen participation in governance; where state governments operate with the concepts of transparency, accountability, and effectiveness; where diversity in economic pursuits are championed by state governments and executed openly; and a region that no longer grapples with violence but where peace reigns’ he stated.

    Several goodwill messages were delivered by different partners and government representatives, including the new NDDC chairman who noted that the problems bedevilling the Niger Delta were as huge as they were multifaceted and that the crash of the oil price and renewed militancy have further compounded the woes in the region.

    In declaring the 2016 NDDF open, His Excellency, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, the  governor of Imo State, represented by his deputy Prince Eze Madumere, stated that the outcome of the round table meeting with all partners was the most important aspect of the NDDF and promised to drive all the projects to be implemented by PIND and the Demand Alliance Partners in various agricultural value chains in Imo State.

    Proceedings at the Forum focused on four key topics of peace, conflict mitigation, elections and development; regional cohesiveness – The role of federal, regional and state government institutions; climate change and the green economy; and economic diversification and the digital economy, in the form of presentations, discussions, and syndicate sessions. While the sessions focused on different topics, one recurrent theme in all the sessions was how to increase actionable opportunities for sustainable development in the Niger Delta.

    Lately, the Niger Delta has been in the news for the wrong reasons especially with regards to oil spills and militancy. For fora like the NDDF and other initiatives working to change the narrative in the Niger Delta, the major task is to create an enabling platform for dialogue on a way forward for the region and to facilitate collaboration among key stakeholders in the region including the government, the local communities, CSOs, the private sector and donor communities. It is only when they succeed in this that a Niger Delta that ranks high in inclusive citizens’ participation in governance and development can emerge.

     

    • Christopher wrote from Abuja.

  • The other class narrative

    The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Sixteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.

    Consequently, we suffer poverty of character and this manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avoidable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

    This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian populace are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo, proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains our choice of the incumbent leadership.

    Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures. Yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice, in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class whose end he claims to pursue. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

    No man; be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.

    Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future foibles. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the working class itself in further substantiation of the working class’ capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization; a veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office

  • Some wonderful class narrative

    The democracy we declared has recoiled into a spent shadow. Sixteen years on in the grip of blood-drenched mascots, it steals from our sweetest fantasies like the proverbial slut making a surreptitious exit with her drunken lover’s wallet.

    Consequently, we suffer poverty in character that manifests as mean-spiritedness. It’s akin to that patience of the wild that holds motionless for endless hours the motorist at the police checkpoint, the kidnapper in his lair, the assassin in his ambuscade and the public officer on his perch – this patience belongs primarily to the predator while it hunts its prey.

    Oftentimes, it manifests in uncontrollable spasms that have seen us bury our best and elevate our worst in abject negation of the cycle of the universe and morality. But who needs morals in a nation where fair is foul and foul remains fair?

    As you read, many a Nigerian of commonplace roots live through each day without ever contemplating or criticizing their living conditions. They find themselves born into dehumanising squalor or somewhat indecent circumstances and they accept such sordidness as their fate thus exhibiting no conscious effort to better their lot beyond what their immediate circumstances dictate.

    Almost as impulsively as the beasts of the wild, they seek the satisfaction of the needs of the moment, without much forethought and consideration that by sufficient endeavor, they just might improve their living conditions. However, a certain percentage – comprising men and women of privilege – guided by personal ambition, consciously strive in thought and will to attain higher status but very few among these are concerned enough to secure for all, the advantages which they seek for themselves. This explains the number of self-centred and treacherous human rights activists, women’s rights activists, journalists and columnists parading our streets.

    Very few men are indeed capable of that humaneness that drives martyrs to persistently rebel against glaring social evils in the interest of less fortunate members of the society. But there exists a few however, that are truly bothered by the impoverishment of their fellow citizens regardless of any risk or discomfort it might attract to them personally.

    These few, driven by compassion tirelessly seek, first in thought and then in action, for some way of escape; some new system of society by which life may become richer, more joyful and devoid of avertable evils that mars the present. But surprisingly, such men oftentimes, fail to curry the support of the very victims of the injustices they wish to remedy.

    This is because more unfortunate sections of the Nigerian population are hopelessly ignorant, apathetic from excess of toil and disillusionment, apprehensive through the imminent danger of instantaneous chastisement by the holders of power, and morally defective owing to the loss of self-respect resulting from their degradation. To excite among such classes any conscious, deliberate effort in pursuit of general improvement of the status quo proves basically a hopeless task, as antecedents of such efforts have proven.

    Thus despite our claims to modernity, higher education, sophistication and relative rise in the standard of comfort among wage-earners in the country, the Nigerian society have failed woefully to achieve better living conditions and a better society even in the throes of rising demand for more radical intervention and reconstruction of the social order.

    It is no surprise however that the Nigerian working class has persistently proved a dismal failure. And the reasons are hardly far-fetched: Nigerians have a problem with differentiating between appropriate and inappropriate political behavior.  That is why the nation’s democratic experiment like any other system of governance practicable by us was doomed from the start.

    What exactly has democracy offered? A 4-1-9 progressive plan that booms circumspectly like it had been doctored as part of a cold-war era propagandist scheme? But despite our self-righteousness and persistent cynicism with the current order, we really cannot explore a more worthy alternative than what we have now. The average Nigerian can’t bear to be led by a truly honest, visionary and accountable leadership. That explains our choice of the incumbent leadership.

    Apparently, we possess an overwhelming and oft-convincing inclination to self-destruct thus our lack of a coherent and defensible political ideology essential to the evolution of a progressive leadership and state.

    The average Nigerian is no more electable than the leadership he endures yet he loves to speak truth to power even as he functions simultaneously to smother his own voice in the riotous gabble of his exultation of the same ruling class whose end he claims to pursue. No matter who is elected, the demographic and economic realities of Nigeria will persist, and there is a very limited range of politically-viable solutions for dealing with them.

    No man; be he a distinguished columnist, lawyer, soldier, or public officer in any office can command the tides of history. The few that appear to have done so–the Napoleon’s, Caesar’s, Hitler’s–were really nothing more than the most capable at making it appear that they command the tides, when in fact they were simply skimming along with them.

    Thus the need for the Nigerian working class to consciously evolve in thought and will in pursuit of a more balanced social order. Such conscious evolution could only be achieved by a re-orientation in scholarship and purification of thought and action.

    The foundations of scholarship and knowledge must be tirelessly reconstructed to guarantee more progressive responses to internal problems of social advance — problems of work and wages, of families and homes, of morals and the true value of life – and all these and other inevitable problems of civilization must be resolvable largely by an average member of the working class by reason of his exposure and constitution.

    This informs a greater need for study and thought and an appeal to the rich experience of past and current mistakes in the journey towards the reduction to the barest minimum, the possibility of future foibles. The answer to Nigeria’s widening income and social gap – which has so far manifested in preventable crises and persistent state of insecurity – is to found an educational process geared to steer successfully, the commonplace trains of thought away from the dilettante and the fool stereotype.

    It’s about time poor, struggling members of the nation’s working class learned to scorn the maxim that holds that if their stomachs be full, it matters little about their brains; the paths to stable peace and security winds between honest toil and dignified manhood. That proverbial better society that we seek calls for the guidance of skilled thinkers, the loving, reverent comradeship between the low income earners and ambitious middle class emancipated by training and culture.

    Such human elements would no doubt be conscious of the fact that not even the sustenance of oil subsidy, higher wages and a fairer economic system could protect its members from the usual handicaps and monstrosity constituted by the incumbent and predatory ruling class.

    Hence they would be able to understand that the much clamoured social enterprise and gesture towards change must be mooted and achieved by the working class itself in further substantiation of the working class’ capacities to assimilate the culture and refinement of humane civilization; a veritable step towards such reality is to vote the incumbent administration out of office

    • To be continued…
  • The stadium narrative

    The stadium narrative

    Motorists who drove around the National Stadium – Alaka – Ojuelegba axis of Lagos last Saturday could not have missed the long trail of young men and women clad mostly in white tee shirts. The line almost stretched endless toward both ends of the busy road. Looking at these young men and women you could see visible anger all over their faces.

    Like some Nigerians, I really didn’t know what was happening until I got a call from someone who identified himself as Dennis who said he called to inform me of what is happening in Abuja. The hysterical Dennis was just shouting “Nigerian youths are dying like chickens in Abuja.” After calming him down I asked what the issue was. That was when I got to know that the Nigerian Immigration Service (NIS) is undertaking a nationwide recruitment drive.As we are all aware, that drive turned awry as some job seekers lost their lives in the process. The ripple generated by this unfortunate incident is only beginning to intensify.

    It is no longer news that no fewer than 19 people died at theAbuja, Minna, Port Harcourt and Benin centres following the exercise, but the irony of it all is that our stadiums, built for football matches and other sports, have been turned to other functions, no thanks to the English premier league, Spanish La Liga, German Bundesliga and the Italian Serie A which has made our local league so unattractive that most clubs now play to empty stadiums across the country! And trust our “highly ingenious” elites, they have found another use for the stadiums – recruitment drive. Very soon, the civil service, military and police will tow this line and start recruiting from the stadiums.

    I believe by now most of us would have seen the pictures of the exercise from across the country, it is scary to say the least. Hundreds of thousands crammed into several stadiums that would make Manchester United or Barcelona grin with envy. Even though most of us know how dire the unemployment situation is in the country, the figure still shocked us. How did we get here and how can we wriggle out of it? Should a select few continue to live in opulence and splendor while the majority wallows in poverty? Why should a critical exercise like this involving a para military outfit be outsourced? Why can’t the entire test be done online?

    The questions regarding this issue are endless. The painful part of the whole exercise is that after going through the cumbersome registration process, most candidates knew there was no way they could independently confirm why they were not picked. I can bet my last Naira that a good proportion of these vacancies would have been filled even before registration commences.

    The processwhich was out sourced to Drexel Nigeria Limited starts when an applicant download the application form online preferably from a cyber cafe, fill a part of it to generate a slip referred to as “Pay4me.”

    The “Pay4me” print out then qualified applicants to pay the sum of N1, 000 to dedicated NIS accounts in designated banks all over the country.The commercial banks that were involved inthe transaction included the United Bank for Africa(UBA), Fidelity Bank Plc, Zenith Bank Plc, Diamond Bank Plc and Ecobank Transnational Plc.

    On the payment of the N1, 000, a teller is issued with data including candidates’ validation number, transaction number, application number and application type, among others. The teller is expected to be taken to cyber cafés where the applicant used to complete the registration process and get acknowledgement slips. It was after this process that the applicant can now go to his designated “centre” for the test.

    It was reported that 734,000 candidates applied for about 4,556 vacancies available which racked in about over N7billion. What services did the company provide to “earn” this huge amount of money which has turned out to be blood money, according to some angry Nigerians?

    It is regrettable that this is not the first time that such an incident has happen in the country. I recollect vividly that in 2008, the same scenario played out during recruitment drives involving the NIS and the Nigerian Prison Service (NPS).This newspaper published verbatim on page 3 of Monday, March 17 edition the 2008 fiasco which simply goes to say we never learn anything in this country; 17 candidates died in that sad episode.

    This has again beamed the searchlight on the chronic unemployment situation in the country. But I must point out that unemployment is not only a Nigerian problem, it is a global issue. But the difference is that other country are having sleepless nights on how to effectively engage their youth population, but in our own case there appears to be no clear cut policy in place to tackle this menace.

    Prof. Chidi Odinkalu, Chairman of the National Human Rights Commission took to twitter and described what happened as “corporate manslaughter,” he wants that appropriate security agencies to treat the circumstances that led to the stampede in the various locations as a criminal act of manslaughter.

    “I’m willing to go on record and call on the Minister of the Interior to do the right thing and leave office. Abba Moro must go. Corporate manslaughter is a crime in Nigeria. What happened to these job seekers is a crime and should be treated as such,” a message on his Twitter page reads. He also enjoined other human rights activists to sign as well as help collect signatures for the petitions demanding the sacking of Moro and Comptroller General of Immigration, Mr. David Parradang.

    The nation waits what action the government would take on the issue.

    Re:Has the NYSC run its Course?

    Your above titled article was quite instructive and timely. However, the truth is that to an extent, the noble NYSC cause has run its course! It was worse under the leadership of the former DG, Brig-Gen Okorie Affia, where respect for human dignity was at its lowest ebb.

    I was involved in a double tragedy; a victim of armed robbery attack on my way to Sokoto State and an accident which has left me with serious medical challenges. It took the intervention Of President Goodluck Jonathan before my medical expenses was refunded by the Okorie Affia led leadership. There are manycorps members out there who would have loved to respond to this timely article but may not have the opportunity because of spinal cord injury or their hands have been amputated due toinjuries sustained in the process of serving their fatherland.

    If the victims of the electoral violence have still not been given the jobs promised them by the President; then what are we talking about? In my own case,for example,I will need an urgent hip transplant of over N9millionto make me walk again, I really doubt if Brig-Gen Olawumi is ready to toe the line of repositioning the Scheme.

    Several months after his appointment, no hand of fellowship has been extended to any of us despite the urgent medical attention that we require; Brig-Gen. Olawuni should walk his talk. I have made several calls and sent messages to his official lines all to no avail. I would be forgiven if I say Brig-Gen Olawuni may end up like his predecessor unless he prove to us and Nigerian – in act and indeed – that he is ready for a great leap forward.

    As I write this, the rot and high level of corruption in the NYSC cannot be ignored. If Nigeria must developed – owing to the fact that the NYSC is microcosm of the macro Society – then something drastic must be done.

    If I must be convinced that the DG is serious and committed, he should revisit my case and a host of others and act promptly by doing the needful without further delay.

    However, I want to use this medium to thank my family members, most especially Mr. Steve Babaeko, MD/CCO of X3M Ideas for his unwavering support, moral advice, and financial assistance. Babaeko Oluwaloseyi

    LA/12B/3975.